Rough Waters

[Glenn]

There was the touch.

There was the fact she was ill.

There was her hesitation in telling him.

There was his certainty on how he should feel.

There was her denial that such certainty even mattered.

There was her final conclusion, with all of its unfortunate weight.

He started to lurch forward underneath it all, a physical reaction to something else entirely. This was not a letter delivered by a raven. This was not a carefully controlled environment of his making. She may have been trapped with him, trapped with all of these people in this city, trapped in this carriage, trapped with her own sweat and saliva. He was trapped as well, with her, but with himself. There was nowhere to run and nothing to rush to. Semantics would not protect him now, not in the face of a slow, steady realization.

With some embarrassed physical effort, he sat up once in his seat once more. "I appreciate..." He stammered, even as his words caught up with the rest of him, losing their footing too. He stared at her. There was a certain clarity to his eyes, a sharpness, accentuated by the glamour glow. Before there had been a canniness, an animal alertness. This was different, softer, deeper. There was no well of energy flowing underneath. "You care for a man when you can only see his shadow, when you can but walk through the ruins of what once has been. Either you are a fool or a wonder. As is so often true in our conversations, you may well be both.

"Never were you more the fool then when you tried to divert my attention with a coin. There is nothing that a coin could purchase, even in this city, that is more diverting than you, and certainly nothing which would also be as engaging and meaningful." He had been collected, unflappable, cool and calm, even in his undeniably formal clothing. Now, though, he wiped at his brow, even as his eyes never left her. "Those latter qualities are important. You began as a diversion and the temptation remains, always, but you are not just that. My reticence began as fear, but now my fear is in not knowing what lays underneath anymore. What's left of me without the gamemanship and the struggle? I've no idea anymore how to engage the world if not that."

Even as he spoke, his mind began to churn anew, overriding mere feeling

She was ill. Why? Just the iron of the carriage? Was it the city itself?

He had been blind underground. Was it the same for her here?

It seemed like a sixth sense for them: their glamourie.

Did suitable parallels exist in nature but not here?

Without warning, he reached a hand out.

Instead of touching her, however, he banged upon the carriage wall twice. It came to a slow stop. Some of that manic force was possessing him. It couldn't stay quiet for long, not in the face of such stimuli, such questions. "Finn," his voice remained soft, however. There was a slight strain to it. He had been on the verge of ceding control in a relatively healthy way for her only to have an obsessive emotion rush into the gap. If he let go now, there was no saying what he might do or be. "Let's get out. Let's just get out. We'll be in the night and if the party is close, we'll go and if it's not, we'll do something else. Let's go out and we'll return my name so that there is no obligation between us, and then we'll just be out there in the night, the two of us."

[Niabh]

When he leaned forward, she leaned with him, an exaggerated bow that left her with her cheek almost resting on her knees and her head turned toward him as she tried to get a clear look at his face. Her expression was a mix of bewilderment and bland, callous curiosity. Certes there was a little uncertainty as to whether or not this was her fault, and if she needed to make good for it. She never should have touched his face; they were funny about their faces.

“Are you going to puke?” she asked, with an interest suggesting this was some colorful facet of human existence of which she had heard but never been privileged to witness. It wasn’t, of course; she had spent too much time lingering in seedy pubs for that. But for breaking down barriers and enforcing humility, vomiting was a close second to sex. Everyone was vulnerable when they vomited. “Please, if you are, do try to hold off until we’re outside. If I smell puke then I’m going to puke.”

In the back of her mind, she was more worried about weeping than puking. Puking was natural. Tears would send her into a blind panic.

Praise to the gods, he did neither. She eased herself back upright when he did, relieved but a bit disappointed. Her fingers kneaded the nape of her tight neck in hope of some relief. The cords felt like twisted rope.

“For all you talk, do you ever hear yourself? ‘Oh no, you have mistaken me for other than a brittle shattered husk of a man, how sad for you.’ Do you have any idea how insulting it is to say you care for someone and be told you’re a fool for it? In case you’ve forgotten, I have already cared for someone and been proved a fool for it.”

She thrust up her left hand with its two scarred nubs. Above them, her gaze fixed upon his, all stubbornness and self-assurance and a single bright hard mote of pure physical pain that she did not bother concealing: a tension in the brow, a tightness in the corners of her mouth that pulled the line of her lips a bit too thin. A crack in the edifice.

“Two fingers and a baby, my true name and two years of my life. That’s what my foolishness cost me last time. Unless you can do worse than that, I am not particularly concerned.” Her hand settled back into her lap, folding itself into a stunted fist. “I am neither a fool nor a wonder, and I am most certainly no man’s diversion. I am myself, and queen. If the queen sets value on you, you are in no position to contradict her.”

The corner of her mouth ticked downward into a fleeting frown, and her gaze shifted momentarily off him, like a relentless beating sun slipping behind a cloud. She hadn’t meant to talk about that. The right thing to say, the thing she truly wanted to say, unspooled itself at the tip of her tongue: You are not the only person who ever had to put your life back together. But sickness was a constant fluttering in her chest, begging for escape, and she felt there was no way to say it without shouting it at him. The very fact that she had to keep it down made her want to scream it all the louder: again, she was tamping herself down for his sake, to spare his feelings, and she could not but resent it. This relentless corner they had shoved themselves into.

Best not to think about shoving oneself into corners when one was already trapped in a box.

“I keep thinking there is a man beneath all those clever diversions and digressions, no matter how much you say otherwise. I keep catching glimpses of him here and there, in what you call your lapses. I got him to lob a book at me earlier; that was an interesting development. And I think he was the one who kept hauling me about by the arm in Myrken. But it’s all just you. You can’t be rid of him. And if you cannot be rid of him then you may as well put him to harness and make him work for you, rather than trying to bury him alive. You could be more. You could do so much more.” With a moist kiss, her sweaty hand uncurled from its fist. “I do not know if there’s anything left of you outside the games. Mayhap the game was all that was ever between us after all. I should be very interested to find out, though.”

This time, before she could stretch a hand to his face, he banged the side of the carriage. Her hand shot back like a snake shooting under a rock, and she drew in her knees and scooted out of range, hissing like a mink. The ring bounced off the carriage floor and snuffed itself like an overturned candle, leaving them in darkness and stillness at roughly the same moment. When she realized what he must have done, she instantly regretted the overreaction. Fortunately, it was not a regret that instantly boiled over into anger, the sort of thing that came from breaking face, but a much simpler one: a young lady who realizes she has just made a girlish spectacle over nothing.

She gave him a rueful, apologetic smile, eyes sliding away in embarrassment, and nodded, with a sigh of undisguised relief. The tremor in her voice might have been louder to her than to him. “I…would very much prefer to walk, good neighbor.”

[Glenn]

He did not puke. He did not cry. He swallowed it all down as he was so used to swallowing down everything (in truth, it rarely got anywhere near that point, but then she knew that by now).

She spoke, clearly and cleanly, and was that a hint of admiration in his eyes for someone who could be ill, who could be offended, and yet, who could still find it within herself to be imperious instead of simply impetuous, to say something as opposed to simply tantrum, to channel a natural sort of order instead of just an emotional chaos. Oh, he disagreed with her on all points, but no one could disagree with appreciation quite like he. That she did better in the moment than she did with days to craft a letter was interesting as well.

Unfortunately, this was not a time for interest. Nor was it a time to provide retort (not that she gave him such chance in the midst of her past recounting). It was one thing to read about it and another to see its aftereffects, both upon her hand and within her eyes (and their brief retreat). Perhaps this led to his mercy as much as anything else. Perhaps not.

She panicked again and he chose, once again, to dismiss it out of hand. The shift to darkness helped, or at least provided an excuse. He did not need to see her (or her regret, or her apology, or her embarrassment). He simply had to act. The two of them were in a tight space, but he was an athletic thing under those boring formal clothes. It was with a certain, almost impressive, deftness, that he maneuvered himself around the carriage, around her as well, and opened its door. He all but bounded out, only having to steady cramped legs for a moment before he offered her a hand to help her out. There was no looking about or getting his bearings. There were no calculations of where in the city they might be. There was no snatching of the falling ring to provide them light. He did not even adjust himself which, in and of itself, was a sign that he possessed more self-control in this moment than any man had ever before shown at the end of a carriage ride. Instead, he was singularly focused on her regal presence and its most-dignified escape into the night's air.

Physically, that was. He had delayed any notion of responding to her to halt the carriage and secure their egress. He had words of response. They had created pressure in his mind, and even as he reached out to her, they began to make their own, quite similar, escape. "I fear, Finn, that if I start, I may not stop. I fear that I will bypass normalcy. I could be more, yes. I was more. I was too much. I think you can understand that notion, being too much for your people, shattering everything you value in them with your intentions. If I start, I may not be able to stop again. I have a history of bypassing the purpose of my intentions to disastrous effect." Then, whether they were in the process of getting her out or if she had pushed past him entirely, whether he still had her hand, a dutiful courtier and his queen, whether she had quickly pulled it back, whether she had never given it to him in the first place, he would note with simple matter-of-factness. "My natural position is to contradict you; it is in such defiance that ever realize my value to you."

[Niabh]

If Glenn asked her to name five things she wanted most in this moment, getting out of this fucking carriage and giving back his fucking name would likely not be among them. Even near panic, she had priorities, though several of her priorities might of necessity involve one of the two: being back home by her mother’s fire with a cup of marrowbone broth would require getting out of this fucking carriage, for instance.

Before she could even half-rise, she had to collapse back into the seat and twist her knees aside as he somehow squeezed around the cumbersome cloud of petticoats and exited before her. For a moment his haste was so rude that she was baffled to the verge of being offended. Back home a man would never put himself ahead of a woman. She wondered if he’d done deliberately to reassert himself, or to escape her. Either seemed likely. He pulled himself back together swiftly enough, though—but then, he’d had practice. And he was pretty and graceful enough while doing it to provoke her bitter approval despite her jangled nerves and splitting head. Chomh mear le sionnach.

She accepted his hand for balance as she stepped down. Erring on the side of avoiding the stairs entirely, she overestimated the distance and felt herself tipping forward too fast as her foot touched ground. Quickly she let go his hand to keep from dragging him down with her if she fell and turned the stumble into a graceful pivot that did her head no favors but allowed her the dignity of getting her footing while almost seeming she’d done it on purpose, like a flourish or a showy dismount from a horse.

“Your natural position is with your head up your arse sidling sidelong like a crab,” she snapped. As she spoke, she fumbled impatiently with the cloak’s clasp. The wooden toggle kept twisting to balk her. “Lugh’us Danaan, can you not give a lady three heartbeats to…to pull herself together before you start back in being you?”

She gave the collar a vicious yank. The fastener clattered away and bounced into a gutter and the heavy cloak slid down her back and collapsed in a lump on the walk. She let out a gasp as if it had been strangling her and reeled a few steps to tip the back of her head against a whitewashed wall that was damp and sooty but blessedly cool. Her throat flashed as she sucked in long swallows of air, her bare shoulders glistered with sweat and—there really was no polite way of putting it—she was one deep breath from her tits tumbling out. Whatever force held her breasts aloft in the scarlet-and-gilt-beaded bodice could only have been composed of glamourie, as no corset-maker alive was capable of such architecture.

But even the sultry, befouled city air felt cool as silk after the confines of the carriage. The iron cable twisted around her temples began to loosen. When she finally opened her eyes again, she could see the sky above the looming upper ledges of the buildings. No stars, still the same unnatural haze, but the sky all the same. And the sea, the steady pulse of the sea, as distantly audible as her own blood in her chest.

“Have I not promised to help you with that part, to put a halt to you an you go too far? Did you forget? Do you think me incapable, or did you never believe me at all? At the very least, I have longevity on my side. You could come out of retirement fifty winters hence and I could still turn up out of nowhere to tweak your nose. Or send my daughters do it.” The best she could do for a smile was to pull up one corner of her lip, making her appear old, wise, tired. “It’s practically a curse: be held a friend of the Nialls and you’ll never be rid of us.”

Her head turned away, her gaze shifting thoughtfully to a shimmering puddle in the street. “Here is my problem with your usefulness: you spend six sentences explaining why you’re useless in every practical sense, then proclaim you do me service in exactly the ways I don’t need. You offer yourself and claim you are indispensable. There is power in that, and control, and badly do you need both those things. I have come to suspect you always have—long before Myrken, long before everything. If you have nothing to offer, that would mean all the power is mine.”

That was not quite the truth. The realization had come upon her suddenly, instinctively, in this moment. Only looking back could she see the seeds had been sown since the very beginning, perhaps even since the first letter. That desperate need to control: control the conversation, to always know the game three moves ahead so that nothing could be left to chance. And what was the Queen of Fairy but the ultimate seductive surrender of control?

She had to smile at the thought, if only to herself. Bodice aside, she hardly felt queenly or seductive, some beckoning creature out of mortal lore. She felt sticky and frustrated and on the verge of a bad hangover.

“You don’t seem to realize that I have been offering myself to you as well. Or perhaps you do, but can’t allow yourself to accept it.” She looked back up to him, sudden and intense, as if proposing a game. “Would it make it easier to accept, Glenn Elias Burnie, an it were a bargain? If it was something you felt you’d earned, or that you’d bought and paid to have? And then, if it all goes wrong…well, you won’t be the first mortal man who fell victim to a fairy bargain. We’re terribly tricky. It would not be your fault. Not this time. You get to hold on to your good intentions. And that’s what matters most, is it not?”

[Glenn]

It was perhaps a crime that someone who was so unbearably stuffy was also so graceful. He had worked at it. Footwork was everything. Footwork was the beginning; days upon days of it before he was allowed to do anything else. Footwork was the constant, no matter where he was, no matter who he had guiding his training, even himself. Now, it was more routine than anything else, but what was there to do in exile but to follow however many routines one could find?

She had let go of his hand. That was probably best for both of them, less awkward certainly than whatever had happened in Myrken. She certainly hadn’t given him any chance to kiss her ring or any such sign of respect. Granted, he had no idea that he had offended her yet again, so he hardly realized the need. Underground had been matriarchal, but there he would have been expected to leave first in order to help her out (and perhaps lay, face first, upon the ground) so her feet need not tread upon it. Her people’s sense of matriarchy was something different. There was a line between respect and outright supremacy.

To see her flustered was a refreshing thing. It was to see her as human (though of course not Human). It was how he saw her in his letters and not how he saw her at all. It was how he claimed to treat her and not what he claimed in the least. It was how he acted towards her and the complete opposite of that. It was somehow clearer in this moment, even as she so casually unleashed her power. Therefore, he did not jibe her about what she might turn him into. He didn't even note the contradiction: she seemed to want him to be more of himself, even though what she had here before her was obviously already more than she could handle. He’d regret not mentioning that bit shortly thereafter, but by then it was too late.

"Maybe I'll send people to pester you. We breed better than you do. I'm sure I'll have young people at my disposal in my old age." It was his only retort (for what would come next would be something else) and while it was three sentences when it should have been one, it was still uttered mostly for form's sake. He hadn't been so affected by the ride and he was less apt to resent this moment than she.

"Intent does matter, Finn. In this case, my intent in asking you to hold me in check was certainly not that you unleash me to the exact point of being satisfied with my company without bringing ruin to all I care about. No, I asked this because of your vested interest. It was a reasonable request because you hardly want me rushing about destroying all the things you value in my world and yours just so that I might achieve maddened ideals." They were awash in contradictions, both of them. "Of course, if I truly did ask it with your interest in mind, then maybe that suggestion is but the logical extension of my intent." He couldn't help but mention it, even though it damaged his argument. That, and perhaps nothing else, was a lapse. It was playfully enough said, but there was a hint of doubt wafting about the air around him.

She had shifted into mythology before his eyes, turning from frazzled passenger to a the queen of deals, hopes, and dreams, a veritable djinn holding the heartfelt wishes of humanity within her talons. That she was a sweaty mess didn't matter. He wasn't looking at that. His eyes were locked upon her own. That was all that mattered. Still, he let out a little groan. "As best I can tell, you're offering me what you want, trying to make it seem like it's what I want, and seeing if I might give up even more in return, all with a smile on my face and gratitude on my lips." He shook his head. "If I what I want is, in fact, what you want, then we should bypass all of the theatrics and just go ahead with it, leaving the bargain behind. That's the practical thing to do after all." Even taking a breath now would mean doom for one or both of them, so he continued on, showing, for once, the tiniest bit of strain at the point of his nostrils. "I'm not at all convinced that what you what is what I want. I think it's far more likely that what I want is what you want. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here." Despite that tiny bit of strain, it all came so naturally. He said all this, staring her in the eye, without flinching. Even his final exhale seemed genuine. If there were contradictions here, he darted between them with the same infuriating deftness that he used to escape the carriage.

Certainly, she had to have wanted this, knowing by now, how to energize him so? In pushing, she had brought him back to life, awoken him from the slumber of the ride and from the empathy (if not kindness) which had driven their egress. Burgeoning gentleness had given way to mania. Whatever she truly wanted in life may not have been here, but he was, and his gaze upon her churned with such all-too-mortal vigor.

[Niabh]

The streets still shimmered from the morning rain, phantoms of steam rising from the stone, and no breeze blew inland from the sea. A still night should have been sweltering, but the temperature was so perfectly balanced at blood-heat that it barely felt like anything at all. Late spring meant for long, languid evenings, the first crawling of denizens seeking their nightly revels. Nearby lanterns beckoned beside their doorways, windows aglow and waiting, unseen speakers murmuring from behind the closed doors. Yet for the moment, the street was theirs alone.

Her head gave a serpentine twist, and her full attention riveted upon him, as if his mania had summoned it into being. Her bottomless gaze met him in return, the brown eyes gone fully black. They did not blink. Her ears, having reappeared at some point or another, flicked back as if at a snapping twig, then rotated toward him as he spoke, their tips quivering like antennae. This…this was interesting. There was something to be had here, if she could but riddle it out. It hurt not to go near him, but if she did, she would never be able to keep her hands to herself; it would be like the sword-stick all over again, feeling it all over until she found the catch to it, the spot where she could twist. And that was bad. She still had the dim certainty that it would be bad, though she could not, in this moment, remember why.

The headache receded into a sick, slow tide of crushing pressure, then release, washing in and out. If not soothing, then it was hypnotic: she could bear down between waves and force herself to focus.

“Why I am here, Glenn Elias Burnie, is to give back your name.” Only the word name was spat out with enough rancor to echo off the corridor of stone walls and paved streets, a single pebble bouncing across a frozen river. The waiting carriage horses shook their heads at the sharpness, the jangling of their harness muffled and the occasional stamp of a hoof dampened as if wrapped in wool. “The trouble is that I don’t want to. Not at all. Not the least particle of wanting. It would be the right thing to do, and the kind thing to do, but I. Don’t. Want. To.”

The flat black unassailable gaze, coupled with her sweet, sharp smile and the cheerfulness in her tone told him everything he needed to know about the reasons why. They had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her insatiable greed for pretty trinkets.

“What you want is yet a mystery. You may have even just said, but I confess, I stopped paying attention to all that after the third or fourth time you said ‘want,’ so…” A wave of her hand beside her face dismissed it all as a petty trifle. “But for now, in order: I will give you back your name. We will to go to this very silly party and see if I can’t help you play your prank. And then…do you want to know my deepest, most secret intentions?”

The little smile curled wider, became feral, fiendish. Her head dipped slightly, and she lowered her voice to a throaty conspiratorial whisper that nevertheless carried clearly between them: “I wasn’t going to tell you, but you leave me no choice. You see, there was a ball back in Myrken, long before I ever knew you existed. Gloria came in masque as you. Sword-stick and all. And we danced. And she squeezed my stones to find out if I really had them. I was going to trick you, somehow, into dancing with me, as I should very much like to see how the original fares against the reproduction. I’ll not promise that you’ll get to squeeze my stones on the dance floor but get a few drinks in me and all’s fair.”

A poised, pregnant moment, shimmering dangerously with potentials. Any moment it might vanish: a door might slam, the wind might stir, a passerby might given them a hard nudge and growl at them to stop taking up the whole bloody walk.

“I have told you three times by my count that if I wanted anything of you…if I really, really wanted it…it would already be done, and it would be done a damned sight easier than by trying to reason with you. Ever so much easier—do you ever have that feeling?” Another of those quick, inquisitive birdlike tilts of the head shot a bolt of pain through the back of her eye. The lid twitched, but she managed to keep her gaze fixed on his, like a woman intent on staring down the sun. “I can’t imagine but that you do. It is very tedious convincing people to agree with what you think is best, and even then, one never quite feels they’re really agreeing; they’re only worn down enough by the argument that they go along just be rid of you, and that’s no good. Not when you want them to believe it. If reluctant acceptance is the best one can expect, one might as well impose one’s will from the start, will-they or never-so, and spare everyone a little time. I can take it, but then it is worth nothing. You see where you put me?”

She started toward him, face soft and beseeching. Both arms stretched toward him in an unnatural, supplicating posture with forearms pressed tight together from wrist to elbow. “See how you’ve bound my hands?”

A black vine spiked with delicate red-tipped thorns too tiny even to break skin sprouted from between her fingers and slowly twined around her wrists, creeping upward to the elbow like lace gloves. As she approached, the vines burst into fragrant flower, withered, shed their petals like snow. The soot on the wall was grey-green moss, silently spreading in a shaggy carpet to dig its sucking rhizoids between the bricks. The moss overtook an adjoining building. When it touched the windows their shutters exploded outward in a spray of nameless little creatures with chitinous wings and tiny childlike faces, chattering excitedly as they dispersed into the city; cloudy glass fractured soundlessly into webs, each with a plump yellow spider in its heart.

A sizzling sound emerged from the darkness at the end of the street, rising rapidly before shallow foam-fingered wavelets boiled up to fill and smooth the uneven gaps of the paving stones. The rivulets joined into a flat sheet of sea that rolled just shy of his toes before it withdrew, hissing as if cheated of a prize.

Above, a sky awash in a spill of stars.

Of course she was making it happen. Fairy glamour.

The truth be this: the city itself is false. Has always been false. Not merely false but so shoddy an illusion that one would have to be blind not to see through it immediately. A hundred times one sees the holes in its surface, the cracks where the joints did not quite meet flush, the sense of wrongness that compels one to correct something without knowing what need be corrected or where to begin correcting. This was what had been wrong all along, all along, so close to the surface that one could go mad with the frustration of how near it had been. She was merely wiping the dust from his eyes.

Of course it was true. She was making it happen.

The truth be this: you were wrong all along. Glamourie does not distort, but reveals.

How long did it last?

Centuries. A whole span of mortal years. The length of a languorous afternoon. The time it took a tall woman to take seven steps.

Arms bound, she spread her palms before him, all of one broad hand and most of another. In each of her hands lay a choice. The left hand, her dominant hand, the one with the iron scars she could never conceal, the truth. In the right, no less true, but the sort of truth that could call the sea into the streets of Razasan.

“So tell me what you want,” she said.

[Glenn]

He was eighteen when he encountered the Ashfiend in the woods of Silver Lake (though he was younger in mind). Only a few months later came the shared Chimera dream. Before and after was his fixation with Rhaena Olwak, their thoughts connected, their connection a drug. Then came a cursed ring, a severed hand and rapport, a year of mutilation and medicinal restoration, and more dreams as well. The outcome was victory and the consequence devastation. Then, Underdark and far more than a hand severed. An endless tapping. Catch's blood. Defiance of Kylerryth. Storytellers and Golben, finally Golben: months that were years in a horror his own making, tethered to the unliving husk of Audmathus (he, himself, possessed by nothing but pathetic wry regret). At the very end of it all, his mind was with hers; a third severing, a final one.

Exile. Quiet. Introspection, until Myrken and her glamour wrought with resentment and wrath.

Such fool letters at the apex of the circle and at it's nadir.

All of that had shaped him. All of that had led to this moment, had led to the he who was before her now. It meant that he did not fight nor did he run. As she unveiled her power, her intention, her wishes and wants, he endured. Perhaps no one could have done more or less than that. She spoke and the world changed. She moved and the world changed. She acted, and then, and only then, did the world change around him. He listened. He watched. Then, finally, he felt.

Had that been all? No, it hadn't. The order of it was wrong in his mind. Inversion. There was an inversion. It came with the sea? No, it came with the moss? With the insects? Her wonderful, bound hands? It had been there all along? He just hadn't seen it. That was the point. Now, he understood.

She spoke. He said nothing.

She stared, eyes themselves shifting, and spoke further. He responded. Had he been smiling? Coy? Had he been cross? Offended? Had he been both smiling and cross? The memory was not of the window shattering. It was not of the fall. It was only of the landing and the satisfaction of pain most effective. "My natural reflex," he began, decorating his words in some sort of science, "is to respond to such impulses with a headbutt to the nose." Is that what he said? Or had he feigned confusion instead, for as she expressed herself, it was simply his dancing that she'd wish to compare. Or had he asked her why she'd possibly keep them since they just got in the way while dancing (they were always in the way)? Severed hands. Was there something about severed hands? Had Gloria's hand been severed by that point? Isn't that an image, someone with a hand of wood grabbing... No, he hadn't said that at all. Surely the coy statement. That was his natural instinct (a headbutt).

She moved, hands coming together, and spoke further. He responded. There were no possibilities here. There was only one Glenn Elias Burnie and she had split open the very core of him. "Of course I see where I put you." Smug was not the word. Matter-of-fact? It took three words to make one to make Glenn. "I put you there after all, Finn. Only once. Do you believe that? I used drugs, patronage, hopes and wishes, even iron, yes, iron (though it was silver), but only once did I ever do it as you say and that was only because there was no other choice. She was mad. She was killing indiscriminately. So I did it. Because I had no choice." Surely he softened then. "Time is valuable to us like it is not to you. The time spent is the value. The road traveled. The growth. The acceptance." And then he would have finished it with that daring, half-mad, sparkle in his eye, of course, never more himself than in that infuriating moment. "Oh, Finn. When someone agrees with me, they really agree. They Believe."

She moved, the world moving with her, and spoke further.

What did he want more than anything else? She had guessed. With all she had learned, she had guessed. She had guessed what he wanted, what he thought he wanted, what he would admit that he wanted. She wasn't half-wrong either.

However, given the breadth of her own wanting, overcome by her own avarice, had she underestimated his capacity to be utterly insatiable as well?

Half of all that he wanted in this world was Truth. It became clear now, as his neck stayed locked, as his nose held in perfect alignment with hers, as his eyes darted wildly this way and that to take everything in, herself included, that the only real path to Truth, a Truth that he had missed for so long, was through her Glamourie. It revealed. Only it revealed. All of his books, all of his studying, all of his conversations and interviews, all of his questions? All of them provided but false information, for that information was not refracted through her lens.

It was what he was missing all along, through every consciousness shattering, surreal, twisted experience he had fought and striven to understand. She offered half of what he wanted, the Truth he had been forever missing, but only implied the other half. In the end, his mind may have been greedier than even the totality of her, but his heart was wounded and withered still. She offered half of what he wanted but only hinted at what he Truly needed, though they walked hand in hand.

Therefore, this half became all and half again still. He had been on the verge of asking for this anyway, a taste of it at least (taste was entirely the wrong word and completely against the point; he saw it as a new sense, and would experience it as such) and now, with this inversion, he went well over the line in entirely the other direction.

"You know what I want." Wildly darting eyes settled upon her as she concluded her brief and endless perambulation, the physical gap between them now very much bridged. There was nothing else to look at now, nothing. "I want it all. You offer so much, so much that I've been missing, but I need the rest as well. It pales. It crumbles under examination, but that's all the more reason to claim it, to possess it, to examine it, to tear it apart. They want it for a reason. They live it for a reason. That what you offer, be it so obviously true, is not sought after and accepted by them, means something." What a flight of fancy this? Had she not unveiled her glamourie, what might he be saying to her now? How sweet was this? How much sweeter would have been the admission if it had been its own opposite? If he felt this, mustn't he have felt that? "I cannot understand the truth you offer unless I understand their falseness as well. I want it all, Finn. All of it. Always."

[Niabh]

“Soothly? Do they Believe?” The notion gave her pause. Where she came from, such claims sometimes proved to be quite literal. She shied back a half-step, blinking twice in uneasy consternation, and kissed the side of her thumb to ward off ill fortune. Foolishness, really, of the sort that he might rightly decry as base superstition. Not to mention that mortals were already so eager that it was scarcely a challenge to make them Believe anything. She had half-hoped Glenn might be made of sterner stuff, and yet he was just as easy as any of them. Were she less self-assured in her ability, she might feel a touch disappointed at how effortlessly the hazelnut was finally cracked.

Forcing her chin upward, she gave a light, dismissive toss of her head. “’Tis fortunate then that I will never, ever, ever agree with a single word you say. Unless I agreed already.”

She shrugged. A generous shrug, it acquiesced to him. “Still. There have been some few times, with long stretches between, when I may have agreed with you. Conditionally. Just until something better came along. It is a talent of yours: spew out enough words and someone’s bound to agree with one or two of them. For example, I too believe that time is valuable. Too valuable to waste being frightened of one another. Too valuable to spend jostling one another for dominance. Every heartbeat you spend attempting to convince me I should not do that which we both already agreed I should not do is a moment I will not get to spend dancing. A pity.”

The whole street smelled like a tidal flat, salt and decaying greenery. Now delicate pastel crustaceans crept forth on dancer’s feet, assaying their new domain. The streetlamps had all gone out, and moonlight held wistful, watery dominion. Her own golden, flickering aura dimmed beneath it. “You never answered that question. The one about what they are meant to do afterwards. Will there be time for dancing when the world is safe?”

It was a child’s question: sincere and ridiculous, but filled with such yearning.

She turned a shoulder to him to regard the night garden in which they now stood. “As for falseness…that you will have to tell me. You are human; you know them far better than I do. All I know is that they adore falsehood. They take it whenever it’s offered.” She glanced back at him. “But then they get so angry. It is like…like what I said before, about how you only have room for one of everything. Only one sort of truth. If they see any other kind…then it must be a trick, do you understand? They say it is the deception, but I wonder if it isn’t disappointment. They hoped it was real. Or else they are like Tennant, so fearful and so swaddled in old scars they shrink away from even the hope because they might be hurt again. They are all so frightened here that there’s scarce even any satisfaction in frightening them further.” Her voice became strained and fervent; she wanted an answer.

“Like us here now. I knew when I began this that I would either have to keep you here forever or let you go and face your wrath. But it’s so rare since I came Here that I have the opportunity simply to be. Even more rare that I get to share it with anyone who might be the least bit appreciative. And the odd thing is…the moment I decided to show myself, you did too.” Her expression softened. “It’s as if we both wanted it but were too proud to be the one to admit it first. Or too afraid. And that’s silly. What need have we to fear each other now? It’s all just time wasted. Even now, it is hard to understand why we didn't just do this from the start. Why didn’t we?”

Because this world is iron and in the end they would find you out. Nothing here is worth the least particle of what you left behind. Keep yourself in check, little queen.

Usually that mantra had an instant chilling effect. For now it was all just words. Words words words, so many words between them when she could have just shown him from the start and he would have understood everything right away without so much bother. In a way, she was not even deceiving him. Glamourie was her truth. He would understand nothing until he understood that.

Stepping back toward him, she looked him over critically, her head cocked to one side. “Granted, ’tis pity you appear to have gone just a bit mad in the process but frankly, you mad is so much more spirited than you sober that I scarce have the heart to chide myself over a happy accident.”

[Glenn]

She seemed to have managed to quiet him, particularly frustrating for one who desperately wanted certain answers. Perhaps he was more prone to answer her directly now, given how Her world was swirling around him, but unfortunately for her, that was not the most pressing prone in the least.

His knees buckled. His body swirled along with the earth's new axis of rotation, not falling directly down but instead bending over forwards, much as he had in the carriage, only to arc backwards at the last moment, landing somehow gracefully wholly upon his back. He stared directly at her for a long moment, not quite close enough to have the luxury of looking up her dress. That moment gave way to another piece of action, whereas he cupped his hand into a small circle and looked through it, shutting his other eye, not that it helped steady things one bit.

She had her questions and he had his hand. It rubbed down against his face coalescing as but one finger, outstretched, over his lips. Air softly blew out making the sort of sound that no queen ever imagined hearing. "Shhhhh." Mania, madness was it? had given way to something else entirely. His shoulder pressed back into the sod (was that the word? No, that wasn't it at all; it was no longer surf either, but botany, much like languages, was a weak point, a terrible flaw for a mapmaker false), as if it was trying to make its own impression; like a cat rubbing up against a tree that now belonged to him, he was trying to mark the ground itself (the world itself?) as his territory. There was a level of comfort in this environment that was hardly natural at all.

No, it was learned.

"Let me enjoy the smell of it. It's been years, a trip to Ricathiar with Calomel. Did I tell you to ask him about tears?" There was a fond grunt of stretching as he shifted his sunken weight from one shoulder to the other. "He'd infuriate you. He's a dragon, you know, or has a dragon inside of him. That's a secret, so don't tell anyone. No one would believe you anyway. That's Cinnabar, like the spice. That's why you shouldn't let dragons forget themselves and name humans. Terrible idea. She's one too. I wrote her you know, but not about Catch's horn, even though she knows where it is." His hand, which had gone from eyeglass to shushing to falling limp beside him now ran idly through his hair, lingering at the nape of his neck, allowing him for yet another stretch. "The first time I saw the sea was when I was eleven. It was the third place I'd been. You should have heard the screams. I did. I ran. That's how I ended up in the fourth place."

He indulged with another long inhale, shutting his eyes and then opening them back up to stare at her once more. "Are you going to lay beside me or is that beneath you? There'll be time to dance." He sounded slightly more petulant than reassuring, dismissive almost. "Art. Both high and low. I'm not her. I'm not Rhaena at the end. I know the value in barn dances, like she did before. I know the value of a man with a fiddle and a bone to pick, maybe even a bone to pick the fiddle with. I know the value of great works as well, but they're all great if we make them with passion and if they reach people's hearts." Whatever disdain he had for bards, it did not seem to stretch this far. "Once we've freed ourselves from the confines of our oppression, we'll create and enjoy, and yes, Finn, Ellipsis, Dot, and Victoria, your Royal Highness, we'll dance. But if we just did it your way, or Rhaena's way, the song wouldn't be our own. It'd be your song. The world is better with your song," hand sprayed outwards from neck to sky and then back down to the ground, "and ours both."

Then his eyes rolled to the side, drawing his cheek along behind them. He nodded up and down slightly, rubbing his face into the ground itself. "Oh, what else did you even ask me, then?" He half muttered it into the ground before groaning and looking back up for her. "You talk almost as much as I do, but you don't enjoy it half as much. Why would you when you can see this and hear this and feel this instead? It's all I got though, Finn and I love it so. I can hear you right now, but you can't hear me, can you? I can feel you. Can you feel me? What can you do with me here, with my name? You've sang me your song, Finn? Here and now can you hear mine too?"

[Niabh]

When Glenn buckled, the woman let out a tiny, sharp gasp. The vines shrank and snapped, falling away from her arms as they instinctively reached out to catch him. Her first thought was that he had swooned; her second, much more serious fear, was that the shifting had been too much for him and he had doubled over dead. She had never heard of such a thing but Glenn Burnie would surely pride himself on being first, tha a’chead aige. But then he reversed course and wilted gracefully backwards, like a cut flower collapsing upon a dung heap. The gasp turned into a groan of exasperation.

Ladylike, she plucked up her skirts in her fingertips and moved around to his head, craning her neck to peer down at his face with sour disapproval on the off-chance he really might be in need of aid, or at least of a hand to haul him upright. One palm pressed to her cleavage to make sure her tits really didn’t tumble out at this indelicate moment. When he started pulling faces, she gave a thin snort of amusement and stuck out her tongue at him. Aye, he was fine—save for being a melodramatic madman, but even glamourie couldn’t cure that. If he was soothly comfortable as he seemed then nothing down here could harm him and he wouldn’t be able to find anything he might use to harm himself. That covered both her concerns, so she might as well leave him to it.

Leaving him to wallow and ramble, she floated like an errand blossom across what once had been a street to examine something interesting and pearlescent that appeared to be building a nest in what once had been a windowsill. That the tips of her ears rotated to catch the echo of his voice was the only sign she was still listening. They trembled a bit at the grunt, and she bothered glancing over one bare shoulder to make sure he was still mostly well.

In truth it was difficult to feign indifference. Beneath her silence ran a secret humming vein of pure pleasure, her heart pumping double-time; she had to bite the corner of her mouth to keep from constantly stealing little glances at him to see how he was getting on. In his own odd way, he seemed to be making the most of it. It buoyed her. Even outside the joy of a good prank well played was the joy of making, and it was simply no fun to make anything with no one around to see it. Glamourie was an extension of herself and she was shamelessly, childishly hungry for admiration, whatever form it took. Had he suggested the moon sprout a pair of violet eyes and cherry lips with which to blow kisses, she would have done it without a moment’s hesitation just to show him she could.

As it was, what he had asked for, and what she could give him, was time. Great swathes of time, during which the mud would never grow too chilly to be comfortable or his limbs too cramped, and the smell of the sea always fresh and clear and full of infinite subtlety for as long as it suited him to enjoy it. A vast, elongated now that never became wearisome until he grew weary with it.

Her lips pressed tight to keep from smirking as she turned and ambled back toward him.

“My gentleman—” and gracelessly she flopped down in the mud above his head. Her shining skirts mushroomed out as she landed, deflating slowly. She swatted them into submission, then arranged herself more comfortably, leaning on one hip with a hand propping up her weight and her legs tucked to one side. “—is a dragon on the outside. Once we were out drinking at the Dagger when a little girl-child called him a monster, then she tried to hide behind me because she didn’t know we’d come together. He laughed it off; he’s used to it. Whereas I snapped at her ‘that monster’s closer kin to you than I am, for he’s half-human and I’m none at all.’”

Still smiling to herself, she drew her finger in a long, lazy line down the oozy silt before decorating it with the Old Letters that spelled out her name. No sooner were they writ but they filled with water and melted away. “Inside he is human. Or at least he wants to be. He tries to be. He tries so much harder than some mother-born humans I’ve met. Oh, he’d be your very model an he could, Glenn Elias Burnie: reason, intellect, self-control, all those virtues you claim you would breed. And when he fails, he’s so…” She paused in her doodling to cast a quick, curious look down at Glenn, though she scarcely needed him to confirm it. “Shamed? I think that is the word. And it makes me angry. I don’t dare say it to him, because it would hurt him more, but I can’t help think…why would anyone such as he ever for more than three heartbeats together wish to be human?”

In slow, brutal strokes, she erased the last traces of her name with the side of her fist, then stared at the mud in the creases of her palm as if reading her own fortune before scrubbing out that fate against the blood-and-gild gown. “You all set such store on humanity, as if to be human were the highest thing anyone could aspire to be. It’s as if you have but one glam, and that is to turn everything else into some version of yourselves. It might start otherwise. But soon enough there would be but one song and no place for anyone who cannot dance the measure.”

Suddenly she glanced down, as if he surprised her by still being there—as if she had forgotten to whom she spoke. The proximity, as much as the man himself, was attractive, and the attraction was so perverse and repellant that it came back around to exciting again. Unconsciously her tongue teased along the roof of her mouth before she clamped down on the creeping arousal and thrust it away. “This is too cozy,” she announced bluntly. “I feel I should be weaving flowers in your hair.”

A poppy manifested between her fingers. She glanced thoughtfully between the flower, his temple, and back to the flower before finally flicking it away. “Nay. I’ll not. You’d bite off your own ear to be rid of it.”

Instead she lowered herself once more, stretching out full-length with her head propped on one fist so she could continue to keep an eye on him. “Glenn Elias Burnie,” she said, and her whole tone had changed; she was pensive, serious. “Why do you want this so much? Why always the name? What is it that you would have me know that you cannot just say? I do hear thee. Why can’t that be enough?”

[Glenn]

She took her good time in joining him, and even when she did, it came in two stages. By this point, he had more faith in his own body than he had in her and hers, and there was a moment where he thought his final fate might be to drown in her skirts. She managed to contain them in time, and went back on about her gentleman. He'd never given the man an iota of thought, despite her brandishing that word once or twice. Glenn Burnie had not blushed in many a year and he did not blush here with that (entirely monochromatic) dawning. "They're similar then. With him, it's surrender. Why does yours do it? To fit in? To make life here less painful? How do you possibly let him? Are you afraid you won't be as fond otherwise?" That was often Burnie's own shield against her threats. Given the current state of affairs, it was a somewhat flimsy one. "For him, it was surrender. Maybe an experiment, probably surrender. He's unaware of what he is. The inside made a fresh start for the outside." Then, even as he tried to arch his head back so that he could see her upside down, stubborn as ever and refusing to actually turn about. "I don't know." He started to spit at the distaste of those three particular words, but a sense of physics caught up to the rest of him, raising a red flag having to do with unfortunate trajectories and getting his own spit in his own eye; he defied the instinct. "Because it would be breaking faith to find out. It would be breaking his heart, you see? Not him, not me, not that." Even with all the time in the world, there was no more to spend on this, though.

"I think you're wrong." Now, those words? Those words were more enjoyable by far and he settled into a contented little smile as he uttered them. His eyes slipped shut and his left shoulder stretched upwards in an unnatural way. He almost forgot to continue, so satisfied with the sound of it. "Oh," for he had come up with something even better and more satisfactory. "Deep down, you suspect you are too, lest we wouldn't have these talks. Why, there'd be no point at all, Finn. The difference between before and now is that I'm trying to be better. Don't you see? It's not about stamping out all your music but instead about making us secure enough in our own that we're no longer afraid to listen. And," A finger darted up and over, blindly questing for her, utterly unwilling to settle on whether it ought to be a point, a prod, or a poke. "that's what we're going to do, you and I. It's all about music and dancing in the end. Only the nicest, sweetest metaphors for you, highness."

The flower would have been a suitable vengeance for that. It never came. Instead she shifted, and do mercifully let him think it was to dodge his probing, grateful, and accusatory finger. Her movement, and the accompaniment of words, certainly had impact. Her eye was upon him; his head finally turned so that his eye was upon her. Just one, an eye for an eye, his glance more of a stare and his stare resonate with her tone, pensive. "A deal, princess and queen. I'll tell you all, but then you will do something that I want, but only if it's something you want too," his head shifted this way and that, but with such tiny, tiny movements, as if the words to this compact, the perfect words, were all there before him and he just had to weave himself into them to create the most beautiful, valuable of tapestries for he and her, one that could be hung in the heart of any castle of any fairy story, "and I think you will want it, just not when I ask for it. You'd give it to me now. You'd give it to me later. So the only difference is that instead of responding to what I tell you, you'll give it to me then. Say yes and I'll answer your question and I'll tell you my want." The smile on his face was languid, pleased with himself in a way he rarely showed through so obvious a tell (though he had in so similar a way just a minute or so before), entirely honest, entirely genuine. It did not at all reach his eye.

[Niabh]

“You may be trying to be better,” she said dryly, “but there’s you and there’s all these other folk, and there are quite a few more of them than of you. You might convince me of your own intentions—might, because you spent too long warning me of them, too—but you’ll never get that pack of pigs to walk in a straight line, never. You’re not the first who’s tried.”

This time she glanced over, eyes narrowed, and snapped her teeth at his pointing fingertip with genuine viciousness, and with a sharp enough click that had she not fetched short on purpose, he would have been left with a lovely ring of toothmarks. The muck beneath him began to slither and hiss. “Don’t point at me.” For once, she sounded truly offended. “And do not presume tell a queen what she is and is not going to do.”

With a quick twist, she was lying on her belly, both elbows propped in the mud, fingers woven under her chin and a deep scowl on her face. “I didn’t just pop out of a bluebell this morning that I’ll agree to a blind bargain. That’s how princesses end up kissing toads. Tell me what I’m agreeing to first and we’ll see.” It was quite difficult to look stubborn and haughty lying in a mudflat while wearing a ballgown, but a fairy queen could carry it off. “I hate that. I hate when you act as if you hold all the cards when you obviously don’t. Pity’s sake, man, you’re trapped in a world of my devising, you’ll stay here as long as I want, and I have your name. I should be making you agree to ridiculous forfeits, not the other way around.” What should have sounded ominous came off as only petulant and exasperated, an older sister bowing to the whim of a sulky sibling who would not be pacified any other way.

She pressed her fingertips to her temples and cut her eyes toward him, but with a bit more humor than before. “And I don’t trust that look.”

[Glenn]

"I thought we were getting them to dance." It may have been petulance. It may have been actual miscommunication. She was bringing much more of an intensity to all of this than he seemed to be able to muster.

In fact, when she snapped him, both physically and verbally, he didn't have a retort, which may have been a completely new occurrence for them.

Then she was scowling at him, and that lazy smile turned into a sullen frown. "I said you'd like it. It'd be a good thing." There was no fight in him right now, which made it all the more impressive that he was so utterly (naturally) defiant still. Gone was that blathering on about her truth. That had been his mind temporarily overcome by what she was showing him. Here and now, he was acclimating, as humans were apt to do (and he more apt than most), though he was wholly within her world and his inhibitions remained somewhere else entirely.

"I'll tell you at the end, but you won't go along with it." Then, because nothing but true things were piling out of his mouth, he added. "The reason why I don't tell you now is because I think if I tell you, you'll rush to do it, my answer be damned. You're a greedy little thing, but then, so am I. That's the point. That's the problem."

She had come at him combatively before and he had withered and ignored her and just basked in her world. Now, she was there beside him, and he couldn't ignore it. Instead, he turned upon his side, shutting his eyes and allowing in, not that he had a choice, that all-encompassing center of the environment she had crafted. He inhaled and exhaled over a long moment. Then he scooted just a bit closer to, leaning his head clumsily towards her arm. It was an animal gesture, much like his stretching; he hadn't committed himself fully in the turn and thus was unable to press his forehead against her own, but it was an attempt at contact. "I'm lonely. That's half of it. I always had her voice in my head. This is a little like that," and perhaps why he had taken to it in so dramatic and intoxicating a way, not that mortals didn't usually take to it dramatically. "But it's not what you think and feel, but you think you think and think you feel. Maybe less of the latter. What you think you think because of what you feel? That sounds more right." He was struggling to maintain focus. These were the sort of words that he didn't admit to himself, let alone her. That was the point. "We lie to ourselves. All the time. She couldn't lie to me. I couldn't lie to her. I couldn't lie to myself with her. She couldn't lie to herself with me. You hear me. I hear you. It's not enough. It'll never be enough. I talk so much about how we are the ones that craft external truth, but we can only do that if we're secure with our own internal truth. I'm not." As always, the words, even these most difficult of ones, just poured naturally. The difference now was that he couldn't stop himself.

He had chastised a distant Calomel for surrender not long before, but here he was in the midst of it. These were words that require absolute surrender, not that she was making it particularly easy for him. "That's half of it." Did she let him lean, even a little, upon her? That was the nice thing about surrender. Once you did it, even the hard things became inevitable. "She understood. We could be here a hundred years and I might say this a hundred different ways because it's my heart and I'm not sure of it right now, Finn. One day it's one thing and the next day the next, never big changes, just little ones." That was all the deflection he could manage though. It was important, but it was also an attempt to stall, one that crumbled under the inevitability of his surrender. "I want you so, so selfishly, to understand me completely, every bit of it, because I can't forgive myself. Not judge. Forgive. I can't do it. I'll never have that right nor the means. But if you understood, you could. If I deserved it, you could." And if he didn't deserve it? Well, anyone could judge him. That wasn't the point at all.

He would try to pull away then, but there was no strength to him, no escape. If she put up even the least bit of resistance, he wouldn't get far. If she didn't, he'd settle only a few more inches away, propped up on his elbow, still mostly sideways, that untrustworthy look back upon her, now glassy and distant. All of those words had a cost. "As for what I'd ask," he'd ramble further if she let him, for without her bargained promise, there seemed little point. "it would be to see your home, not just see it, because seeing it is grass and trees and houses, but to feel it as you do, when you feel all of them." It was a distinction he wouldn't have even been able to voice just an hour before.

[Niabh]

After coming so close to panic before the carriage door was opened, that nerve was still raw. The glamourie, the blissful and limitless control of shaping her own environment, took the burn from it, but actually touching him, having that sick mortal heat and stench so near to her face, made her whole skin stiffen like boiled leather. The throbbing vein her brow ceased to throb and instead drew inward to a single bright nova of pain until she felt a moment of real fear that it might burst and blind her. Her breath sucked in sharply, and the very idea that she had had even a fleeting urge to fuck this man brought bile up her throat. Who could stand it? They were all of them sacks of rotten flesh, boils swollen with puss, walking tumors. Who could bear to touch anything that was already half-dead?

Lugh’us Danaan, who’s queen here anyway? You or that needle in your brainmeats? An you’re going to shit yellow in the middle of your own glam, you may as well get up and walk back to that cowbyre Myrken. Leave him to wallow. He’s tultharian. He’ll live. And if he doesn’t, they make new ones every day.

Ah gods. That voice was familiar. Her father. Even now speaking truth in the nastiest way possible. If she was starting to think like him then it was definitely time to pull herself together.

Her leathern skin seemed to crackle as pushed herself straighter, her spine stiff as a crone’s. “You know,” she said, voice trembling only a little beneath the warm imperiousness of the language, “I did write you that the only reason I was bothering to come all the way here to give back your name was because I had decided not to be a queen this once. I do wish you’d make up your mind whether that matters or not.”

Her fingers brushed through his dark hair and she gathered his head into the curve of her shoulder, same as she had done for her brother when he was little and weary, same as Meg had always done for her when she was little and weary. Her mouth turned down, partially from revulsion, part from resignation.

“You do a poorer job of lying to yourself than you suspect you do,” she said. “’Tis plain enough you’re lonely. A man doesn’t spend half a year writing to a lady who abuses him an he’s not lonely. Or vindictive. And you aren’t vindictive because I’ve taken pains not to give you anything to be vindictive about. Nothing serious, anyway—a handful of ash in an envelope every now and then because I thought it would fluster you. If you got truly angry and overreached, you’d look petty and you can’t stand looking petty; it’s beneath you.” She shrugged to herself, with all the cavalier resignation of a woman with no qualms about resorting to pettiness. “The only way to properly get back would be to stoop to my level, and for someone like you, that’s like chewing alum.”

She sighed and plopped her cheek against his crown for the scant comfort it gave her in return, while trying not to breathe through her nose. The needle-point was back to a bearable throbbing. “But in Myrken, that’s when I knew it for certain. I told you I was lonely and you couldn’t say a word. Oh, I think you actually did say things—when do you not?—but not a word that mattered after that. Not even farewell. You had this look on your face as if I’d spoken something unutterable. I’ve forgotten what that’s called again.” Her brow wrinkled thoughtfully. “Blashamy? It was…quite awful, actually. And I did wonder, afterwards, if it was that you envied me for being able to say it, or if you couldn’t believe such foolishness.” Her musing tone implied that for her, the event was already centuries past on the verge of fading over her vast horizon. “And it scarce takes a bard to see why a little child with no family might go from place to place until he found somewhere he belonged. How like a drink of cold water that must have felt once it was found. How he might come to feel he owed it better for taking him in. A good, safe place that no one would ever want to leave. Throw up walls and pound nails in the door so that no one could ever get out. Nor could anyone come in and take him away again. And then that one cold moment when it came to you that the one it needed protecting from was you.”

That last part filled up with truth as she spoke it, and all at once she wished she hadn’t said it. She even considered toying with time again, unraveling it, turning it back again, and speaking over the mistake so he would not remember hearing it. Her thumb found the well-worn groove of her collarbone and rubbed it up and down, pressing down on the hollowness that was always just beneath the layers of skin. She whispered, half to herself, “You quit the thing you love to spare it.”

She swallowed, felt the knot slide past her thumb, then quietly lowered her hand to her side. “And to lose the one who understands all that is…well. I near to said ‘not easy.’ But that is too easy to say.” She glanced down at the head on her shoulder and spoke with a touch of childish pride. “There, see? I do think about what you tell me betimes.”

As he pulled away, she let out a long, shivery breath of relief. Sympathy she could provide but snuggling was a bit unnerving. Her hand fell back to her lap and she kneaded the palm with her thumb to erase the bristly feel of his hair. Not quite repulsive. Just odd. A sad, eerie sensation, the way a pelt seemed sometimes while it was still warm enough to remind her that it had so recently been alive. His glassy-eyed gaze, the earlier rush of panic, only strengthened the impression that she was sitting here beside a corpse and had held a corpse's head to her shoulder. Her chin tucked down to her chest and she shuddered again. How much of this had she occasioned? How much of it was always there, barely dormant, seeking outlet? Would there be anything left if she let him out?

But she had brought him in. With glamourie, there was no way out but through.

Anyway, he'd all but asked for it.

Anyway, he had asked.

Telling someone about home was one thing. That she would talk about all day until someone shut her up. What he was asking for was something else again. A flat sullen look rose like a shield across her face, protectiveness and greed. Her chest felt hot and tight. No. That’s mine. You can’t have that. You’re not allowed to ask.

That was the instinct. She couldn’t help that. Beneath it was something softer. One could not have said all she had just said to him, and believed it true, without understanding why he might ask to see. Still, she turned her gaze down and sucked her lower lip between her teeth, hesitating long after she already knew what answer she would give.

The bottom lip escaped with a plop, and her head gave a quick twist as she glared down at him. “If I do this,” she said slowly, “you promise me. You won’t make fun. You won’t do that thing where you try to make it all sound stupid. I could make you promise.” A dark hint of threat. “But I want you to promise.”

[Glenn]

"I appreciate that you think. Thank you." He had not managed a response until the distance from her had been purchased. In general, if trapping him here accomplished nothing else, it ensured that she was able to get words in edgewise. She was dominating these conversations in a way that he would have never normally allowed. Was it surrender after all? Was it surrender instead of competition, or was Burnie simply free to experience the sensation of her, of the world around him, even if it was a world of her making, of his own heart's beat, instead of constantly trying to influence and nudge? If so, was that truly any different from surrender?

"The spirit's correct and that's what matters," or at least it was what mattered when one was not attempting to force and win battles of semantics instead of facing one's enormous debt and depth of emotion, when one was not capable of deflection. Still, the clarifications would come quickly and without rancor, soft and peaceful, matter-of-fact yet still full of wist; this was his life after all: "I'm a little vindictive against what you represent, queens and fairies both, yet still affectionate towards who you are, even accepting, Ellipsis, that part of who you is a royal and a sidhe. I can get back by rising above you, by the way. I have, at times. Spite can drive a man to be better. Bitter? Better." That practically cried out for a semantic argument, even an appropriate one, but he drove forward.

"I didn't go from place to place by choice. I was cursed. My own fairy story, the second chapter of my story as a whole. I ran away from the monastery. I took a fairy deal so as not to get caught, because adventure seemed like my fondest wish." Here, within the embrace of her world, he was an unreliable narrator. Although he was not holding back, he was still himself. Where did the figurative end and the literal begin? "I didn't run from the places, the places ran from me. Myrken was different. The eyes of its people were open. They knew where they were and they knew what was coming. Better to stay and fight and die with eyes open than hear the screams at my back again. We have so little life that it must be lived. To preserve it solely for the sake of its preservation is to insult every possibility."

He faltered. The hypocrisy of his statement threatened to strangle him, even here. The mud had previously roiled underneath her haughty, regal rage, but now he felt like it might swallow him whole because of the contradiction of his current existence. She had offered him a rope, though it was one covered with thorns, the thread of logic that could cut through it all. "I quit it to spare it, to spare them, but only after I failed them, only after I failed her. She would have understood but she was gone before she had the chance." He swallowed, and it would be in this specific moment that his gaze would begin to lose its focus. "That's a lie. In that last moment, she understood. I was there, in Golben, and it was so much like this. Audmathus, who I had never even met, with me, already dead and dust. Days for me but months in reality. I felt her die. I felt her decide to die. She was lost, so lost that there was nothing left to find. She'd been pieced together too many times. The ring. My madness. Catch's kiss. The Storyteller's magic. There was nothing left but moth-eaten, rotting lace and the twisted parody of ideals. She drew upon my strength and her own, and then..." Time froze for him as the opaque memory of his other half's murder became crystal-clear for the very first time. "Oh."

In that brief moment, there was a corpse laying before her. It just may not have been his corpse.

Then it was past them, and sparks began to ignite in the otherwise empty stare once more. "Thank you," he reiterated. "For thinking. It is appreciated. And for respecting my wishes, even without your word." Color was returning to him now, slight movement as well, but not the outright writhing into the glamour, just signs of life. "If you make me promise something," despite where he was, there was a hint of his usual impertinence again, perhaps the first since she had captured him so, "then you'll know in your heart it isn't true. Of course I promise. On my true name that is within your grasp anyway," because he did this as much for her as for him. To make mockery of it would be the utmost nadir of pettiness, which wasn't at all like spite in the least.