No Rest for the Noble-Hearted.

[Cinnabar]

"Well, whichever two instruments on their own are lacking. Pipe and drum alone can be enjoyable, I'll grant that. But they're so much more so when the band includes, say, a fiddle or - ah!" A fresh comparison, perhaps closer to the truth. "Very well - imagine a fiddle, but lacking half the strings, and so half the notes. Or with half the strings too too loose or too tight, so that they only scrape rather than sing, and the tune is mangled as a result."

More satisfied with that explanation, though it remains to be seen how the swordswoman would argue it. On the matter of fisticuffs he can only grin and shrug, that warning against trying to poison him with jenever having been clearly heard.

"And, well, perhaps embroidery isn't quite so similar to smithing - you said it relaxes, hm? Is that not enjoyable?" Curious, but this is a side-issue because there is the matter of Catch.

"Definitely best. You've had a taste of him, I imagine? Of what he might be?" That small pause, the space of words left unspoken. "Cam's opinion of him is exceedingly low, you understand."

[Carnath-Emory]

"The musician is mangled," she corrects, and quite direly. "Have you seen this happen? One moment the tight string scrapes, and then it snaps - " some violent little motion with her cup. "No, no; I yield before this horrifying explanation. What a gruesome thing you've brought to our light-hearted outing, Cinnabar Calomel. If it weren't for your questionable taste for liquors I would suspect you born of Dauntless stock after all."

Which, he might note, has not prevented her from draining down a fourth sip of that very liquor - and with lips that cannot quite restrain their grin then at all.

"Mm. Embroidery relaxes, yes. Like to a slow death, you see? It is a tedium. And all the same it demands close attention, else one is plucking needles from fingers. It is one stitch and then another, and another, and another yet; each moment the same as the one before it. No. It is not enjoyable. There are better ways to relax."

Perhaps this is one of them: this very unlikely stroll upon one of Myrken's dirt paths, defined by barrow-wheels and horse hooves, and even in the deep of winter not quite overgrown at all.

"Catch," she begins - after a period of companionable quiet; boot-soles on loose gravel, the faint calls of distant winter birds. "Catch took himself to Darkenhold some months ago, in search of a - " Words elude. As they often do, when the conversation's important and its topic is Catch. "A remedy for the Governor's ills."

Careful wording. Catch had said 'pies', the governor had said 'gutted'; a swordswoman who must mention it will do so only superficially.

"What he sought was to be found in our glasshouse. Amongst all the plants there, mn? We spoke for a time." A sidelong glance, towards a man who likely understands how remarkable such conversations can quickly become. "There came a - misunderstanding between us. His intentions were good, my ignorance was - vast. My clumsy words, mn?" Shooting him a wry smile she lifts the cup again only to discover it quite empty; it's laughter then after all.

"By the time that things had - calmed - it was a small wreckage; so many plants gone black with rot. It could have been far worse, if he'd wished it to be. So that I understand Cambree's low opinion, although I do not share it." Does this surprise? The glance she turns upon him is quiet and gauging. "I do not know what he might be. I do not know how to imagine it. He speaks things which have meaning to me, he understands things which I know and for which I have not words - and perhaps neither does he." So that it all comes out as maggots and worms and dirt -

"The Governor bade me ask you of him."

[Cinnabar]

"Ah. So needlework's more like toil." Understanding, then, how it is work of the sort that's not invigorating but draining, tiresome and dull.

She tells the story of Catch's visit, his search, and the damage left in the wake, and Cinnabar has to shake his head, a dismissal of her admission of fault.

"You're not to blame for it; he's... ha. You have a dish, or a plate, hm?" His hands describe a rough circle the size of a generous serving-platter, his voice adopting the tone of a teacher, a lecturer. "And you drop it. It smashes into ten thousand pieces. An attempt is made to repair it, to mend the pieces together again with clever glue and painstaking work." He mimes fitting fragments and shards together again, piece by piece.

"And yet forever after that plate is broken. Webbed with cracks - crazed." He has to grin at the aptness of that word, so often used as a metaphor, here in its original meaning but within a metaphor. "Some you can see, and so you are careful not to place weight upon them or they will break anew. Elsewhere, though, the pieces have been matched together with great cunning, or skill - that or they didn't break entirely, but were weakened - the beginnings of cracks. So that you grip the plate by a spot that looks sound, but it holds countless invisible breaks, and so crumbles. That is Catch."

A half-dozen paces on, he speaks again.

"But he's not a plate. Nor a man, nor a child, nor a dumb brute, nor an oracle." Many things he's not, many assumptions - mistaken assumptions, to his mind - as to how he might best be viewed, and thus treated.

"From what I've been told, he arrived a couple of years ago. A pale-haired stranger with no idea what he was, or who he was; no memories. Very strong, though, more than a man should be. Frighteningly so, to some. He has things - monsters, which he claims live inside his head." The young man's tone is level, matter-of-fact, but his gaze is intent upon the road ahead of them. "He's also very unstable - unpredictable, prone to fits and fancies, some harmless, some very much not. So, for some reason" At last a sidelong glance for the swordswoman, to see if she notes this small jest. "the Governor has asked me to help Catch.

"Or rather, to teach him how not to be dangerous."

[Carnath-Emory]

"It is. Mm. Perhaps you try it for yourself. Have your Cambree fetch some thread, some needle, just enough to begin with..." And it's words lost to laughter all over again, with a pointed little wiggle of her cup besides. How did all of the drinks end up in Calomel's bag? The proper order of things has somehow gone drastically awry.

"It sounds," she murmurs after a time - when laughter had given away to instruction, to a once-Constable's quiet explanations, "like a mosaic. But that is a more deliberate thing, mn? The tile must be broken so that its pieces may become parts of something new: a new pattern, a larger design. There is order to it, it is not - " a small, uncertain smile " - crazed." A smile because he'd smiled, and uncertain because what seemed like a joke doesn't actually appear to have a punchline. Hours from now she will repeat the phrase, bewildered, to an architect - who will find it all hilarious.

"If not man nor child nor brute," and clearly the woman shares those sentiments, "then what?" 'Unicorn', the Governor had said. But perhaps he had not said it to Calomel. And regardless, she means to be careful with this: while it would be possible to repeat the Governor's sparse description of what Catch is, of what Catch might become, the value of learning these things from Calomel lies not just in his knowledge of the matter but in the perspective from which he approaches it.

She has no intention of tainting that perspective with assumptions, and with too-pointed questions.

"Monsters," she murmurs after a time - a long time, as it happens. Long enough for the stronghold to retreat into the very far distance; long enough for the pace of their journey to work some warmth into their legs. Long enough to think properly on this: the things which she has seen, the things which she wants to say.

The things best avoided.

"Monsters in his head." A sidelong glance, at a man who must have known that she'd ask.

[Cinnabar]

"Mm, no. No, a mosaic is assembled from pieces, but those pieces were never a whole to start with. He's broken, and ill-mended. I don't know that it's within anyone's power to mend him fully. Lamai made an attempt but it went poorly - a patch, but all the more terrible when the patch failed." The matter of the masked ball, and the horror unleashed there.

"But monsters, yes. A Wolf that urges him to acts of destruction, and which he's been encouraged to resist. A fat man, a figure of great fear for him which has made his encounters with Treadwell... fraught." Fraught and on occasion violent.

"I'm not sure what he is. I've not seen his like before, nor has anyone else in Myrken, though there have been guesses made - that he is a unicorn, or that the myth of the unicorn is some distorted account of him. Not unthinkable, as the impression I get is that he is old." Older than anyone in Myrken Wood. Older than Myrken Wood. Older than civilisation itself.

"So: some maddened godling, some spirit of the wild places maybe." Calomel shrugs at that poetic turn, as good a guess as any. "Whatever the case, he's immensely powerful - he's spoken of pulling down the moon, or shaking the heavens until the stars fall, and in all honestly I can't entirely discount such ideas. I believe he has killed cities." His glance for the swordswoman is troubled, worried, and her silent call for another drink comes at a good time; he reaches for the cup and they can pause for a moment while he slops a generous measure into the vessel - for his own consumption, drained in a single mouthful, before tilting the bottle again and passing the cup to Ariane.

"He's powerful, so he draws attention. There are parties who seek to take him for their own - to bind him, or manipulate him, or wield him like a tool or a weapon." Anger, there, though held back; outrage at those who would make the attempt.

"All they need is to approach with a gentle voice and kind smile, because he's an innocent. Malice he returns in kind - and in great heapings - but for the most part he's a good soul. He seeks to please people, to make friends, to be loved and treated with kindness. No different from anyone else, hm?" Onwards again, restless strides along the road. When he next speaks it is a confidence shared, a sharp look to say that this is not to be repeated.

"Glenn wants Catch to be made harmless, by whatever means necessary. I want Catch to be happy. He can't help what he is, whatever he is, but what he is now is dangerous and I need a way to change that."

[Carnath-Emory]

Wolves. Mosaics. Broken things, half-mended things. To approach the question of Catch is to unfold a map of breathless detail and endless breadth; a conversation which might easily span hours. But hadn't she known that already? So that the onetime Governor's been invited upon an excursion of no fixed destination, a journey upon which they may tarry for exactly as long as it takes to explore this complicated creature who was once A Very Fine Catch -

"'Unicorn'," she echoes after a time. "The Governor suggested it to me. Not unlike Hrimfax, he said - save that Hrimfax is willingly horse-like; he wears that shape because it was asked of him by a voice which he loves." But this is a confession with raw edges; it was so long ago that the General returned to his distant holdings, and the passage of years has not quite silenced the dull ache of his absence. Her hand accepts the cup, glad of the distraction, glad of its warmth, and she drinks lightly of the wine until she can comfortably speak again.

"He told me some of it. The Butcher, the Wolf. That he was - made," and this is where the woman's vocabulary fails her; perhaps it is that, and perhaps it is only that the common tongue lacks the means to express what Catch had described, what Catch had -

"Brutally, mercilessly made. He explained, I think, because when this misunderstanding came between us, I saw - " The word falls away from the rest, amputated, leaving a space which she fills with a very necessary swallow from her cup. "I don't doubt that he could end cities. He might very easily have pulled Darkenhold down onto our heads. The Governor reckons him some god-thing, and I agree: he is Kylerryth, devoid of malice; he is eternities. He read the words which were written into me, he knew the iron in my blood before ever he saw it. He -

He is beautiful. And I would murder the ones who did this to him a hundred times over, had they not already perished so long ago."

Naked confession, raw with its love and its quiet, furious anger; the glance of her eyes admits that much. It is necessary to shake this off - with a twitch of the shoulders, a slow draw of breath, and afterwards the set of her mouth has become something like an apology.

"He is dangerous. Of course he is. Did you hear of that archer who plagued the 'Dagger's woods? What he did to her was - mm. Very bad. She survived more of it than I might have, I think; there is a thing which he speaks that my armour heeds. Or that it is afeared of," and this narrow shrug is only a testament to a woman's long ignorance of what flows in her very veins. "I think, if he dared, that the Governor might have him made useful - "

Dangerous ground.

"Tell me of the horn."

[Cinnabar]

He is beautiful. A sharp glance for the swordswoman at that uncharacteristic candour, that raw honesty, but he looks away again before it might risk becoming uncomfortable.

"He has malice - or at least, he has wrath. He has no restraint when angered, no control. He smashes and destroys until he is spent." Childish in his anger at times. At others... "Sometimes, though, I think he recalls himself - his old self. He remembers that he's ancient, and powerful, and people are so very frail. When he becomes cold and haughty, Ariane - when his eyes become wise - tread very carefully indeed. Or don't tread at all."

Calomel has seen this a bare handful of times, has noted that change. No longer the petulant anger of a child, but the imperious fury of a lord.

"They went into his head with glass knives. Not made, Ari - maimed." An answer to the matter of the horn, or the start of one. "From what I can gather, it was taken from him - carved from him, leaving him as he is now. Hence the scar, hm?" A touch of thumb to his brow, following the line of that ghastly cleft in Catch's skull.

"The thing's lost now, in any case. For a time its whereabouts was known - safe at the bottom of Silver Lake, fathoms-deep beneath poisoned waters, resting across the lips of a stone face. Glenn sent an agent down to look, in some sort of device - a barrel with a window, lowered on a winch." Imagine that voyage - the murky waters befouled with year upon year of murder and bloodshed and flux and worse; a stuffy little bottle of air, and the deadly waters of the lake pressing in from all sides. "The agent barely escaped with his life. Not long after, before an attempt could be made to recover it, the lake was drained - the whole thing, just acres of poisoned silt and stinking muck. The horn was gone, though the face was recovered. Either it was lost in the draining, buried beneath lakebed filth, or it was taken - and if the latter, the time between the lake's draining and the search for the horn was slight; the list of people who knew its whereabouts few." It might be possible to investigate it, to follow leads and interview suspects, but that's not the former Governor's role in this.

"For our purposes it's gone. Which is good, because it must never fall into Catch's hands. I can show you the why of it a little way along the road."

[Carnath-Emory]

The eyes fling a challenge; a chin's sudden sharp lift dares the man to make something of that very unlikely confession. But all of this is gone as swiftly as it arrived, chased by an apt description and a very unnecessary warning, and it's for the latter that she has some small, ironic grin.

"Oh, now that I've seen. And more than that; it woke that black in my skin, which he did not much like at all." And understatement; her glance confesses that, as well. "I find it strange - not that he sees the one as distinct from the other; of course he would, and he's right to. But that - for all that he's fond of the steel - he loathes the black so utterly. I wonder, sometimes, what he sees there in my skin that I cannot." A tightening of the lips; already, a shake of the head, and a wave of her cup's dismissing all of it. "There's no asking, of course. I wouldn't know the words for it, but more than that I think that the asking might itself discomfort him."

'Discomfort', she's said. And clearly meant 'alarm'.

"Things were taken. But also things were given - by his account of it. As if they filled his head with chaos and monsters and hurt. Tell me, what does this horn sum - "

But here she pauses, this woman who was once a mercenary and infrequently a soldier; who'd read unicorn written there upon a page in the Governor's own hand, and accepted the explanation half-digested and not much explored. What is a unicorn but a picture upon a page, a horse with something extra? Like a lion is a housecat grown large and murderous, and a griffon is a confusion of too many different pieces altogether, so that 'unicorn', wrote the one man, and 'horn', said the other, and until Calomel sketched the trail of that long-ago mutilation she'd made a soldier's assumption -

"It is the horn that was cut from his head?"

- and in the back of her thoughts had heard the music of that warhorn, a bellow like a summons fit to banish the Wolf into sullen silence and capture the stars back into Catch's wanting hands.

The voice is incredulous, the blink truly startled.

"Show me this, then. This Why. And tell me something of the look of this Face."

[Cinnabar]

"A reminder of past hurts, almost certainly, even if the resemblance is only superficial; that seems to be the most likely thing to distress him." Possibly some tattooed malefactor, such that Catch had learned to associate such marks with fear and hurt. On the matter of the horn, though, he nods.

"By his account of it, yes. I can't imagine the... specifics of it, how it was done." The former Governor can only shrug helplessly, knowing what little he does of the addled man's nature, of his capabilities. "Or even who, specifically, was responsible. But from what I've been told the horn is a thing - a tangible object, not merely some symbol or figurative way of naming a precious thing taken from him."

They're not too far from the Why, following the road north towards the Broken Dagger and Myrkentown as Calomel keeps an eye on the treeline. With the tavern not quite in sight he turns aside from the track and into the trees, waving a hand at a frayed and faded length of red yarn fastened about one of the trunks months ago. "We follow these." Markers tied to indicate a means of escape, leading the way from cataclysm to the relative safety of the road. He speaks on as they tramp through dead and crackling undergrowth and drifts of snow between the trees, from one loop of yarn to the next.

"The face was that of a woman - carved from white stone, marble or such. When first seen at the bottom of the lake her eyes were closed as if in sleep; on her later recovery the eyes were open; later still her mouth became a snarl and she wept blood. A good deal of it." A ghoulish detail, better suited to a ghost story told around campfires. "No one knows who she is, or was, or how she got to the bottom of the lake."

[Carnath-Emory]

From one fleck of crimson to the next, they travel - this unlikely pair, with their steel and their liquor and their very remarkable conversation. From one splash of red and then to the next, the swordswoman imagining not the lure of scattered breadcrumbs but the syncopated rhythm of clashing blades, each clash of steel against steel counting off the waning moments before a combatant meets his end -

"Perhaps they wrote such words into him as well," she murmurs after a time. A considerable time at that, for he has sobered her with his mention of past hurts; has left her wondering at things she'd never otherwise have asked. Oh, but if their years-long acquaintance has been marked by any one constant feature, it is surely that... "Different words, of course. Perhaps not a different They." It is a cautious sidelong glance; a caution not born of red markers and the imminence of violence. "I was never told their names. Certainly not their intentions," and it is telling that a woman ordinarily given to measured risks and rigid self-control had nevertheless surrendered herself so blindly to their hands; telling, so that this, too, is almost a confession, and it has left her with a glance cast about in search of some nameless distraction.

What her thoughts set upon is inevitable.

"These," a twitch of her hand towards one of these crimson warnings; the other hand has tugged the russet scarves a little higher about her chin, and it is certain that this creature of violence and symbolism has not failed to note the likeness. "These are to lead the way?

Or to warn away from it?"

[Cinnabar]

"Look to his hands, when you see him next. Scars, hm? In patterns." Faint and faded, a tracery of silver on skin scarcely less pale, but visible in a good light, and not the random crisscrossing of old wounds. Deliberate. "Though I'm not sure they were the work of those who opened his head. Altogether more measured, more careful. The difference between a woodcarver and a woodcutter, hm? But a long time ago, either way."

They tramp on through the woods, following the winter-faded loops of yarn from trunk to trunk, the brandy bottle passed back and forth between them. A more-or-less direct route, the next marker always visible from the one before.

"There's a very old tale - perhaps you know it, Ariane - of a king who had built a maze - a labyrinth, full of turns and twists and dead ends and blind alleys such that no one who entered it would ever find their way out again. Into this maze he put his monstrous son; every seven years, the seven boldest youths and seven loveliest maidens would be taken as tribute and cast into the maze, and the beast would hunt and devour them." A grim tale, but there's a sidelong grin in anticipation of some commentary on the nature of kings.

"At the third time of tribute a great hero vowed to slay the creature, and volunteered to be among those cast into the maze. On his arrival he fell in love with the mad king's daughter, who offered to help him on the condition that he take her with him when he left after slaughtering the beast. He agreed, so the king's daughter - the princess Ariadne - gave him a ball of string in order that he might find his way out of the darkness." Perhaps an excessive explanation, but one which passes the time as they walk. He nods for the next flash of red ahead of them, and the lighter air of a clearing beyond. String, leading the way out, which they now follow in reverse.

"I brought one of Glenn's people here - bookish sort, rather full of his own learning. And in case anything were to... occur, the strings were so he might find his way back to the road in a hurry."

Closer to the clearing, the trees are stripped of bark and splintered on the inward side of their trunks - bare, pale wood that grows increasingly ragged as they get nearer to the centre, the ground beneath their feet strewn with what looks like matchwood. At last a clearing, wider than it was before, encircled by uneven stumps - not neatly felled with an axe or saw but shredded, as if gnawed close to the ground by great blunt teeth. Inside the circle, twisted sticks that might once have been shrubs and undergrowth, the ground churned and uneven mud beneath the snow. What's left of a fallen trunk slumps near the middle, outlines softened like part-melted wax. A little changed since the last time he was here under the touch of ice and snow, but still clearly enough an unnatural desolation.

"Here we are."