Rough Waters

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Fri Apr 27, 2018 5:30 am

“The raven was your good neighbor there,” she replied, equally drily. “He informed me that forcing someone into a social engagement and then standing them up was a very common sort of rudeness. When we get home, I’m promoting him. He’s much more sensitive to courtesy than Father ever was.”

Beyond the lift of an eyebrow and a delicate snort when he mentioned looking into her people, she was quiet and intent, taking in information. It was good to have something to focus on, like doing figures in one’s head or reciting the Catalogue backwards, to distance herself from this fetid, jogging box speeding across a tultharian city. Land-splits. That she understood. Trust the tultharian to get themselves in that sort of jam anyway; no one ever got anywhere with two owners pushing and pulling over the same patch of land and it was always the vassals who suffered for it. Tenants. They didn’t have vassals here. But tenants implied they could just leave if they wished; they weren’t beholden, not by fealty or duty. Why didn’t they? Momentary curiosity aside, she barely considered the question. They shouldn’t have to move. Two hundred years was two hundred years, even by Tuatha standards (although in the back of her mind, she had a vague, nagging concept that the same people had been there for two centuries), and in any case, they were a secondary matter.

Still. Aja Islands. A mental tickmark went beside the name. Could be she knew them by some other name. It wouldn’t hurt to find out where the islands lay. How near they were to home. How likely it would be for information to trickle to them. For all she knew, they could be one of the places they had spies set, though most of those were on the coast, not on an island that she knew of.

Two hundred years was two hundred years, but two hundred years was not long enough by Tuatha reckoning for information to be out of date.

But not now. He was waiting.

“Could always go over one or the other’s head and fund them for a buy-out,” she mused aloud. “That’s what I would do. I don’t suppose you could do it yourself, though.” She gave him a critical, doubtful once-over, frowning. “Not to insult your means, but if you want to keep your name well out of this, flashing money about isn’t the way to do it. Plus if it ever gets out, people will start pressing you for loans all the time.”

Another reason this partnership, however brief, was bound to go agly was that she had even less information than he, but also far, far fewer qualms. A born meddler with a quick sense of justice, her sympathies went at once for the people themselves, while their various landlords were cast as equivalent obstacles. Her nails lightly tapped on the seat as she considered, though she smiled at his hand gestures with a touch more wistfulness than the situation merited. It was exactly how her bard sculpted things in the air when she was trying to explain a point.

“My concern would be whether or not this lesser laird—noble,” she corrected quickly, with a scowl and a shake of the head, “ whether sh—he, would even be able to hold onto this land even if he gained majority over it. If he’s already…what’s the word? Strapped? then could be he’d end up in the same pit a few years down the line and lose the holdings anyway. Particularly if the trouble’s cyclic.” Her hands flopped down in frustration, and she gave him a plaintive look. “I don’t know these people, Glenn Elias Burnie; I can’t make a good prediction how this might play out. My instincts would be to make sure the greater one took the whole of the land because one could be more certain that he’d be able to retain it, and because it mightn’t be such a loss if he couldn’t collect a season’s worth of tributes every now and again. And then let him know quick and plain I’d be watching him like a hawk between times to make certain he didn’t take advantage. But you can’t do that.”

With a quick twist of the head very like the raven’s inquisitive expression, she snapped back to the present to regard Glenn with a touch of suspicion. She had questions. Quite a lot of questions, actually: how sure could he be of these men’s motivations? Sure enough to be certain that either would fall for the bait? Was there actually a military action forthcoming, or did he plan to spread the rumor himself (she would enjoy seeing how that worked without glamorie)? How on earth did this voting business function? But one rose above the others. “Is this all purely intellectual, or do you have some sort of investment in the outcome?”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Glenn » Mon Apr 30, 2018 5:19 am

"Spare him that." Burnie was quick to say, too quick, perhaps, but rusty as he might have been, he was still capable of a certain velocity when it came to protecting his friend. "Or at least ask him his opinion first. You'd not want to promote him into constrained misery."

Outside the city, one was more likely to find vassals. Here it was more of a system of landlords than landed lords, but still, people did not leave. Burnie was less likely to give weight to the two hundred years so much as the current moment. That was not a universally shared opinion by humanity, but she had already picked up on the fact that he was not always in accord with those he wished to help. More often than not, they didn't want help at all. What (price, cost, right, burden, hurdle) then?

When she suggesting a funding stratagem, he went silent. For reasons both good and bad, that hadn't occurred to him. "I can't throw money about everytime I wish to enact change," he near-sputtered. "If I was going to do it here, I'd do it through an intermediary anyway, but it'd be a bad habit. Before I would know it, I'd be entirely consumed by raising money in order to repeat the exercise. Moving that sort of capital about is clunky and inefficient anyway. I'd be caught before long and then I'd lose the pulse of the information."

Her next concern rode alongside his last one, but quickly began to drive it towards the rocks of contradiction. He sniffed in response. "At the same time, you're right. I'm not entirely looking for a permanent solution here. I'm just trying to get them out of the current fix. That's the level of engagement here. I can't solve all of Razasan without sacrificing all else, and even then, it's a large nut to crack." The manic energy sputtered in the face of his previous loss. This was a small, precise cut that "I'll need to ensure some sort of successful follow up. I'm trusting in the heart of the lesser one, Girard, in this moment. I'd have to tie it with some sort of logically occurring reward for him achieving this, one that can't be traced back to me."

Then, in response to her question. "You may not believe me, but I'd call it more of an emotional urge than an intellectual one. An impersonal emotional urge. My only personal investment in any of this is a young queen's enjoyment."
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Mon Apr 30, 2018 7:45 am

“No one ever asked our opinion on being constrained into the misery of Father,” she countered lightly, but with a mild reproachful note—not quite a warning, only a reminder of what she was. She’d been teasing about promoting the raven, but if a queen wanted to elevate a messenger raven, she didn’t need anyone’s thoughts on the matter. Mostly she realized that Glenn hated it when she queened around him, but since she was about as far removed from power as it was possible to be without renouncing it, a little needling wouldn’t kill him.

She restrained herself from giggling at his spluttering, though she could not resist a smile. “I quite like money. The idea of money, anyway. It’s…tidy.” Still smiling, she dipped a hand under her cloak, then extended her closed fist toward him and slowly rubbed thumb against forefinger. A gold coin bounced off his knee and rolled away to be swallowed up by the grimy carriage floor. Another falling coin punctuated every sentence that followed: “It makes trade easier. You can carry it about. I liked it better before I realized that most of it’s imaginary. It’s like your laws—you all get together and agree it’s worth something when it’s only a bit of polished-up silver.”

One last coin before she opened her palm and flicked a small scattering of broken beech leaves directly into his lap.

When she eased back against the far wall of the carriage, she grew a little more grave. “You see, that is one of those things you would have better mentioned right up front. If you only want these people out of the present fix, I’d’ve planned for that. And if you don’t give a hang which of these two men—” a distasteful little inflection on men “—comes out the better, then it makes just as much sense to deal with the people directly and making promises you can’t deliver. Unless you can deliver. I confess I am having some trouble conceiving how to fake a military action that never manifests. Then he’ll know you were involved. If he’s half-bright, he’ll know you led him false for some purpose of your own. Even if he never figures out what it was, you’ll have his eye on you. If your court’s anything like ours, word gets around faster than pisgies in a plum grove.” A shrug of the shoulder. “It matters not. What would you have of me for this?”

She was about to ask more…only to snap bolt upright, with a sharp hiss between clenched teeth, as the entire carriage shuddered violently from a ridge in the road. Her nails raked pale tracks in the seat as she all but plastered her back against the wall. Lugh’us Danaan, this would all be a little bit easier to tolerate if only they weren’t closed up in a box and she could see what was happening around them. How did anyone travel like this? She couldn’t even guess where they were anymore.

The thought rose up, clean and cold as a steel blade, that this might all be a trick. This carriage was going nowhere near a ball, but to the middle of nowhere, a forsaken field, or some seedy spot down by the docks where they swept up the unclaimed bodies every morning.

Nonsense, she scolded herself. Anyway, if you really believed any of that, you’d’ve stabbed him six times and hopped out of this carriage quick as a frog off a lily-leaf. Stop spooking yourself. You’ll be right as rain once you’re out in the open.

Except now she was embarrassed, as well as annoyed with herself. Not making a very good case for herself in front of someone that, damn it all, she had meant to impress. That admission stung as much as anything.
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Glenn » Tue May 01, 2018 12:56 pm

“And don’t you wish someone had?” Burnie shot back quickly. It was easy to be self-righteous when it came to his feathered friend and now she’d made it even easier still, for he could be the same (and more) about her younger self. She could reproach his lack of respect or defiance, but he certainly had the moral high ground here, or at least he thought he did, which was as good as having it. “I would have done the same for you,” he added, before thinking it through the rest of the way. “Or better. Or worse,” some admission that he wasn’t perfect even when he had the best of intentions. Sometimes, his good intentions created their own sort of misery. If he hadn’t been so acutely aware of that, they’d be back in Myrken right now, wouldn’t they?

Then came money, and the trick and her leaving him dirtier than he’d been. Wasn’t that always the case with easily obtained funds? He dusted himself off with a real frown; it wasn’t every day that he dressed up so, after all. Still, he was able to ramble or pontificate or whatever it was that he did so effortlessly, even when covered in the world’s smallest woodlands. “It comes down to Truth and Belief and Trust, really. There are things I don’t yet know about you and yours;” speaking of effortless, there was nothing more so than the word ‘yet’ in that phrase, “but I feel you must have done the same. You just bound it all with magic and power in a more literal way than we have. We work on faith and occasionally steel. It’s how we grow to be more than we are, Finn, and if you decide to tear us down, it’s the way to to do it. We have a shared understanding, a shared faith. We decide, one and all, over generations that something has worth, and therefore it does. It’s not the thing that has any true worth but our mutual, often unspoken, agreement. You’ve seen that fail in our laws, but it succeeds more than it fails, generally, and without it, we’d have nothing. You have less uncertainty than we do, but you also have less freedom and less possibilities. We can build anything we imagine, so long as we imagine it together. You're limited to what’s already been decided, and thus you can’t grow past what you are.”

He stopped for a breath, though it was a satisfied one. There had been precious little time for all that in Myrken, what with strange hand-holding and vicious glams. She’d found something else he enjoyed too. When he spoke again, it was fond and wistful. “Just like our letters, isn’t it? You needn’t respond now, if you don’t want to. That can go with the other one you mentioned.” There was hope at the bottom of the box of wretched words. He had every intention of writing to her despite what had happened. Hope or pained tedium for a squirrel who primarily wanted her nut.

She had asked some quite valid questions. There were easier and more direct ways to deal with this. “Part of it,” he wholly admitted, “is the sport of it. Part of it’s doing it with you.” So he had admitted to both a lapse and the desire to please her or entertain her or to dance this particular political dance with her, even if it happened to inconvenience all parties. “Part of it is this, though: while I don’t mind learning about their plight second-hand, and helping them the same manner, I’d rather not get attached. This isn’t my destination, no more than the inn with the bear was yours. It’s just a stop along the way. I’d rather not linger.”

That was the first half of it. The second was exactly HOW he intended to inconvenience them this evening. It was interrupted even before it could begin by the ridge, the carriage, and the Queen, a string of causality which had left her first alarmed and then sourly reaping the consequence of said alarm. He frowned. In that moment, he could have pounced, jibed, poked and prodded. It was fair game and maybe she even might do the same were their situations reversed (he didn’t think so). He could have comforted as well (which might be more akin to her reaction), but her behavior had cautioned him away from physical contact just a few minutes before.

The best way forward was to stick to business. One could lose himself in business like nothing else save a bottle and while she might prefer the latter, all he had to offer was the former. “We don’t need to make anyone think war’s actually coming. We just have to make people think that people might think war’s coming. It’s not even that really,” and the frown faded because how could it survive in the face of that? “We need to make people think that the crown might think that people might think that war’s coming. That’s more than enough reason to think taxes might be coming too. Opportunity is often all it takes. We can manage that with colors, boasts and whispers. You’ll supply the colors and the boasts and I’ll manage starting the chain of whispers.” Really, it was simplicity itself.
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Thu May 03, 2018 5:36 am

Tuatha do not feel regret. Perhaps their lifespans bred the emotion out of them, as any true regrets would have to be carried an unbearably long time. The closest she came now was a white-hot spike of self-recrimination not too dissimilar to the feeling when her arrow struck off-center, coupled with dispassionate acceptance so ingrained that it did not even strike her as curious: she played the game, she erred, and the consequences were on her own head. Now he would plunge for the vulnerable spot. Those were the Rules. He was no more to blame for seizing the opportunity than an eagle that snatches up a lamb.

When it did not come, her mouth pressed into a small puzzled frown, as if she was suddenly worried about him. In spite of everything—the sick buzzing in the stomach, the unbearable heat and closeness of the carriage, the irrational fear that clung like cobwebs to her mind—her hunched, hunted posture uncoiled itself and her lips softened into a real-if-skeptical smile. It wasn’t like him to be so candid. No more motive than the sport of it, and to include her. Had he sat himself down for a week and thought of nothing but ways to appeal to her two greatest touchstones—her sense of play and her vanity—he could scarcely have done better. “If I could but believe that,” she said gently, “you’ve no idea how much it would please me.”

With that, she pushed back her hood, a visual signal of disclosure. Also it was far too stuffy for it. Her hair was wound into a complicated crown of braids that left her neck bare, and she’d glammed her ears to human proportions, which, conversely, always made her feel more self-conscious of them. Mouse-ears.

His earnestness, coming on the heels of her own anxious outburst, made her feel a little embarrassed. They were both trying—timid, fumbling inroads, to be sure, but still trying to find an accord. It was harder for him. He was out of practice. It fell to her to be gracious about it, then, to try to move them ahead.

“I know, I know, there are vast philosophical differences and never shall our twain meet, you seek to impose lasting meaning in the face of your fleeting lives while we are forever doomed fill the yawning emptiness of our eternal stasis, araile, araile, araile—this is exactly like our letters in that I feel I’m being bludgeoned to death with a loaf of wet bread. We’re wasting valuable plotting time.” With a sigh that bordered on a yawn, she propped an elbow on her knee and dropped her chin into the cup of her palm with the careless grace of one who never had to worry about wrinkling her dress. “To practical matters. Three degrees of separation from the truth should be sufficient. I told you before: sometimes it’s enough that only one person believes it, an they be properly placed. Distraction can be provided. Are you planning on laying a groundwork tonight or do you expect to accomplish this in a single evening? Give me names and point me at a target.” Quickly she scowled and straightened up, shaking her head. “Don’t give me names. You know what I mean. Tell me what people are called, where they fall in all this, what they needed to be persuaded of. Unless you want the entire pack of them in a panic.” That would actually be easier, but a bit of an overkill if all he wanted was the suggestion of a rumor. “And I need a name. And we need to agree on a story in case someone tries asking me about you, or you about me. I don’t mind telling people I’m an evening hire, but I think you would.”

That was more for her sake than his. She briefly considered, then dropped, her usual method of feeding everyone a different story and then leaving them to realize the contradictions later. Such a superficial distraction to start tongues wagging might make a good smokescreen for accomplishing more practical matters right under people’s noses, but…there was Glenn. No doubt Glenn spent his time being exactly as infuriating with everyone else as he was with her. It might be worth someone’s time to go digging. She didn’t fancy someone digging their way back to Myrken. Mayhap another seeming, too, just to be on the safe side. This world did not abound in gigantic redheads.
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Glenn » Fri May 04, 2018 2:33 am

He read her letters. Did she think he didn't? Did she think that it was all a race to respond and have his own voice heard? Maybe that was the case sometimes, but over time? Over all of this time and all of these words? She did not fully realize it yet, even after the altercation earlier in the day, but Glenn Burnie did not care a whit about guest right. Maybe as Governor, under certain agreements, he was bound to certain things. Currently he was bound to nothing and no one but his own expectations and the ghosts that haunted him. In seeking to accommodate her, however, he was being a good host. That had nothing to do with any right and everything to do with her. "Your not believing that," he responded, though gently as well, "has much more to do with you than with me, unfortunately." It was unfortunate because if it were the other way around, he might be able to act to change that.

Amusement reached his eyes (again, not that he thought she could see them, making it more likely to be an honest thing), at her deflection. "I think it's worthwhile for you to see how genuine the letters truly are, Finn. You say you put on airs and play at one position or another. I don't entirely believe you; I'm a human. That's my folly and I well and truly admit it," and she was welcome to take advantage even though he had not. "A good philosophical discussion is never a waste of time." She had a point and he knew that if left unchecked, he might drone on for hours. He wasn't about to tell her she was a good neighbor for that though.

This was far more time than he thought he would have to plan, as he assumed he would be spending half the ball trying to figure out even who she was, but it would have been a shame to waste it. "Two grafs, as I said. Girard is the younger, he who we wish to buy." He shut his eyes for a lingering moment, but resumed abruptly when he realized she might use the opportunity to speak. "We don't wish to buy him. We wish him to purchase the rest of the street. The one who owns is Brignole. The former's young, needs more sun, of parents who probably died from not getting enough themselves. Better-meaning than he is sensed, but a bit strapped because of it. Brignole's the usual sort, thick in the front and the back, poor eyesight but enough misplaced vanity to refuse spectacles. A squinter. Your name is Margaret. Evening hires never call themselves Margaret. It's always Maggie or Peggy or Meg, thank you very much." That he could manage that with such steady detachment was probably a terrible sign of his own broken nature. There was no lust, nor affect, nor disgust or condemnation. No one should be so dispassionate when talking about evening hires.

"As I said, we could go with war or pestilence when dealing with Brignole. Taxes are coming (because of the idea of the idea of the idea) or sickness might spread. Your choice. I don't think Margaret is a leper though. With Girard, it'll have to be idealism and ambition we stoke. We push one and pull the other." There were hand motions involved with that, exactly what one might think, albeit slightly more subdued. They stopped suddenly when he realized he missed a beat. It had been a while since he did this and he rarely had to do it out loud or in a way that might have been misconstrued. There was never any doubt with Rhaena and rarely any plans to be shared with anyone else. "You play towards their expectations. That puts you as either the adventurous but ignorant (including of her own ignorance) daughter of a wealthy merchant from Derry that I am showing around as a favor or a domineering vampire countess to whom I owe four souls by sunrise. I do think one is a bit more reasonable than the other."
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Fri May 04, 2018 6:59 am

She nodded in agreement, likewise forgetting (or not fully understanding) that she could see him far better than he could see her. Derry was from whence Lady Patience had hailed; all she had to do was borrow details from all the stories she learned while being Patience’s maid. If that little stockpile of information gave out, sigh a little, pretend one had a tragic past one preferred not to speak of, and then quickly distract one’s partner by urging him to talk about himself.

“I’ll stick with the taxes first, then. Pestilence as an afterthought. Your folk are all too willing to think of pestilence as something that happens to other people. They’re…grafts?” Now she squinted, a little skeptically. She thought that was something one did to trees, but she could see how it might be a political metaphor for a larger power structure sustaining a smaller, unrelated but more fruitful one. She was actually quite proud of how well she was getting on with this metaphor business. “You take the Girard. An he’s young and witless and soft-hearted, he’s more likely to be impressed by you and eager for advice, particularly if he knows he’s witless because he won’t trust his own judgement. I’ll handle the other one because I’m more capable of playing to someone’s vanity without managing to insult them.” Had she sounded a little less brutally matter-of-fact about it, she might have seemed smug.

Abruptly, and with nothing else of more practical use to say, she found herself tongue-tied, acutely aware of where she was. Not in a strange city with straining at the seams with tultharian, not in a clattering mobile box whose interiors she did not dare brush with her bare skin for fear of getting it all over her. Only very far from home, in a closed, quiet space, with an odd, sad mortal who through circumstance and stubbornness had become one of the few people she knew. The thought occurred to her that if given other options, she might not even like him very much. And yet, here they were.

She sighed deeply, hands folded across her stomach. “I did not say I put on airs. Perhaps I did not say it aright. It is hard for me betimes to…I don’t know the word. When…when someone asks you what you would to do for something that has not really happened. Hypothetically.” She pronounced all six distinct syllables as if they were words she had seen separately and was now trying to place in correct order. “When you ask me what I would do or what I would want, it is hard not to feel beholden to an answer once ’tis set down. To write the thing out makes it real. Only…it doesn’t. Not for you. You use it to work out ideas, to plan. To predict. I wasn’t saying I play at one position or another; I was saying that I cannot. Not the way you do.”

She grew frustrated, twisting the edge of her cloak with one hand. Perhaps it would have been less a struggle were she not already on edge, but in this moment, the gap felt more impossibly wide than ever, as if a year’s worth of letters and struggling to understand had never even happened. “I don’t think you realize how binding these letters are. I…we don’t use writing that way. If we write something down, it has happened. Oh…paugh. I think I just made a worse muck of explaining it than in just sitting back and letting you be wrong about everything again.”

She slumped back in her seat again, arms folded. “Much as it warms the bright blue chambers of my heart to imagine you might have a deep hidden reserve of altruism, I do believe you are as you say you are, and that you do as you say you do. Which is fine. I have enough feelings and preferences about everything to serve for two.” It was hardly fine. It meant it was not even worth her while to feel sorry for him. “It seems very empty, is all—that self-same emptiness you ascribe to my folk. But at least we have joy of our meddling. You don’t.”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Glenn » Fri May 04, 2018 7:58 am

"I am hardly shopping for a protege," he replied in regards to Girard, though, of course, it was was to set up the punchline. "I already have a young fairy queen I counsel who only begrudgingly understands what I have to offer her." Burnie rather thought she'd woo the younger noble, but this was in part her fun and he'd defer to her wishes on these matters. "I'll just keep a healthy distance and not open my heart to him."

Then, as he was about to provide her more such useful context, she turned inwards and expressed herself outwards all at once. It came as something of a surprise and left him off-balance enough to listen to her the whole way through at least. Their earnestness looked very different on this evening. "Every time we write a letter, it's a contract? Is that what you're saying?" His mind began to churn. She had rarely seen this in motion either; fighting the glam was something else entirely. "It's why you absolutely cannot sign your name. So long as you don't do that, you can wriggle your way around. There's a cost even to Finn though. It's one thing if I'm writing to Ellipsis, even though there's a cost to you to that."

He was staring now, in part because he couldn't see her and in part because he desperately wanted to. It was also how he thought these days on the other side of years of shattering. "There's a danger in it already. I could look back at the letters and probably find a hundred snares you triggered. Or if not me, someone else. You're clever but our letters ran deep. I should destroy them to be safe, for you. Is there some sort of ink you could use that fades? Then you wouldn't be bound for long at all." He exhaled, not exactly outwardly enjoying this, but certainly energized by it. "There must be some way to free you of that. To make it so you could walk amongst your people with all your power but not to have to abide by all of these rules. You could solve every problem there within a year, I imagine, unbound but still manifest and whole."

That was the danger of Burnie, not to use her letters against her, but to try to upturn nature itself, even and especially in her name and with her goals in mind. "But listen to me. The selfless thing to do would be to no longer encourage you to write the letters. The altruistic thing. To free you from that obligation and risk and, I imagine, on some level, pain. That's how the fairy story would go, if fairy stories were soft cerebral and not heartgripping and exciting, me freeing you." To his credit, he did not look away, even though he was not truly meeting her eyes. "Is it a testament to you or a black mark upon me that I cannot do that?"
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Sun May 06, 2018 2:53 pm

“Testament to me,” she replied, forthright and without a heartbeat’s hesitation. “Certainly to me.”

That he should hone in on what, to her, had been the least important part of the admission was exasperating. “Oh for pity’s sake, still your blethering. Should anyone else lay eyes on those letters, they will look like nothing more than a packet of requisitions. They’ve been that way ever since I sent the crown. I didn’t bother telling you because you would have started in whinging about deception and trust and truthfulness again—and don’t start whinging about it now, either, an you please. In any case, there is no contract. Not as you mean it, anyway. Whatever is between us is of us. If I learned later there was a cost, I deemed it acceptable and it is not your place to say me now that it is not. I’m as bound as I’ll ever be, so we might as well continue.”

She followed the course of his wildly darting eyes, trying to force them to meet hers, until at last it dawned on her why his gaze never seemed to find a place to land. Her hand dipped under the cloak again, though there was nothing in the lining but more beech leaves and beach pebbles, nothing solid enough to build on. In the end she slipped the garnet ring from her small finger. The floating star atop the domed gem flared in cold red-violet light that strengthened and spread to illuminate the space between them, two faces emerging from darkness. The glow gave his skin an unsettling rubious cast and turned his pale eyes purple, so that for a chilling moment it seemed he had been transformed into some barely recognizable ghoul—as if it were possible to glam someone by accident.

“You begin to irk me, Glenn Elias Burnie,” she said, but in an amused, thoughtful tone that was as far from irked as it was possible to be. “Were I more fanciful, I should think that this is the last means left for you to express your regard: by inventing dangers and then rushing in to rescue people from them. I expect it allows you to avoid those blunders you call your lapses, because then you can convince yourself that you’ve provided a necessary service rather than admit you can succumb to ordinary feeling. For you to say you do for the sport of it, or for the pleasure of my company—you tempt me to believe it, for those are the reasons I would give to you, if you asked.”

The violet light was no kinder to her face than it was to his. It laid bare the basic inhumanity of her features: triangular hollows beneath cruelly jutting cheekbones, the jaw long and narrow enough to give the faintest hint of a wolflike malocclusion, the skin poreless as polished soapstone. She looked both lovely and vaguely repellant.

“I have wondered as much for you, Glenn Elias Burnie. How it might be to free you of all these self-imposed strictures, all these…asceticism…and turn you loose among your own people with all your own power and cleverness and potency intact. To see what you would make of yourself could you but forget yourself. The difference between us is that if I truly wanted it, I could do it right now with the two of us sitting here. I could do it so that you would not even realize it was done.” She paused to lend that idea the gravity it deserved, eyes boring into him. “But I do not, because I know you well enough to believe there would be enough of you left that you would hate it, and hate me for doing it, and hate yourself for becoming what you fear. An I could be sure of that last little fragment…”

The light abruptly blotted out. She was crushing the ring in her fist tightly enough to emboss its edges in her palm. Her fingers relaxed, light leaking through the cracks.

“If I could be sure, still I would not,” she concluded more calmly, “because in spite of what I see in your face even now, you say you do not want it. That is reason enough for me. In all the time we have known one another, I have set upon you no charm, no enchantment, no beguilement, nor yet even any obligation that I did not likewise impose upon myself, such as our honesty.” She pursed her lips, considering that honesty even now, then shrugged a shoulder. “The one glam, true, but you were aware of that one, for I wanted you to know what could become of you if you overstepped yourself. Yet you have never yet tired of imagining how much better off I would be could you but rearrange me a little. I begin to feel like the goose with the gold eggs. Do you remember how I asked you about that story? What do you think would be left of us if we started hacking one another open?”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Glenn » Mon May 07, 2018 12:41 am

Eventually, he'd learn not to ask her such questions. Eventually. It was different in person, though, so it'd almost certainly take him longer to learn. Plus, there was a conspiratorial element to it, to know someone well enough to give them a conversational little so that they might be able to take a conversational lot. He missed that familiarity like a drowning man missed air. It was very much why they were here now.

At least he was consistent in his exaggeration. For all she may or may not have been different in close proximity, he was very much the same, a fact that was quite obviously both rewarding and disappointing. He'd be a fool to be blind to it. Speaking of that. "You didn't tell me because I'd find a way around it, and then we'd be talking about that instead of about things more important." It took all he had not to be driven to distraction by possibilities to 'crack' such a code as it was.

Thankfully, there was nothing quite like fairy light to command a man's attention when his mind threatened to drift. He allowed himself but a second of surprise. He was, at heart, a Myrkener, albeit one who walked around with open eyes and ears devoid of wax. He had seen such things. He had dined with elves and drank with a mul. He had negotiated with both self-proclaimed gods and wraiths decried by all. Moreover, he had made the leap that almost none of them could (for even those who considered themselves wizards couldn't look past the pomp of it all for their own ego's sake): he had begun to see magic as just another tool, like a lever or a pulley, just another manipulation of the world's latent power. So after that moment of surprise, Burnie would seem quite comfortable indeed with her, too comfortable perhaps. She was a manifestation of the world and he could look past the most inhuman features to find the humanity within. In some ways, it was all he ever did and all he could still do, broken as he was. It was all that was left for him, even though it left him occasionally blind and vulnerable. The opposite would have been a black heart and an endless scowl. That was no choice at all.

She had won that moment of surprise though, and that left him gracious and attentive. She spoke and he listened, though it was obvious about midway through he was all too eager to respond. Finally, he did. "You want something. You want to be home on your own terms. You want to throw off the yoke of your father, of being a pawn. You want your people to open their eyes to their current plight and to accept the solutions you would find for them, to even admit that there was a problem in the first place. You want to make a difference, to be active instead of passive, to redefine what being a queen has meant for your own life. You want those large things and a thousand small ones. You are constantly wanting, constantly desiring." He was close to her now, sharing in her light, purple eyes gazing into hers as if this was the easiest, most natural thing in the world. "Yours is a story that is just beginning, despite the betrayal in your past and all your years here already, all your years in general. There's no saying how it'll end. It's all before you. If I try to push you or prod you this way or that, it's very often with your own goals in mind. I see what is up against you and think you'll have to be more; no, different is a better word, different than what any of your people have ever been to achieve them.

"I wonder though," and here his head tilted slightly, though his eyes never moved. "if you would be unsatisfied with that victory. It's one thing for me to never reap the benefits of my efforts (something else for others in this generation not to, but forget them for now). I'll be dead in a matter of decades anyway. You do it for a different purpose, to save your people, your way of life, so that you may possess it and enjoy it. That'll be such a fine line to walk, Finn." The slight tilt became a soft shake, before he swallowed and pulled the conversation back to himself.

The energy threatened to leave his voice but he pressed on. "I've seen it. Myself unleashed. With all the power and cleverness and potency and none of the inhibition. None of the care for consequence. I lived three years of my life that way, cut off from anything but action and results. Just because you've not seen that doesn't mean I haven't. It's very much why I'm here. You've got the chain of causality backwards. You can't right tug me towards what drove me here in the first place." Of all that he had lost, having someone in this world who understood him completely, who he could understand utterly? Well, that was the most of it. It was the greatest treasure in this world and he had squandered it due to madness and blindness and the arrogance of youth. He had seen it damaged and had chosen revenge instead of nurture and in doing so, had come to lose it all.

"I want you to understand. I want you to see what I had been before, so it makes sense to you, so that you know why I hold back now. You'll never understand unless you see." He'd warned her of this, of course, but since her arrival, she'd seen him want but two things, the first was this political meddling, to do it with her, and now, here was the second. "You have my name. Have you the means to see?"
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Fri May 11, 2018 3:56 am

For a moment she was angry enough at the presumption that it felt that time had doubled back on itself through a distorting mirror. Once he had brought the moment to its crisis just before asking for her name. Now he’d thrust his own name in her hands and forced her to drag it along behind her like a wicked little boy tangling a horse’s tail in a thorn hedge. He’d given her something she didn’t want and hadn’t asked for and was now asking her to use it to his own advantage. While trying to convince her it was to all her advantage. Because that was what he did.

She toyed momentarily with the idea of leaving his face red and his eyes purple forever, the way they branded thieves here. Let others see him coming and be warned. It would be painless but just ridiculous enough that his pride couldn’t bear it, with no way of covering it up without he put a sack over his head like a leper. Let him have some real excuse to avoid parties.

Or she could just give it back. As soon as this carriage stopped, hop out, spit it back at his feet, and dance off into the shadows, thence to the stables to collect her horse. By dawn she could be back on the road to Myrken, unburdened and free of the city stink. If she made good time, she might even catch up to Hok ere he left for the north. No letters this time.

This whole plan unfurled itself from her back-brain in the half-heartbeat it took to gather a breath.

Instead she replied, with a touch of lazy insolence, “You ask the wrong question, but aye, I have the means.” Idly she twisted the ring between her fingers so that its light flashed from one side of his face to the other. “But for that, no. For that we’ve overstepped the bounds of friendship and moved into bargaining. What would you offer me, Glenn Elias Burnie? What would the privilege of my understanding be worth to you?”

She could keep up the air of insouciance, but secretly, she was wary. She was running a wager. If she did not completely mistake him, what he asked amounted to crossing, and only a banded bard would dare try it. Technically she could do it, but the gods alone knew what sort of mess she would leave him in if she did--like trying to do fine surgery with a pointy stick and one’s own bare dirty hands. Could she be blamed for giving him exactly what he wanted? It was, quite literally, the oldest trick in the book.

Abruptly she cut her eyes away, looking cross and sullen. “You insult me. I do understand. You’ve been very plain about the matter; one would have to be very obtuse indeed not to have noticed. I don’t understand everything, true, but I understand well enough to know that it would be a cruel, terrible thing to bring out of you again, not when you’ve worked so hard to put it in back of you, to recover from it. I don’t agree with your means, but I understand why you take such precautions. Your word is enough. I trust you.” She bit her lip, then gave up the effort of fighting back the small chuckle as she glanced back toward him. “Lugh’s balls, did I not just say I never would, much as I want to? I can want things without having them. I’m not that much a hedonist. But if that is what you require to feel yourself heard...damn right I will set a price on it.”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Glenn » Fri May 11, 2018 4:57 am

Gloria Wynsee did not entirely have the wrong of it. Burnie was never quite as alive as when he interacted with beings of power. Where she had it wrong was to think power could only be magical and not temporal, but in this moment, highlighted with an eldritch glow, he all but lit up. There was a taste in the air (iron for him, but surely not for her), a more rapid beating of his heart. Even in this strange light, everything felt more vivid.

There, on a figurative table, was a deal with a very literal fairy queen. The terms, the gains. Did they matter? For a moment, not in the least. It was the danger and the challenge of it all that drove him.

As she gathered her breath, however, so did he. The moment was past them.

Certainly, what remained was still fraught with risk.

He let her speak, which was rare for him, but such was this atmosphere, such was this company. "You can want things without having them. Is there a cost to wanting, or is there only a cost to asking? This is very precise," his voice had gone wistful, distant, calculating all the stakes at play. "I insulted you through the wanting, I think. Lack of trust. Lack of respect. Lack of faith. It's about me too, and what I lost, but it's not just that. Answer me this: how I should I feel that you want the very thing that I have told you I fear the most, the thing that I've run away from? Do you truly think it's unfair for me to wonder if you can understand through everyday means when that is exactly what you want? I blame you and you blame me." And yet there they were. "If nothing else, it shows we care enough for it to matter."
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Tue May 15, 2018 8:04 am

The trouble was that she, who lived by bargains as much as men lived on bread, made no sign of removing the offer from that figurative table. It would sit until it gathered dust and the table crumbled to splinters beneath it—and judging by her utter stillness, the way she kept her neck tilted just so as her violet gaze bored into him, so would she. The bargain, once made, could only be withdrawn by mutual agreement. By her own interpretation, she was being unduly magnanimous about it: not setting him a price, but asking what he was willing to give. The cost was rarely about what prize one wanted for oneself, but a test to see how much how much they wanted it—to learn if the wanting was idleness or whimsy or a matter of life or death. That truth she would never tell him, nor would any Tuatha ever tell tultharian.

Even when at last she spoke, the bargain remained like a solid thing, real as the gold ring between them.

“It’s not the wanting that is insulting. It’s these petty half-assed tricks of yours—forcing your name on me when I never asked for it, going around behind my back to learn what might be done with it, then using the fact that I have it to try and make me accept something else I didn’t ask for. It’s that I must keep watch on you lest you find an opportunity to act on your wanting. That I must wonder what else has been looked into behind my back. It’s that I have wanted and you have wanted and acted, and I started to feel my faith has been ill-rewarded and my generosity abused. That I must ask myself how much of it was deliberate and planned from the start, or how much of it is simply your nature and you simply cannot stop yourself from nudging, always nudging, to see where the lines are and if they may be crossed—for I see that look on your face just now, and hear you claim that you act but for the sport and the joy of it, and I wonder how far removed your nature is from mine after all, for nothing would please me more, and nothing would be more dangerous.”

She let her gaze fix on him for a hard sharp second, like a little silver hammer driving in a tack, before her shoulders softened and she let herself recline against the padded seat once more. “So now you answer me: how should you feel? How do you feel?”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Glenn » Thu May 17, 2018 12:51 am

If two people do not agree to play a game, then whatever follows is simply not that specific game. It might still be playing. It might even be two separate games. Her bargain remained on a table, but it was not any table that he currently chose to patronize. Words had been said and like often, if not always, she was literal and he figurative.

He was frequently insulting.

"Pettiness implies intent, I think." Did she know this trick of his by now? Semantics to aggravate, to send a ripple in the pond, to emanate waves enough to make one have to tread water if only for a few seconds. At the end of it, he spoke with purpose. He just needed those few seconds to gather his thoughts and it was with such statements that he bought them. One day the price might end up being too high. "That's a thought, isn't it?" He had gained distance and now, as he veered back in to the conversation at hand, he was comfortable and confident in his speech. "How alike we might be. In the larger meaning, your glamour is as natural as breathing to you. It's how your people see and interact with the world, an extra sense to take in stimuli and another way to communicate outwards. Given your bloodline and the power that comes with it, this is especially true for you." That was her, and wasn't she lovely and pleasant to describe? With an inhale and soft exhale, him, all the harder. "Am I all that different? You've your glamour. I've my wit. Reason. Intellect. Power. None of those are quite right. My method then." With some small, reluctant (but not as reluctant as it ought to be) satisfaction, he repeated the phrase. "My method. I learn. I learn everything there is to learn. I see darkness and try to drive it back with light. You might say we lose the sense of wonder by doing so, but it just means we come to appreciate through understanding instead of superstition. We may fear the unknown and respect and come to love that which we learn."

There was a point in all that, though it was difficult, a point wholly lacking in satisfaction. "So, here I have not held back in my natural instincts, my method, when you have repeatedly held back in yours, wholly admitting that they are two very different things, one of direct encumbrance and one far more indirect, as action for me may be different than action for you. So, I'm sorry. Doubly so that I will likely continue in the future."

What was an apology worth when it was deflection as well? Perhaps something still when they came so infrequently? But then, she had questions, and the only way to truly make his apology matter was to answer them as directly as possible. Eventually. Now. "I should feel offended." That was easy enough. He paused before the next one, paused and struggled to not avert his eyes. For all his bravado, this was a mortal who had been through far too much and this was one more impossible request. "I feel..." His voice faded off as he realized the word simply did not exist. It was, perhaps, the first time she had ever seen that particular look of puzzlement in his eyes, though she had not spent much time with him in person, not truly. "That start of a sentence won't get us there," he demurred, frustration tugging at his lips. There was a place to escape to and he was sorely tempted. She said it herself, how dangerous it'd be, but did she know? Did she truly? She looked at it in relation to his people, not her own, not really. Maybe she wondered what an adversarial relationship might be like between his and hers, him and her, but he could paint the picture of what an unleashing would look like for herself and those that she cared about the most, all for her, all through what he had learned and what he knew they could do together to and for her people. Still, that wouldn't answer her question. It'd only allow him to escape it (and maybe her, for how could she continue on after that?). Instead, finally, with difficulty and in good faith. "I'm not sure there is a word. It's a cold, brisk (even painful) burst of wind to the face on the warmest, most wretchedly oppressive day of the year. That's how I actually do feel. For all of our words, we do not have one to express it." That may have been an unsatisfying answer, but it was a relief actually express it nonetheless.
Glenn
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 3218
Joined: Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:00 am

Re: Rough Waters

Postby Niabh » Mon May 21, 2018 8:23 am

She realized with mounting unease that it was becoming harder to follow the thread of the conversation. Even the semantic digression, which by now she should have recognized for what it was, set her a half-step back as she fumbled to determine if it was something he was doing deliberately or if she really had used the word incorrectly. She wanted to put a hand on his arm and stay him: Please, I need a moment.

Meanwhile her head throbbed, both from dull anger and from the stifling closeness, her temples seeming to bulge in time with the clip-clop of the horse’s shod hoofs upon the pavers. The air congealed into so much wet wool, and her swallowing swished so loudly in her own ears that she prayed he couldn’t hear it. Underneath the cloak, her bodice glued itself to her sticky ribcage and the hollows behind her knees turned into lakes. With as much humor as she could muster under the circumstances, she thought to herself that if this ride didn’t end soon, she’d be able to clear out a whole ballroom by airing her armpits. The honeyed aroma of ambergris wafted through the confines of the carriage in an effort to make things more bearable.

And so roughly half her energy was currently engaged in keeping her neck locked into place and her face perfectly smooth, betraying nothing. It left about a quarter to listen and a quarter to compose her own answers, and one needed well more than a quarter of one’s attention to keep pace with Glenn Burnie. She wasn’t going to last much longer.

A particularly cold, prim version of her own voice piped up in her head, thick with disdain: You were in far worse fettle than this when you escaped the High Court. You faced Herself when you were half-deranged with fever and didn’t so much as sway on your feet. You put yourself in front of a charging boar and shoved a pike through its neck, with everyone screaming at you not to. Are you going to let some sad, sallow sack of bones get the better of you? A mortal—and a man, of all things? All because you’re getting a wee bit queasy? Better to let the boar gore you while you still had some dignity.

His moment of unexpected, unfamiliar puzzlement was what stilled her, cutting through the haze of her roving, bitter thoughts. Her head snapped up in surprise, a frown slowly drawing over her features, as if she were as puzzled as he seemed. Leaning forward, she outstretched a finger and delicately stroked the shallow furrow between his brows. It was such a small gesture that she saw no reason to refrain, and such an overwhelming urge that she couldn’t. Perhaps touching things to acknowledge the truth of them was not such an unfathomable gesture for a creature who dealt in illusion.

Her hand withdrew, and she tapped the knuckle of that finger against her bottom lip. “That was a silly question. There is seldom any should with feelings. They are as they are.”

It was a timid gift, held out tentatively: that whatever his answer, it was neither wrong nor wholly incomprehensible.

Her eyes closed for a moment, gathering herself. “Glenn Elias Burnie, at this moment I am ill and in pain, and I’ve been sitting here debating whether or not I should tell you so that if I started behaving oddly, you would not think it was because of you. But I haven’t. Because I fear what you might do with it. I tried to explain the name to you in good faith, so that you would know that it was not a matter of trust or the lack of it, and you still used it against me. That isn’t right. That isn’t a thing one should fear of someone with whom one is meant to be friends. I did not tell you that to wring an apology from you. I told you so you would know the problem exists. It isn’t even that I stay my hand and you do not; that is not something I do because of some rule, or because you asked me to. I do it because I care enough not to wish you more harm.” Saying it aloud gave her a second wind. She managed to pull herself taller. If she was to play queen, she was going to be a queen with a straight spine. “You’ve said you have no care for whether I am queen, or fairy, or anything but myself, when ’tis plain that you do care. You care enough to turn it back on me whenever it suits you. It is a spiral between us. I stay my hand and you use it as leverage to push all the harder…but if we ever reach a point where I must push back, you’d be in pieces. Is that what you want? Is that why you keep—”

A thought like a fragile bone snapping in her ear cut her short. She bowed her aching head, pressed her fingertips to her temple, muttering, “Gods spare me self-destructive men.”
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
User avatar
Niabh
Member
 
Posts: 922
Joined: Fri Jul 24, 2015 4:40 pm

PreviousNext

Return to Other



Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

cron