...you can't breathe while they're in the room.
For the barest, most lonely moment, she couldn't breathe. Tennant was in the room, a washcloth draped over his shoulder. He smoked one of his smokeroots and the serpentine curls of gray dispersed in his fiery hair. He said things like Lovely Gloria and Beautiful Gloria and held her hand so tight she thought she could feel his bones trying to become hers. He had orange and cinnamon on his breath. They shared wine -- I spent two shillings on this wine and I don't know anything about wine, she'd said -- and he told her bonnets and gloves were things to hide behind. He was standing right there--
--but he wasn't. He wasn't. Just her. Just Agnieszka Kazmerrik. Just a comical, child-scrawl image of Rhaena Olwak. Just dresses and scotch the color of piss from a body that wanted for water. And Jerno piss was always so yellow, so dark, film on the fingers, sediment on the tongue, but you drank, you drank what you must, and--
I was like that, too, always hitting things and people and running around breaking shit because I was hungry and poor.
"I'm sorry," she said into her glass, shrinking in her seat, hoping the individual threads in the upholstery would grab her skirt, the hips of her blouse, the bottoms of her elbows, drag her in so she could just vanish, so they could stop talking, I'll make your dresses, I'll make whatever you want. "No -- no girl, or woman, or child should be forced to do such a thing. I wish you hadn't. I wish--" more scotch, hot in the head, a red mottle to her cheeks, glass in her eyes, "--no girl was forced to kill someone she cares for so deeply.
"But if you think I am judging you, if you think I can judge you, you assume too much of me. I offer you another perspective. Like -- like you offer me. But if--"
Beneath her skirt, her left knee pumped, her clog-heel drumming a cadence on the floorboards, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.
"But if you think you're the only one who's ever been forced to kill?"
You aren't.
The Councilwoman sat. The seamstress did not admire the curtains because sometimes she thought there were shadows behind them. She scrubbed her palms off on her skirts as if trying to clean them, so hard, so viciously and with such wild, remote vigor that the palm of her bare hand was littered with tiny dollops of skin.
(until you've spilled the guts of someone)
"Not just a Dream," she whispered. "A vision. As sure in my head and heart as if it had been etched into my bones or growing in my belly like -- like a baby. A thing which must be. A thing which shall be. The Storyteller, she -- she..." Tap-tap-tap, but this time it was a gloved finger that drummed against her own temple, drilled with a hollow knock against the side of her skull.
"Glenn Burnie was dead. The whole town sang songs about it. About his death, about treachery. I went to Rhaena and I told her, I told her because I was afraid. She put her -- her little invisible fingers under my scalp and my hair and my skull and into my brain." Her words were fast, silent as a hoarse breath. "She took it out of my -- my stupid head. She made it hers.
"Do you want to hear the song? Do you want me to sing it," Gloria asked.