Sand Would Do

Sand Would Do

Postby Rance » Tue Aug 13, 2013 3:27 am

"A penny," he said. "It's just a penny."

She blinked.

She and Noura danced. Their palms were warm against one another and sometimes it was impossible to feel where her dark skin ended and Noura’s lighter flesh began. Perhaps it was not so much dancing as it was merely spinning, laughing, getting dizzy and almost wonderfully, blissfully sick as the world spun, spun, spun.

They were breathless and conspiratorial when they spoke about secrets; Noura was always Noura, and the passenger in her veins was as silent as salt tossed to sand. They were not great secrets, or hefty ones — they were about sweet-looking boys and how Cherny did that humorous
thing that made them giggle and Catch, how they thought he was fine, just very fine, and—

She blinked again, tried to look away.

What mattered was the sword at her hip, the curt and utilitarian way she spoke to the sea of finely-uniformed miscreants in front of her. They all had eyes for the proud Marshall with the proud scar etched along her proud cheek and how it creased across her proud lip. Perhaps proud was the wrong sense, the wrong feel, the wrong fabric; perhaps Dauntless would have been more fitting, more customary; less coursing, dripping, gnarled with hate…

"Glour’eya," Ariane said, a twitching smile, a nod that both respected and demanded; Ariane knew how to take the breath between syllables, where to apply the inflection, as if her voice was a soft-soled boot against an enemy’s throat—


She blinked and it was hard to see.

Her grip was stone. Her strike was true. She threaded his throat with the point of the knife the way she’d pushed, pushed, pushed so many times through fabric with a stubborn needle. But his skin wasn’t nearly so plaintive or invulnerable; no, he bled, he was red all over, he was scarlet, he was a new mouth torn across his throat and a slack face that understood; he was eyes that would never look upon Cherny again, or Mister Catch, or anyone. He spilled cardinal Sunshine from his throat all over his white, white clothes—

She blinked and the mirror-shard shook in her hand.

—clenched his fist as if it were a brick and hammered it against her cheek, the slap of hard knuckles hitting Sun-skin. With each blow, an unforgiving crack. Shattered the bone above her left dimple to smooth powder. He smiled, big and wide and painful and bloody and told her
told her

told her

you smell of a cow's shit

and beat the Jernoan blood out of her, until her face was skinned raw and wet and gleaming in the afternoon light; Son wanted it, he wanted to break a furriner and she wanted to be broken, deserved it, maggot and heifer, unyielding in conviction, shoving away friends as she did without remorse or regret until too late, too late, lying with glass-thin reason, she deserved every strike, every hard blow of butcher-boy hands—

idiot girl—

stupid girl—

cruel.

"It's just a penny," he said again.

She blinked the blurry acid out of her eyes and scrambled to slide the mirror-bladed knife back into its sheath; she'd forgotten unsheathing it at all while she waited for the shopkeeper to fulfill her request

(Ink sand, she'd said. Sand to dry writing ink on the page.)

but now managed to pilfer a little copper from her own satchel, and took the bountiful bag of sand in its burlap bundle. It was an unassuming blessing, a bag full of her homeland, or so she imagined. He had his penny, she had her sand. She wandered out of the little shop and barely tore the leather cord from around the mouth of the bag before she poured a stream of the shining grains onto her palm.

She hungered for home, for company. The sand would do.

The seamstress ate the sand out of her cupped palms, grinding the rock-hard morsels between her broken teeth, swallowing until her guts revolted and her tongue was a desert. Old comforts. A shard of molar swam in the saliva flooding into her mouth.

A penny to suffocate her stupidity.

A penny to dull the pain.
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Rance
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