She'll say, weeks later, that it was dreams which led her to this moment. She'll say that it was monkey-boys and memory-books and the whispering songs that mountains will sing. She'll swear that it was the complicated mind of a horse-shaped thing and an exchange that mirrored an Inquisitor's months-ago visit, stories for stories, a trade and a game and anything but playful. She'll say it was promised moonlight, that it was sunlit wildflowers and wolf-green eyes; that a desert's consuming warmth had led her back towards herself -
But these words she'll whisper, and only to certain ears.
It had kept her in the attic for hours. For all of a night and part of a day, she'd paced its confines: pretty slippers on floorboards worn smooth, pacing out the restless need of an unraveling mind. To feel is also to recognise, she'd written into her book and it had been nothing but necessary to end where she'd begun: in the dark attic space that was her first Myrken home, where her mind might steep in the half-remembered echoes of a life that was never, was always, her own.
Three girls had marked out their spaces here; three girls had hung blankets to delineate between My Room and Yours.
Frayed ribbons pinned to windowsills, to lend the grim attic a little colour. Old letters burned in candle-flame; to breathe here is to remember the scent of dying words.
And so much more. So much more than that.
When she emerged, it was because the moment spoke to her; perhaps she is yet a creature of intuition.
And when she descended the attic stairs, it was with eyes setting immediately upon one-half of what she knew she had to find.
Sometimes, just sometimes, the world provides.
"Gloria." There. By the barcounter. Hunched over her steaming something. "With me. Now."
With the hope that the girl will acquiesce, for otherwise her hands will have to seize her by the collar and drag. These are not reluctant hands. But they are hands which might not know how to stop, once it's begun, and there are things more important here than a moment's mindless brutality. There is the journey they're to take: this very brief march across a tavern's lawn, towards the shack at its rear.
She'd promised, after all.
And this has already taken far too long.