by Rance » Sun Feb 24, 2019 3:49 am
She rented a horse from the livery in Foggy Bottom, where they wondered at her trembling hand as she put shillings into the stablemaster's palm. A Jerno on a horse! Such unlikely circumstances, however, required unlikely solutions. The stable master gave her the briefest lesson on guidance and care, and on second thought, demanded further fees for insurance: it was likely, after all, that she would lose, kill, or injure Dead Scratch well before Westenford, and recouping the price of the saddle, tack, and beast itself would be a far less painful process with additional coin in his pocket.
In hiked skirts and loose trousers, the young woman uneasily made her way toward Westenford, having but one road to follow.
Two hours after her embarkment, she hitched in Collingford for a midday meal and apologized to the tavern-keeper for smelling like so much horse's shit, and asked if he would please tell her what road would carry her to Westenford. After he did, she ate stew, refreshed her wineskin, and took once more to her rented horse.
The good news: Dead Scratch did not hate her.
The bad news: she did not like Dead Scratch very much.
Westernford, even from a distance, possessed little remark ability. And it was this quaintness that charmed her and relieved her as she neared it. Crowned by afternoon fog and smelling of woodsmoke and cooked beef, the muddy town beckoned her. She entered it and stabled her patient creature, and parted with a few more shillings to feed him fine grain, bathe him well, and my God, do oil the saddle, wouldn't you—!
Brief nervous illness waylaid her in Westenford's commons, where Gloria rented a room at the local inn and settled her day of traveling nerves and terrors with good beer and smoke of a very curious nature. That night she paid handsomely to have water drawn and boiled in a basin for cleaning. She scrubbed the tarsweat from herself with a stone until her skin gleamed almost a fine red instead of its usual warm brown. That night, by candlelight, she spent three hours' time knotting her coarse hair into proper Jerno scalpknots, six of them, each the size of a blacksmith's fist.
She looked upon her face in clouded mirrorglass: a hawk-beak nose, a mouth set in a line, gray eyes more steel than gem; cheeks thick as ham sides, her brow an endless canyon of blemish-scars and old lines.
"You are greater," she told herself, "than you presume you are. And you are better than any other soul thinks you have any right to be, Gloria Wynsee."
She woke at dawn. Bonnetless, skirts snapping, boots shaming the mud beneath them, she made her way to Treadwell's manor, and on the door, knocked three times.