I will not apologise to you. Know this.
In Jernoah there is this time; it is every six circles years, and when this Festival comes to be those men who have led our cities and our country for the previous six years are braught before the people. Sisters and Brothers in pointed hats give the children crystal sweets to eat and there is music, the most wonderful music worked out of voorbear hairstrings stretched across blown glass bottels. we dance and there are boiled humours to drink and there are roots to smoke and you have your merriment, you see. and as the Glass Sun falls to the horizon and the whole city is blind of it and your head is so full of melody and you see the naked children having play fights in the avanues,
one by one they give the glass to the governing men; they give them the Nameless' last rites and they rake red smiles on their necks until they are just breathing out bubbles of their own blood. i was twelve, I had just gotten my ragsack hat, my very first hat, and one very thin governing man, we call them stahls, one very thin governing man fell from the platform and his throat was open like a smooth backbent bit of fabric and you could not even see the blood before it turned into clots in the sand
and when they are all dead the cities become very chaotic until new men rise to the occasion to swear lives and years to stahlhood, and there is pease for six years until they are called to die, Ariane, and it is brutal and it is not gentle and it is very firm but it is amoung all things RELIABLE and
The second page was scrawled on the back of an announcement of DISSOLUTION.
and I miss it somtimes with my Glass heart, the not-Myrken part, because this place, this place is not reliable, this place always changes, you were a firm implantasion, a thing that felt like home in my very stupid brain--
Never, when you are but weeks out of your slippers and perrasoles, speak to me like I am a fool, I have done far too many foolish things, yes, but I am no fool for wanting pease and sense and someone, someone who has not had their Hour lost to please tell me something that comforts and garinteas. When you were lost, who else but to rely on other than myself? and now when men hang, should I be patient?
Read this. I am not seid ced sedishis, I am scared for me, for Cherny, for Msa. Catch, for you, for everything. But once you told me that I may be things here I would never be there in Jernoah, in [a scrambling patch of words in foreign script] and I have only tried to do as you bid.
I wish to trust you. But we are all sick, she took our brains with her when she died.
What the Marshall was asked to read was attached with a dollop of wax to the last page: Coriolanus Helstone's response to a young woman's letter. This -- with the currency of many hours over many months -- was transparency and truths Ariane had rightfully bought.