Iron, Rags and Bones

[Carnath-Emory]

While Cherny walks the physicians through attempts and advisements and a veritable Farmer's Almanac of home remedies, the Marshall lingers in the corridor, sparing with her words. There they prove an obstruction sometimes to the staff - but between incidental damages and the Chairwoman's situation, they've become familiar faces this week, all three of them, and the nurses have generally allowed them wide berth.

Such as they're able.

Heads tilted in consultation, for the most part. That folded something is passed to a departing Terryn; an occasional glance is turned towards the Chairwoman's room, towards the industrious huddle that's begun to form about the bedside of Elliot Gahald. Cherny, if he's listening very closely - and who's to say that his hearing won't prove just as keen as his eyes? - might even make out his name now and then, woven in amongst the rest of their sporadic conversation. But soon enough, the farmer and occasional militiaman has turned to leave as well, with a quick clasp for his shoulder as he does, and: "You're owed. Hear?" And with this he does not hesitate to agree; an equable shrug, and then he is on his way.

A quiet descends, with the departure of the last of her people; the Marshall resists the urge to pull the hood back over her eyes and find a seat upon which to doze. Passes a hand back through the dark of her hair instead, fetching out the narrow flask for another sip of -

"Cherny." A glance for the boy, a glance which becomes a quiet examination, and by the end of it her mouth's resolved into a halfway smile. " 've had worse." Which is the useful reply with which she's been rebuffing questions and ending conversations for weeks, helped along in each case by the fact that it happened to actually be true. Now, most of all. "Was that his armour you'd brought?"

[Cherny]

It's hard to drag his attention away from the crowd around Sir Elliot's bed, hard not to watch, to try and divine the meaning and purpose of their hushed conversation, the looks between them, the gestures as they examine the knight; striving to interpret them, to tell whether that frown is worth worrying over or not; that shrug, is it uncertainty or surrender? Even as he stands near the Marshall's side, even as they talk quietly between themselves.

Her answer has him the closest he's been to smiling for hours, a flicker of something that might be amusement, or at least recognition. An answer he's used himself from time to time, and in total honesty.

Not quite a year ago, and it had been him at the centre of that huddle, a madwoman's arrow through his chest and his treasured coat stripped from him like hide from a rabbit. He'd lived, though, and had drawn determination from that fact in later days. Elliot Gahald's condition is no less grave, and all his squire can do is pray; another lesson in his own capabilities, in the limits to what he can fix.

He question has him casting his gaze about for the sack, set aside in the initial fuss over their arrival; there, set on a chair meant for bedside vigilants, and he relaxes slightly once his eyes find it, nodding in answer.

"Th-that and what else h-he was wearing." Padded garments worn beneath the plates of bright metal, saved by Sera Toll purely for the fact that they were the knight's.

"What th-there is of it. There's b-bits missing, and, and the rest's in p-poor shape. B-bent and broken." An understatement, given the condition of some of the pieces - deformed by fierce blows, twisted and torn in places. Regret creasing his brow as he considers it, as if it were his fault - is it not a squire's sworn duty to tend his knight's weapons and harness, after all?

"N-no sword, either. He h-had the belt and, and sheath, but th-the blade's gone. Lost."

[Carnath-Emory]

It was only this morning that they'd spoken together, for a time, about the less-explored qualities of suffering. Here he experiences one of them himself - they both do, for his sometimes-teacher and never-trainer sets aside his question as casually as she can, and in the moment she speaks those words he knows. Which he wouldn't have, a year ago, wouldn't have until a madwoman's arrow had condemned him to weeks in a sickbed not far from Gahald's own room...

It's good, that he smiles; that he can smile at all, however slightly so. Her nod's a quiet approval, lingering even as her gaze tilts to follow the focus of his own.

"Worse than I'd reckoned it," she murmurs after a time, the quiet opinion of a soldier who's all too accustomed to judging a man's state by the wounds his armour has borne. "I see, now, why you worried of mobs come for him; it looks like one already has." But perhaps the line of her mouth betrays a lack of conviction. This is the obvious explanation for what had befallen him, yes. And it is also an explanation that runs contrary to the context Cherny had described: which was that missing hour, an hour which seems increasingly to have been filled with violence, but -

He hadn't been hated yet, this Elliot Gahald. Gloria notwithstanding, he hadn't been anything but adored.
They might have come for his blood after that hour, when Rhaena's grip fell suddenly away. But before?

She drinks down a swallow then, from the narrow flask; a second to chase down the first, and what is she in this moment if not Lentham on a bender, clinging to the drink? Not quite, not quite, but the likeness has her almost laughing, all the same: a tug at her mouth's corner, a slow shake of her head. "Tell me. Has he at all been mm - pon'yatny," a shake of her head, impatient with a word for which she has no translation. Begins again. "Has he spoken at all? With any - clearly?" And it's only now, gazing down towards the boy at last, that she begins to see what has worked its way into his features; what gnaws at him, there at his brow, at the darkened eyes -

Her palm upon his small shoulder. The soft squeeze of her hand.

[Cherny]

Sir Elliot Gahald hadn't been hated by many that met him - and most of those only for the loss of what he'd replaced, rather than any poor quality of his own. They hated what had been done to him, and the Lady he served as champion, but the knight himself? No. No, he was difficult to dislike.

But at the end, when Myrkentown's citizenry had reached the limit of what they'd tolerate under the Lady's rule, he'd been one of those wearing her red-and-gold, and that made him a target. Not to those who'd known him - those he'd helped, in the course of his charitable efforts. No, it was probably someone who'd never met him, someone who saw one of the Lady's servants in his gaudy armour, his good manners and platitudes about how he'd help them, he'd save them.

The Marshall has more questions for him, of course, and he waits patiently as she struggles with vocabulary, as she finds the right words or works around the need for them. His shoulder's thin beneath her hand, beneath Militia coat and mailshirt and doublet; thin, but with a wiry strength that's built up over a summer of good meals and hard work. He nods slightly, still watching the coming and going of the healers. Clearly, and there are interpretations to be made there, different ways in which the word might be meant.

"S-sometimes. M-mostly he's been c-confused or, or sleeping. F-from the fever. But h-he's asked after N-noura." A sidelong glance speaks discreet volumes about the nature of that concern. "And, and h-how people are. The t-town. He's b-been wanting to get better, s-so he can help."

Quieter, as if the knight might overhear.

"He, he thinks th-they must need him - w-with the Lady g-gone, I mean." Conflict in his thin features, doubt, and at the same time faintly guilty for entertaining such thoughts. "He d-didn't do any of the, the stuff the C-civils did. He d-didn't like it, but h-he, he couldn't s-speak against her. Even h-how she was, later on."

If that's what she'd meant. Another glance, for that flask as much as for the Marshall's features, to see if the answer satisfies.

[Carnath-Emory]

Noura. It's funny, the things that catch a person's attention in a moment like this. Noura, who is the Whelp. The Whelp, who is sometimes It. It, which is presently Niall, and the two of them have walked their single body to Golben, the very location at which a swordswoman is half-inclined to be at this very moment. Which is very much where she'd had every intention of being a week ago, until its labyrinth had yielded up a Governor and a friend and a seamstress, all to the relief of a Marshall whose attentions necessarily had to be elsewhere.

There might be no better example of the swiftness with which circumstances can change, here in Myrken. Circumstances. Intentions. And the swordswoman's soft, wry laughter underscores the boy's words as he speaks them. Inappropriate; unavoidable. And already done with and gone -

"He couldn't," she echoes him, quiet in the corridor of a building that is very seldom quiet at all. Twelve paces from where they stand, she had watched her sister hover close to death: her eyes make the count even now, reckon out the distance from here to there, from now to then. In a room three doors down from Elliot Gahald's, she'd clawed her way free from the lasting sleep of Koschei's influence. A man came to her bedside, filthy and bloodstained and trembling with exhaustion; buried his face in her lap, as innocently as Catch had not weeks ago, and her hands smoothed the hair back from his brow as they wondered, each of them, how the other was yet alive...

Memory has become so important to her. And this - here, now - is the most stillness she's known since Rhaena's fall.

"It was what he was made to be, mn? Flawlessly loyal. Unswerving dedication. Perhaps some of what he became was drawn from within - what he had been. Before. This, though..." A thin shake of her head. "This was written into him, written as deeply as could be. She might have had him put a knife to his throat - " It catches sharp into her thoughts; the slightest stutter of breath between one word and the next.

"He'd have died loving her still."

[Cherny]

"She g-gave him reasons. It, it w-wasn't like, like a collar. Just... she g-gave him a life where it m-made sense for h-him to, to serve her. And b-be loyal." Struggling to explain, and perhaps on some level aware that there's no need, that the Marshall will readily understand exactly what had been done to the wounded youth. She talks of love and the edge of a knife and he frowns, shaking his head in denial of something he is reluctant to believe even as he fears it true.

"I d-don't know. She's g-gone now, anyway." There'd been speculation among his friend at the tavern, desperate theories extrapolated from baseless assumptions. Maybe if Rhaena died - if she was killed left unspoken but understood - Elliot would be restored, like an enchanted fairytale princess. Except she'd died, and Sir Elliot remained steadfastly a knight. "M-most of it was him, though. She d-didn't make him a knight. Sh-she let him b-be one, like, like h-he might've been, if he -"

If he'd not stayed in Myrken Wood. If he'd been shaped by different experiences. If he'd had a knight to follow, to emulate; a hero, to give him wise advice and moral guidance.

"- if he'd g-got the chance."

Cherny's had weeks, months in the knight's service to watch, to listen. Quiet moments in which the knight had shared something of his past, as he knew it - anecdotes offered for his squire's benefit, lessons learned in the imagined wastes of far-off Lothaine. Wisdom passed to Sir Elliot when he was a squire, and handed to Cherny in turn. And the boy had paid attention. Doubtful at first, aware that they came from a false life, a fiction, a lie, but as time passed that had grown easier to forget.

[Glenn]

Cherny was a boy. He was a boy specifically made of Myrken, a place of despair and hope. A boy forged in the fires of Myrken, even the best boy, even the best, most caring, most spirited and loyal boy, honed in such a setting, would end up flawed. Here he meandered, twisted and turned through possibilities and rationalization. If the swordswoman had a religion, it was one of the self, and in the name of convenience and truly, fairness, perhaps even hope, young Cherny blasphemed against her. It was somewhat fortune for both of them that one who was unencumbered by Myrken, one whose life was a fiction and thus artificially insulating, now awoke.

"Cherny," It was a cough, but not a spit. Manners were ever important, no matter one's state. in fact, the worse off one found himself, the more important they became. Only through the willful application of manners could one retain civility in the face of chaos. With civility at one's side, any obstacle could be overcome and any suffering could be endured. "To see you well means so much, my friend." He meant to lift up, to clasp the squire upon the arm but up and down seemed to be juggled all wrong and he wasn't entirely sure where his hand was as of yet.

His eyes, however, were mostly under his control. The effort was forestalled by the sight of the other. "My Lady Marshall." There was no sign he had heard any of what they said. "You," a wheeze, untimely but acceptable, "honor me more than you know."

[Carnath-Emory]

Cherny is a boy who is sometimes her student and sometimes her curiosity. He is a boy whose particular way of examining his world had earned him an unusual nickname amongst Darkenhold's motley population. The Lady Marshall, on learning of it, had insisted furiously that they cease and desist - and so they did, in the sense that it became a phrase used only outside of her hearing. The swordswoman's approval was silent and immediate - but conditional, for what they describe is a trait which she is only recently beginning to notice, and there's been no time to properly explore it. No time for anything at all but the managing of each crisis placed successively in front of her.

This is not a reasonable way to live.
She knows this; knows, too, how much she's needed it to be just this way.

Cherny is a boy who surprises - sometimes startles - with his cool-eyed practicality. Who frequently performs the mental gymnastics necessary to balance it against fierce and genuine empathy, which is to say that he's capable of surprising two ways all at once. Being this strange, fine creature, and being in such company as he keeps -

This moment was inevitable.

This, in which he presents to her the explanation that she'd all but asked for, rich with the details that for him are essential; that for her are all but intolerable. This moment, in which the hands clench low against her sides, as if the words which threaten to be spoken might be withheld like this. Even so, her lips part as she hovers upon the verge of ruinous speech; amidst her features an outraged frown wars with mute regret. Perhaps, a man had said to her, and it was only weeks ago, Perhaps you will remember nothing more than what you have, and she swallows back the memory along with everything she might have said here, now; breathes deep in the absence of words, flattens her palms against the walls as if there were something grounding in the texture of coarse, worn wood. "She inspired him," murmurs the swordswoman - as measured a statement as she can manage. "In a way that he couldn't resist - "

Elliot's waking rescues them both. Not least by killing the words in her throat and redirecting her thoughts from Was to Is, and there's a hand at Cherny's shoulder very suddenly. "Go to him." Softly, now. Softly, and her touch urges him forward. "Yours is the face he should see first." A slow breath fails to steel her against what comes, for when she speaks again it is to say: "Gahald. You must lie quietly. For your health's sake, mn?"

Gahald. Because she could not bear to speak the name he'd stolen from the boy he used to be.

[Cherny]

He is not unaware. He rarely meets her gaze as he explains, instead preferring to watch the bustle around the knight's bed, risking only a sidelong glance now and then. He is not unaware of the effect his explanation has, of the response it provokes - tension in the swordswoman's limbs, hands that tighten into fists at the corner of his eye. Steadying breaths, efforts made to keep control. But he perseveres until he has said his piece, until he has advocated for Sir Elliot Gahald, gallant figment that he is.

He knows that his words can do little else than spark outrage in the guts of one who's suffered the same violation as Elliot Brown, who has yet recovered from it, and so he remains careful to avoid her eye. Even the squire's daring knows limits. He recognises that he stands on the brink, that another step will be too far, will be irrecoverable. And sensibly, he stops.

He doesn't immediately recognise that the knight has stirred, intent as he is upon the Marshall's reply - except then he hears his name, and cannot help but flinch as her hand finds his shoulder. A silent nod at her instruction, a fleeting glance that is at once thankful and apologetic, and he hastens forwards to the knight's bedside, reaching to take the hand that reaches vaguely for him.

"You're at th-the Rememdium, ser." It's a subtle change, a shift of posture, of tone that turns him from a worried young boy into a squire - courteous, deferential; a touchstone at his knight's side, offering the information he needs to find his bearings. A sidelong glance for the swordswoman, and a nod as Sir Gahald offers his greeting. "The M-marshall arranged for you t-to, to be moved here. You'll be alright now, s-ser. The, they'll f-fix you up."

[Glenn]

There was a certain lucidity that he had been lacking previously. There was also no telling how long it would last. Elliot Gahald had been assaulted on two fronts; moreover, there was a possibility of a lost underpinning. Rhaena Olwak had created her Lady Marshall and then discarded her. She'd created a fawning, dutiful, mincing thrall and then found her unworthy of even licking her boot. That was her ultimate victory over Ariane Emory. She made her want nothing more than to possess just one simple smile from her Lady and then she denied it.

With Elliot, she held him close. He was her constant companion in so many things, especially after Burnie's removal. Perhaps his mind had been linked with hers when she died. What would that do to someone? What would that do to a mind that was already coping with contradictions, unrealities, and stark impossibilities of morality and optimism.

"It was kind of her, of you," for he looked past Cherny, or tried to. "But why was such an arrangement necessary, Cherny?" The words were hard but he found them. His voice was weak but he struggled through it. This would be the least of what he had to struggle through. Past and present swirled. He saw himself from the outside, saw himself acting in the most barbaric of ways. It was as if he could see the weaving of the Inscribed Witch's spell, could see what others had in him. It made him grit his teeth and reach out to Cherny, to try to steady himself. "I don't understand, Cherny. Was moving me so dangerous a thing?"

[Carnath-Emory]

They'd spoken about so much, Cherny and his recovering teacher. About the way in which certain matters were deemed unbecoming of the Lady she'd been; about Civils and churches and pugnacious pigs - because that had been something to laugh over, that last, and by then they'd very much needed to remember what laughing was like. About sorrow and its uses; about faith and belief, and planishing was the word that she never quite used, some things still being too raw. Of Jernoa - to one mind, a refining fire; to the other, a landscape best suited to die beneath the very same. Of deserts and Catch, and sometimes - necessarily - of Rhaena -

But never this. Not in any but the most superficial aspects. Elliot's conception of knighthood, certainly. The purposes for which one might fill a boy's head with such nonsense, absolutely. The two of them had spent whole hours examining the surface of what had been wrought within the minds of swordswoman and rogue - but only the surface; beyond that point lay roads which she would not have a young boy tread, landscapes to which she would not commit him and which she herself was not ready to explore. It was a choice that she made for them both, with a mingling of hypocrisy and disquiet that was more her than any of the gowns she'd once treasured, the manners she'd once affected.

Not once had she described the clinging memory of an aspirant's yearning heart.
It might have been easier for them both, right now, if she'd chosen differently.

"Be proud of him, Gahald." Of all the words she might have said. "He's given you nothing but his very best." Of anything she might have offered him - that, and all of it spoken by a voice slightly slurred and all but disembodied, for he's limited in the way that he can move, and she's made some attempt at avoiding the reach of his eyes. If only it was as easy to avoid looking at him.

[Cherny]

They'd spoken about a great many things, and yet there were certain things that were left unexplored - deliberately so, skirting around the edges of thoughts too painful, too dangerous to be examined.

He'd described Sir Gahald as a storybook knight - the Lady's impression of what a knight ought to be, all chivalry and fine manners, with clear eyes and an honest smile and good posture. A toy. He'd compared him to what he read and what he imagined of true knights - soldiers, warriors first and foremost, inured to the horrors of the battlefield by virtue of being steeped in them. A shell of protocol and decorum that protected those around them from the potential for brutality.

Sir Gahald had never seen battle, true battle; he remembered fighting monsters and witches in the wastes of Lothaine - and what were they but a youth's imaginings of adventure? A story that Rhaena had made Elliot Brown tell himself. A storybook knight, woven from tales and fancies.

And yet in spite of all this - or perhaps because of it, because Sir Elliot believed his own tales with such blazing sincerity - the mill-boy had gradually, quietly come to admire the knight for what he was: an ideal. Of course he wasn't real, no one real could be that good, that honest and wholesome and earnest in every moment as Sir Elliot Gahald.

But in Myrken Wood, it is sometimes comforting to imagine it possible. To play along. To pretend.

"You're s-sick, ser. You, you c-couldn't walk here - not from t-town - and, and I can't carry you. S-so she - the Marshall - she s-sent some m-men and a cart to, to fetch you." Cherny can only trust that the youth remembers little of that journey, of the urgent secrecy that surrounded it. He presents it as a simple favour - the provision of transport, a kindness on the Marshall's part. Brushing aside the idea of danger.

The Marshall commends him, and though he looks to her as she begins to speak his gaze quickly drops, as if she'd caught him in the middle of a lie. She makes it difficult, impossible to maintain the charade, and he falters, unable to meet the knight's gaze or hers.

"You, you sh-should rest, ser. So you c-can heal."

[Glenn]

It had been a fevered, blistering trip. He remembered heat and cold, pain and oft-dealt with frustration. Details though? Perhaps they would come to him eventually. For now, he could barely focus on the Marshall behind Cherny. She wasn't dressed right. It was a strange notion. Who was he to have so sure a sense of what the Marshall should be wearing? Propriety was its own reward, of course, but he was a knight and she was something else entirely.

No, she was a blur in the background. "Thank her, Cherny." His voice was weak, but he would not back down, would not allow sleep to overtake him again, not yet. His grip on the boy's arm quivered but did not falter. "And let me thank you. You are more loyal than I deserve, than any knight deserves. A man could be the best, the very best, try his hardest every day and I think he would deserve you not still, Cherny. You shall make such a knight some day, my young friend, for you make me proud every day." Each and every word left his lips. He was ragged, was pained, needed to hack and cough and worse, but he would not falter until every word was spoken. Even then, it was only a minor fit of coughing, his head turned from the lad. "Bid her come close, Cherny. I need thank her myself. I must." Honor demanded it and who were they to let earthly necessities get in the way of that.

[Cherny]

For a moment, for an observer who hangs back - there, near the door, say - the scene resolves itself into a vignette, arranged as if to be captured in oils. Sir Elliot bathed in wintry daylight from the window, skin pallid where it is not flushed with fever, his form shrouded in spotless linens; at his bedside, a figure in a coat of sombre black, the better to contrast against thin features and dark eyes, a child swathed in darkness too large for his slight frame; the knight's hand clasps the boy's arm as if bestowing a blessing; the squire meets his master's gaze as bravely as he can, squaring narrow shoulders under the weight of such praise. To the sides, the vague figures of healers and wellsmiths tend to their own business, ready to close in again and tend to the knight's sickness. It might hang on a wall to inspire a surge of sentiment in the viewer's heart - pity for the ailing knight, once so valiant, now brought low; approval for his faithful squire, too young for his duties and yet determined to carry them out. They might assume it a deathbed scene - a poignant farewell, a passing of the torch.

It is a fleeting moment. It is over quickly, between one instant and the next.

The actors move - a nurse moves to fuss with the blankets; the boy looks away, a cuff lifted to cover his mouth as he blinks rapidly and clears his throat, as if in sympathy for his knight's stifled coughs, taking the time to compose himself properly. When he speaks it is little more than a raw whisper, half-choked, and he bends his knees in a bow, hand lifting to grip briefly over the knight's.

"Th-thank you, ser."

Only a nod as Sir Elliot commands him, and the boy steps back - formal, weeks upon weeks of careful control now exercised to their limits - and turns helpless eyes to the swordswoman. A steadying breath, head inclined in deference to the Marshall's status.

"S-sir - Sir Gahald would s-speak with you, sera."

[Carnath-Emory]

It is funereal. The thin-faced squire in his mourning black - white, in her mind, was never the colour for death, but for murder - and look at him now, attendant to the final moments of precisely that. There was never more Myrken a scene than this: a youth wrenched out of his mind and dying of it, a boy far too young to face this down and present nevertheless. It is the realisation of things described to her months ago: a governor's office, a tavern commons on the edge of the world, knives in hands even when they weren't actually knives at all; I am breaking the cycle -

She watches, although she might have looked away long before now; might have walked away, escaped unnoticed between one struggling word and the next. Watches, because this was her responsibility - hers, theirs; because this is the consequence of oversights months-old, years-old. Of the hours in which outrage and dislike had blinded her to what she was was positioned to perceive. And ultimately because this is a boy that she'd come to care for, despite all her cautions. And because this is a youth that had been easy to detest, with the memory of dreaming Elliot dancing bright in her thoughts ... but to look at him like this is to find herself incapable of detesting anything but their circumstances, old and cold and familiar as anything she's ever known.

"I think - "

I think not.
Three words. As denials go, perhaps the easiest she'd ever have spoken.
Bid her come closer, Cherny. My friend. A man could be the best, the very best, and still -

"Of course." She would like to close her eyes. She would like to walk away. She would like distant seashores and unseasonable sunshine, and she has inclined her head to the boy who asks this of her - knowing why she'd demured and unable all the same to do otherwise. She has taken the three steps forward which close the distance between swordswoman and Knight. All to give him the sight that he could not have wanted: dusty, drawn features and bloodshot eyes; unbound hair tangled loose across a shirt's shapeless shoulders. A glimpse of tangled keepsakes; a hint of steel that he might never actually see.

"The most important thing is that you rest, now." He will hear her or he won't. "More than any thing else at all, it is time that you heal." How she wishes, in this moment, that her eyes could be an apology. That her features might express something kinder than regret.