by Niabh » Wed Feb 01, 2023 10:19 am
It was not, on the surface of things, an easy answer for the raven. He had to determine if Glenn was being rhetorical, for one. “I wouldn’t say yours is better?” he began hesitantly. “But you don’t go out of your way to be an asshole about it. You just don’t seem to notice how you come across sometimes. Most times,” he amended. “Also you don’t keep threatening to kill me so that makes you aces as far as I’m concerned.” He cut a sharp glare at the stranger, a quick savage twist of the head. “You’re not here for her. You’re here sizin’ him up.”
Mactire folded his hands and briefly pressed his lips tight, for patience. “I just admitted that. I believe I used those very words.”
“Yeah, but why are you sizin’ him up?”
Mactire sighed richly. “Because he did something interesting and I very rarely find myself interested.”
He paused to slither off the side of the bed, and to compose himself in an easy, thoughtful posture, his gaze now contemplating a cobweb in the corner.
“You poisoned yourself. Poisoned yourself.” As though he could not believe it; as though he were talking in an empty room. “At the Queen’s very feet. Far away enough that she would have no time to thwart you, but near enough that there would be that paralyzed moment when you could look into her eyes as she realized what was happening. Did she put out her arm too late? I bet she did. I wonder what provoked you to draw that golden arrow from your arsenal. The one act she could not ignore. It must have been something dire. Self-injury’s a trick you can only use once effectively; afterwards it only looks like histrionics. It looks like histrionics the first time as well, but that’s neither here nor there. You could have held off, kept that arrow in its quiver, saved it for when you really needed it. You could have stayed your hand from your lips at any time, pretended you’d yielded to supplication, and she would have granted you anything afterwards, out of sheer relief, but you didn’t need anything more than what she gives to anyone for free: her undivided attention.” He flapped the ends of his fingers in the way one might wave bye-bye to a small child. “Then off to nappy-nap for you, safe in the assurance that whether you woke or whether you didn’t, you could not be ignored.”
He spat on the floor in disgust, then ground his boot on the blob of spittle.
“Lugh’us Dannan, lad, have you met the Queen? She cares about everything; when she was a child she used to care that the poor dear sheep might be cold after they were sheared. That’s what you were up against. There’s no challenge there.” He flashed his triangular, sharp-cornered smile. “But sometimes it’s more fun when it’s easy, hm? Like fucking a virgin, they flop right onto their backs and spread their legs and don’t know what they’re missing. You gambled on a queen’s wrath, whether she would leave you to die or save your worthless life. You were counting on her compassion. You staked your life on it—and is it not the best when lives are on the line? That’s when you really feel alive. When you woke and knew you were still alive, did part of you smile for the joy of guessing right? There was a while there when we couldn’t stop suitors from stabbing themselves in front of her. One of them put it through his eye and quite spoiled the Lughnasdh feast. There’s some trauma for you: blood spurting two manslength out of a fool’s eyesocket and ruining all the stuffed quail. But those were boys. All they saw was her beauty. It took you to look deep and see more. A girl who could give you everything you crave, and that she would do it for as long as you required, perhaps even long enough to finally slake your gluttony, because now you had her attention. That,” he concluded, “makes you interesting. But it also makes your motives suspect.”
This man had poisoned himself before the Queen. He had come to the Queen’s Sionnach knowing only the name she had given him and that one fact. Those two things were all he needed to understand that this tultharian had exploited a vulnerability he had cultivated for his own purposes. The tultharian, thankfully, seemed on the verge of becoming aware of that. This didn’t strike him as the sort of man who could lie to himself. Endlessly justify, perhaps, but not lie. Now there was a choice: to communicate with the Queen, or not. He did not think, ultimately, that the tultharian would not try reaching out for her, but on his own terms, never Mactire’s. That Mactire had introduced the idea made the scheme his first. It shouldn’t be too much a trick for him to justify his way around that, but it would only ever be justification. His smile revolved lazily between them. “There, raven. Does that answer your question?”
The raven mumbled something that sounded like asshole, then raised his voice to be audible. “You’re pretty sick.”
“A shame. If a man hasn’t his health, he hasn’t anything.” He waved his hand beside his face again, absent and distracted. “But I didn’t mean to get into all that, really. Just a few thoughts, knocking about my head, keeping me awake at night. We were talking about the Queen.”
He began to slowly pace again, this time without any contrived effort for effect, merely to burn off some heat. He ambled with the slow, easy sway of a shark in shallow water, a shadow just under the surface. “The day that girl stabs me in the back will be the day I die a happy man, knowing that at last, we finally have Mabhe’s heir rather than Morgana’s daughter. If it takes a little trauma to jog her to that truth, I’ll traumatize her myself. I cannot die until I know for certain that she is capable of retaining her title without me. That girl has bound me to this wretched earth. She has not yet reached one hundred winters, but she will soon. Think of the time. Not those first hundred winters but all the seasons thereafter. She will grow, and she will change, and change again, and perhaps the woman we get will not resemble in any wise the girl we know. That is the trouble with children—do you have children?” He stopped, shock-still, and fixed a solicitous, inquiring look upon Glenn. “If you don’t, don’t start. They’re like balls of twine, you never come to the end of them. And young girls are like their own cataclysm, even when they're not Queens. In this span of years, they grow and change so quickly you can hear their bones crackle in the night. You can sow their minds with ideas, and if you are very skillful, the fruit might bear a passing resemblance to the seed. That is the best you can expect under the best of circumstances, and these have never been the best of circumstances. What concerns me now, in this moment, is that she appears to be changing into one of you.” He spat it out, a vile curse. “Not only in her mind or her way of looking at things, but in her person. She weeps. She rises from sleep and swears she has gone away to some other place, for days or for years, and she cannot tell if she is there yet or if she is here in the present. For a while she was drinking this…vile black liquid, boiling hot, gallons of it. Now Morgana fears that it has been poisoning her, blunting her glams, stifling her. She was stuck to it like a drunkard to a flask.”
Another heavy pause, then he added, “The bard is involved. Morgana is involved. For better or worse, I’m involved. And you want to be involved. Well, you think you still are involved; you're not. Why you should want to be involved is a bit of a mystery. There’s not a lot of opportunity to poison yourself twice, you know. You blew your shot. But do you know what she’s going to ask me when she finds out I’ve seen you?” He spread his fingers, eyes opening wide. “She’ll rant and rave and curse and clutch at her dagger, but then she’ll ask how you looked, and how you were, and if you seemed well, even though I’m sure Meg’s told her all that already. And in her ever-so-roundabout way, she’ll ask me if you asked about her. I wonder what I’ll say.”
He tipped his head to the side, much like the Queen, and bored his sharp-cornered smile into him in another wry acknowledgement of how awkward this all was. And it was awkward, both in the difficulties it presented and the implications it made on how the Queen had gotten to her current state. Deep down, on a visceral level he did not often admit, those implications were so grotesque as to evoke incest. On the level below that, they satisfied him. But the important part was that they were useful.
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.