A neck was a neck. A child, if granted proper instruction and placement, could choke out a goliath — and Larrice played the former part quite well. Gloria, though inches taller than him, was back-bent against him, sinking into him, twisting her hips and bucking, but never quite finding a space for fair motion. Larrice's bicep tightened. Twig and twine though he was, he needed only apply a faint pressure from his other hand to the back of her bonnet. Her face swelled, distorted, and her eyes bulged. A long web of saliva dangled from her front lip. An elbow aimlessly snapped back, but caught nothing but wall.
Meanwhile, Aremeda's lizard-like neck twisted fitfully to one side, leather-rough skin bending across the bones set in her collar. She stared at the sickly captor with one bleak eye. Her teeth — they were each their own little square, well-shaped, the last vestiges of a beauty sacrificed to age — tightened into a rubbery smile. "Stole you," she said. "She steals things all the time — though often with my expressed permission. I shouldn't blink an eye to presume that one's foul business becomes another's fouler habit. To fall victim to it is a disappointment solely yours to bear. If you did not wish to be stolen, then you simply should not have been.
"Yet, here you are. In my home. Against your will," Follox reasoned, "and most certainly without my invitation."
In response to the Other Woman's formal gesture — as if they were present here to conduct some kind of appropriate bargain! — Follox scraped her foot across a crack in the floor and spit, a bloody dollop, in front of the table. Court gestures be damned, the crumbling Lady Follox did not concern herself with the niceties: she simply stared, unblinking, at the Other Woman. Examining. Rolling the purple strand of silk in regular circles around her knuckles, then unfurling it, and starting again.
Everything she did was slow. Everything she did took long, measured moments. That canvas face could stare for hours.
She'd time. Neither of them did.
Gloria, meanwhile, scraped at Larrice's forearm, beat at it, but the hand was losing its fortitude. The fists became slaps; the slaps became flaps. One of her trembling legs had already failed her. Those pulpy eyes and purpling lips mouthed a desperate morass of words, all of them unintelliglble: either a plea for help, help from the Other Woman, or consternation over the surge of betrayal caught like a boulder in her throat.
With a satisfied, lady-like care, Follox flattened her left palm, and draped the silk across it so that it pooled across her knuckles. A white thumb smoothed out the wrinkles. She smiled with pleasure at the flatness of the silk, but the smile vanished when she locked her gaze once more upon the captive woman's. And woman was but a title of address, in this case: though Follox did not concern herself too greatly with the non-Razasani, she neither found herself too beguiled by her guest's unique appearance, remarkable and noteworthy as it was.
"You look disheveled. As someone still shaking her sleep, I sympathize," Follox said. "I'm more than willing to let you depart at your will and put the day behind you, but there is a matter of wasted time to consider. Should I provide this kindness without price, I'd grant you a charity I've given no others. Rites are to be observed. My reputation, on the street and on the tongue, is something I loathe to sacrifice even at the behest of a moment's kind consideration."
She tapped a finger upon the fold of silk.
Behind Follox, the cadence of thundering footsteps echoed up from the guts of the home. Her Oster and Tibalt.
"I want one of your teeth. Just one, however you dignify the request," she said. "After that, you are free to go."