by catch » Tue Oct 08, 2013 5:29 pm
<Dame> It is a house; it is a house like many of the other houses, a thatched-roof edifice with a long yard in the back where a dog -- a Pinbone, a bloodhound, a beast -- used to roam with canine authority. Now, its insides smell of old books and the windows are draped in every hue of yellow and red, giving an early autumn to the evening light puddling across the floor. Crisken de Lanz's office is now her office, a place where there are no books, but only paper; an inkwell without ink stands stately and proud on the side of a mahogany desk. Upstairs, on the second floor, the occasional book claps against the floor -- her husband, in all his fair love, purposefully dropping heavy tomes to annoy the office's newest resident. Dame de Lanz stands with hands folded and wrinkled fingers playing cadences against one another. "Vincentio," she said, tilting her round chin toward the squat boy who hung hunkered over a shattered rib. "Do check to see if our friend Mauris is coming up the lane with our friend from the--" It was a foul name she had coined, "--Shadow Militia is in sight. We will have tea as the Lady often has tea with her
<Dame> guests; I wish the fellow, if he has gotten one, to be treated with the utmost kindness." A pause. "I am not in the business of making bleed those with whom peace is a more suitable end."
<Son> What came with her fellow, her Mauris, is what they had come to expect, what boiled blood and set their shadowy will against them, against the Lady. The boy wore a heavy, shadow-patched coat, the leather bulging awkwardly over his large belly. The brim of his hat helped to cast his features into shadow, but what could be seen was a strong, pointed chin, the bottom curve of a full lip. Save for his stoutness, the boy was nothing remarkable, of middling height, in strong, hobnail boots; his hands, tucked into his pockets. His throat, silent. He hesitates at the door, hovering there, face tilted a little up to survey it, and then, turned in question towards Mauris. Looking for some sort of comfort, naturally, because his limbs quivered despite the slight chill in the air, the face was too pale.
<Dame> "Is in sight -- Needless! Needless oratory; too many words," she whispered to herself, tapping her fingers across her lips. She paced, her skirts scraping against the floorboards, her child-wrinkled sash hanging at a slant across her shapeless hips. When she heard the door creak open well after Vincentio's departure, she froze, a statue cast against the evening warmth of the red and gold draperies masking the window at the back of the room. The moment she saw the boy, led by Mauris' brutish hand, she said, "Mauris. Post near the door. This is not a place of threat. Our guest is very welcome." The words were hollow, too-practiced. The old woman was not pale in the way the escorted Militiaman was -- she had hidden all of her pallor and creases behind a root-powder base, but perhaps the cosmetics were enough to make her look carved, artificed. She surged forward, reaching out a hesitant hand for the fellow in the wide-brimmed hat, clicking her tongue. "There," she said. "There, now; I'll allow no violence here. Do come in. I am Civil Constable Dame de Lanz. Senior Civil Constable Dame de Lanz of the good graces of Lady Burnie. Would you like a seat?" She smiled, her lips tugged up into an wary invitation. Beside her, at the front of a desk, there was a simple wooden chair, many years old. "I do hope my boys did not rough you up too greatly."
<Son> The lad is shown in, unsteady, yet there is no mark of violence on him, no cringing. He hesitates as the Dame greets him, head canted, sensing, perhaps, the too-practice of her words, judging her sincerity. Probing for weakness from this Senior Civil Constable. Finally, his hand emerges; it is clad in leather, a small hand, and it takes de Lanz's in a limp-fingers shake. "Your house is lovely," he whispers; his voice is boyish, high. It is rough from screams, or some other wound. "I was roughed not-at-all, Mistress de Lanz." That voice is also full of culture; it is thick, melodious, pronunciation precise. It is very, very learned. "I will sit. I bear a great burden, and it has exhausted me, coming at your... summons." On wooden legs, he goes to the simple chair; he sits. His gloved hand comes up, and the floppy hat is removed. And it is no lad, but a girl, her hair chopped rudely short, the color of corn-husks, stray hair whisping into a deathly-pallor face. That face had been beautiful, but it was ravaged, now, her fine bones thrust through her skin, paper over a pretty frame. Dame de Lanz would know, then, the portliness of her belly, a belly not made fat by good eating, but by a child. "I am Janna Haytham," she croaks, and of de Lanz does not know the name, her boys would; a good name, a solid name. A name that is full of coin.
<Dame> "Dame, please. Titles what they are," she clarified, "I am not your better; I am no one's better." The words were a friction against all the things they had told her -- her ashplant often tried to inform her that she was, she was a clear cut above these broken and confused children, these black-clad boys. But what were colors; what were titles. A compliment to the house; she tittered, blushed underneath the powders, shook her head with so much excitement that a snow of chalk rained down from her silverspun hair. "Well. Well! I've given it over forty years, this house. Well-lived and well-loved, I often say. Kind of you to say. The walls are blushing, old bats that they are." But there was a hint of mischief in the sharp-chinned fellow's voice, as if a few notes had gone sour somewhere, or the sounds and intonations simply didn't connect. She was running her spindly fingertips across the dangling ribbons of her sash when the hat came free. Her first glance finds nothing remarkable. Her second one, however, comes with a choke, a breath. A younger girl sat before her now like she was the product of some manifest illusion. Dame thrust her chin forward, examining, and said, "Haytham," the name a spice on her lips. Haytham; Haytham. Strong family name, well-endowed, as inexorably linked with coin as copper itself. Her hip jutted against the desk and she bleated, "By the Faith, child -- your hair, your skin--" Clearing the throat, adherent to elderly honesty. Eyes lingered perhaps too long on the girth of the woman's midsection. "You are a sight; you are an awful-looking sight indeed. You are--" Oratory failed her; a book one floor above smacked against the floor. "You are one of them?"
<Son> "Titles mean nothing." That was a lesson harsh-learned. She had been a spoiled girl, the only girl among boys, the apple of her father's eye. Since she was a toddler, she had gotten away with anything she wished, and she had learned that fact early. She had been the bane of her brothers' existance, and learned proper the effects and lessons of being a girl, a woman, a rich man's wife. She was a treasure, until she had been taken, brutally taken; her eyes were the only color on her, bright and blue and blazing, a touch of madness upon them. Even now, she sat in that old, wooden chair, like a tarnished queen. When she laughs, it is a crow's laugh. "I was the only one willing to come, Dame. And I only came because I do not care if I die, before I birth this thing." Her gloved hand nestled on her belly; she means it harsh, but it is such a motherly gesture that she flings her hand away in disgust. "Why wouldn't I be? I am discarded, forgotten. Red and gold do not sit on me as well as it sits on you." Her eyes blaze upon those colors, her pale lips quiver. "It was at one of her parties, Dame, that I was taken, and She cared not at all."
<Dame> I was the only one willing to come. A twitch to her web-cornered lips. Her sunken eyes were old things, tarnished gems, perhaps speaking once of beauty -- but anymore, the Lady's colors were the only thing that offered her some semblance of beauty. Sometimes she dreamed of young girls' fingers in her hair, teasing it, twisting it, tugging against her scalp with equal parts pain to produce mature beauty. "You thought if you came here, you might die?" Her voice is hollow, the waddle of skin under her throat shaking -- she crouched, then, at the side of the chair, the doorknobs of her knees moaning beneath her dress, the hips grinding with almost audible strain. "Red and gold are only colors," she said. "The Lady's colors; black is only a color too. But it sits on you like a curse." Disdain rang in Janna's voice -- she could almost taste the sour foulness, the palpable ruin. Talk of a party, a ball -- a masquerade! Her eyes glittered, gleamed, hoped she might one day still see one outside of what she'd experienced at Darkenhold. "This thing," she whispered, tilting her chin. Janna Haytham was the elder between the two; Janna Haytham was a broken girl, and Dame suddenly felt the spry of sunlight and youth in her body. A chimeset of pale fingers reached out, very carefully, to stroke at the girl's hands. "Did she know," asked the old woman, her voice faltering. "Did she know something untoward happened to you?" Filth -- there should be no filth, not here, but this was not a filth that could be scrubbed or scraped away like dead skin; this was not a filth chosen, as so many of the Myrken Wood wretches willingly wore mud and silt.
<Son> "Of course," the girl says, and she does not pull her hands away. Dame was such a girl, such a fluttering, useless thing, and Janna looked at her, as any bitter, old woman, tired, weighted with years, would look upon her. She wished the woman, Glour'eya, was here; her secret friend, her secret letters. They had stopped, after one hastily-written about the Governor; it spurred Janna into action, into stealing away from the grim, dour mansion, slipping silver shears into her hair. Tearing out everything she was. "She knows all, doesn't she? She sees all. The Lady looks into the minds of men, and she sees the secret of their hearts!" Her rough voice dripped with sarcasm, sour honey, the sheen of sweat on her face joined by moistness in her eyes. Dame de Lanz held her hand, a hand near that bulging belly, and she will feel the pulse within; the throb of something wriggling into better position, a silent, sleeping babe that knew nothing of itself or origins. "What did you wish to discuss, Dame," Janna will say, after that moment of silence, that discomfort of the thing twisting inside her, leaving her - for a moment - breathless. "If you wish to know why we beat the Lady's men to bloody pulps, well. There are far, far too many answers for me to describe to you."
<Dame> "No," she whispered, bending beneath the younger girl's gaze, as if she could feel the holes being bored through her by the murderous eyes of this black-garbed woman, this shard of a girl. "No, she does not know all; she does not see all. What eyes she hasn't for herself, we provide. She promises us a better future. Have you lived long enough to see what comes of this place, Janna?" Her palm shifted; daringly, it rested against the warm bulge beneath the other girl's clothes, cupping there with the warmth that its own mother's hands seemed hesitant to provide. "Every year, a new threat. Every season, a new danger. Men and women murdered in the streets by dangerous beasts, nightmares crawling from the shadows to consume our children. I don't want that anymore, Janna Haytham. Not for me, not for you -- not for the child inside of you." There was a haze in her eyes, a blanket over her gaze, a glass thickened over her by hopes, dreams for a better and more proper future. The ashplant guaranteed it; her red and gold did as well. "I don't care for answers now, Janna. I'm an old woman. How many years do you think I've left
<Dame> in this old body? Five? Ten? All I cared for was to extend a peace. The Lady's eyes may be sometimes blind; sometimes, she may not see things at a level as low as mine. I see blood," she whispered, "and it makes me sick; I follow her edicts because I know the future is bright, but the present? The present is bleak; the present is dour." She rose, but her hand never fled away from the girl's bulging stomach. "She would have him hung, this monster. Or burned. Do not let the Shadow Militia lie to you -- this, she would not stand for."
<Son> She dares. She touches. Her star-studded eyes burn with a passion entirely different from Janna's. Perhaps this is why the girl decided to come; woman to woman, they could speak plainly, this old woman could dare, placing her hands, her comfort, on a child that Janna was unsure if it was undeserving of either. Janna bends her head forward, in a bow, as if thinking of these words, these shining words. "Did you know," she begins, softly. "There was a man named Rollo Lombard. A good man, well-liked, skilled. He had a good meal, one day, and he belched his contentment." Her head lifted, and her eyes blazed all the more in their hate. "Did you know, the very next day he began working for the Fellowship? He began to worship at the Lady's altar? For a belch, Sera. A simple belch, and everything he was was taken." Her chin lifts, then, and for a moment, her anger givs her vitality, a shade of the beauty that she once was, that was broken, but now burned with purpose. Her gloved hands grip Dame de Lanz' daring arm, gripped it tight, her fingers surprisingly strong as they grated tendon together. "The Lady interfered for a belch, Sera, yet I screamed, and screamed, at her foul party, her Ball, and none came for me but three drunk constables - constables - long after I was bleeding and weeping, long after the Lady lifted her skirts and went home, laughing with her maidens!" Maidens, of which I had once hoped to be. "You poor, old fool," Janna says, and there is a little sympathy, there. "She doesn't care about you, or me, or your boys. She doesn't care about Myrkenwood. She'll let it be raped, by you and your kind, but we will stop it. This is something I can stop." For a moment, there is something in Janna's eyes - her mad, mad eyes - that mirrored something like a Lunatik's, wooden bowl held high.
<Dame> "And how," Dame asked, her wrist aching beneath the vicegrip of Janna's grip. She drew back her chin, peering over her hawkish nose -- Janna watched with pity, and she watched Janna with the same. Curls of gray danced along her sallow cheeks, sometimes brushing away the dark powder dashed along her dry skin. "You will stop it by inciting further violence? I've a husband; I would have children, could my body produce them, and I would stand here the same wishing light for their futures. I do what I must, Janna. Whatever is within my meek power; I relish none of it, but when my bones are in the ground, I want it to be fine ground; I want it to be healthy ground, where proud feet can tread. And if this is how I can achieve that--" She teased up a corner of her skirt to show off the golden twists running all throughout the red fabric, "--then I will. I am good at this, Janna, the way I've never been at anything." She had nothing, she had little against this, the hollow eyes and firm words of this too-young girl-child bulging in this chair in front of her. She knew it -- and on some level, beneath those wrinkles and the bobbed tresses, she understood Janna Haytham's distress. Empathy. Connection. Disdain. Fear. "Look into my eyes," she said softly, "and tell me my kind is different than yours. I was born here, as were you." Rollo Lombard. She said nothing of him, but the name clung like an oil to the contours of her mind -- everything he was was taken. The old woman drew her hand away from Janna's stomach, back to her own skirts. "No matter where it came from, or whose mistakes led to its conception, that child in your belly deserves your love. If you deny it what it could not choose, then speak nothing of care to me."
<Son> She took her hand back, and Janna let it slip between her fingers. "You know nothing of what you speak," Janna says. "You began this violence. You and your Civil Constables, you set your staves against our spines, you beat out our lives. Tell me, Dame. Tell me how it aids Myrkenwood when a cheerful greeting is deemed not enough by men she has spurned, who use that as an excuse to beat her so that no man would look at her again? Tell me, what is to be gained by murdering the poor, the men who labor in the dust for your food, the unfortunates who cannot afford your gold cloth and your fine, red silks? And do not tell me," she says, with a harsh, terrible laugh, "Do not tell me that such is offered to anyone. Because it is not, Dame de Lanz, and you know it is a lie. There were some who volunteered to do the Lady's work, and she would not have them, because their hair had not the right curl, because they could not afford a hat." She wants to spit, an awful habit that she has picked up, and she does not care. "Let me tell you what is in store for this child. Was in store." Her husky voice is terrible, bleak. "It was to be thrown into the fire, before ever I looked at it. My father and my mother planned this for me. That was the future of my child, Dame de Lanz, and it will have no future at all, because now I haven't the money to raise it the way your Lady wishes. It's future, and mine, is to lay bloody and beaten under your clubs."
<Dame> The words struck her like a gnarled ashplant. They could have scraped holes into her thin cheeks had they been tangible enough. Her bones ached with their vibrations. She turned her cheek away -- her hand shook with ancient palsy as the mouth of a tin kettle tapped against a porcelain mug, chiming a clattering song underneath Janna's drawling criticisms. She thought to say Speak no ill of the Lady or Speak no ill of her people, but only earlier in the day had she seen one of her own boys dash a child against a wall -- a child. Two days prior, she'd scrubbed the red off her ashplant root and couldn't bear to use it as the cane it was meant to be. The old woman's eyes clenched into slits, closing, their lids almost transparent despite the old channels beneath. "You think," she whispered, even as the amber tea splashed over the lip of the cup and spattered like blood to the wooden veins of the desktop, "that I don't recognize the contradictions, Janna? Call me what you will, but a fool, rarely, and blind, never. Take careful measure, child, of how you speak to me in my home, as I would take of myself if I spoke of you in your family's." Nothing was added to the tea, no sugars, no creams. She lofted the cup in fingers scalded by its edge to offer the ring of its handle to the woman. "I am my Lady's subject. You are your Militia's. This will not change. We are opposites. We are enemies, if you like saying it like that." Her eyes begged the girl to take the tea; this was a kindness she provided in her home, an invitation that she hoped might crawl back toward the lines of the Shadow and take root under their black-garbed skin. "If you choose not to trust in my Lady, Janna, then I'll not try to dissuade you. But if not in her, then in me." Her age-swollen chin dipped down toward the bulge. Crisken, she knew, would snarl at her; the old man would have none of it, and the imaginary cuff of her wedding band still burned its absence upon her finger. "There is room always in my home for an infant. For the child it will grow into," Dame de Lanz whispered.
<Son> She was full of herself, full of her lofty ideals, all the pain and the rage wadded into her heart, turning it to ice, and her spine to stone. Maternity pulled at her heart; hatred burned, simultaneously. She would be lying, saying that she left only because she overheard their plans for a child she did not want. One minute, she loved it; one minute, she hated it, and tried again to take the draught that the Midwife had given her. It never worked. It did no good. But it had been a reason, part of it, and Glour'eya's letter had been the catalyst. She had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, until she saw the girl being beaten, until the Militia had emerged, from their shadows, and it all became crystal and clear. She had only just avoided the civil constables; now, now, they would never touch her. But she had the sense to be shamed, her cheeks flushing scarlet, the mad pride in her eyes dimming. She had been raised properly. "I could say that I was sorry," she rasps. She takes the cup, holding it proper, for a week or so of hard living could not dispel a lifetime of lessons. "I am bold. I am suffering. I shan't apologize for that, or that my fellows lash out, now, after being squeezed and beaten for so long. If not in body, then in mind. She cared enough to rewrite a man who belched, Dame de Lanz; she did not care enough to stop what became of me, and she did not care to take it away afterwards. Either she was blind, which is disaster, or she truly, truly did not care - which would you prefer? How could you answer, to satisfy the men who must provide, who cannot under the Lady's laws?" She sips the tea, carefully. She straightens, as much as she is able, her throat less passionate, more business-like. "Our wants are simple. The Civil Constabulary are not to cross into these sections -" And she rattles them off. "In return, they will not be harassed. And when the announcement comes, you and yours must remain in your homes, Dame de Lanz. We do not want you hurt. Stay in your houses, and pray that the Marshall can soothe tempers. This is what I came to tell you; now, you tell me what you wish to tell us."
<Dame> They could have been proper ladies drinking tea; this could have been her daughter, for all the difference in age between them. They could be rocking in crescent-bottomed chairs and laughing about the poorly-shepherded lambs down the avenue. But now, Dame de Lanz had none of that in mind. Her brain was a blackened slate totally stripped of its chalk. The girl rattled her with her knowledge -- how could her mind contain those names, those squares of town, that much conviction! -- but Dame had the desk to lean against, and lean she did as if it were merely a piece of furniture constructed for that purpose alone. The warning was clear, and never in her meager training as Civil Constable was she informed she would be the herald of such news. When the announcement comes, Janna said, the phrase dancing like the lowest note of a dirge against the curves of her ears. "My boys will be safe. Vincentio, Mauris, Killian, and--" their names, what were their names, "--the other two. Should there be some disturbance, I will do my best to keep them safe. They're stupid, Janna. Their mothers are whores and their fathers are mindless cuckolds or drunkards. They have nothing except what I tell them, what the Lady tells them." She smoothed out the front of her dress, fingers catching across the wrinkles of her sash. Her brooch shone against the meager light, for now there were but candles bringing a glow to the room -- the sun had long-since fallen to its rest, and night hung its dark curtains outside of her quaint, hollow home. "They're the only ones I've power over. I am an old woman, Janna." She glanced down at her palms. It was said that there were tellers of fortunes in the hills, crones that could find futures in the lines of skin. Were her lines gone; had they ever been there at all? "If this announcement comes, you will come here -- if not for you, then for the infant you carry. Make this assurance to me," said Dame, "for regardless of our loyalties, we may guarantee one hopeful future." She reached for the mug of tea and then offered Janna's hat to her. "Mauris," called Dame. "Our guest is ready to leave. Show him your kindness. Leave your club, and uphold none of our Lady's laws in his presence. The return will be peaceful."
<Son> This was unexpected. Dame de Lanz's kindness was unexpected, almost overwhelming. It wavered her conviction. She had expected what she had seen; an empty-headed fluff, an old woman clinging desperately to her power. Blind, foolish, easily rattled. The last part was true, perhaps. But, maybe - "You wear too much make-up, Dame," Janna says, softly. She finishes her tea, drained to the dregs, and sets the cup upon the spider-webbed desk, dusky with age. "A little paint goes very far, and I think you would look prettier - younger - if you did not cake it on so thickly." It makes you look like an old bat, a fool. You may be the one, but not the other. Janna puts on her hat, adjusts it. "I'm not to be part of that," she rasps. "I'm like you, perhaps. Directing. I could do that here, as well as anywhere." The Dame calls to her boy, and Janna struggles to her feet, her body unwieldy, her ankles beginning to swell from the extra weight, for she had been a small girl, and the babe was already promising to be big. "Yet, your boys have advantage over goodly men and women. Your boys have power. Teach them better, Dame. Teach them your kindness, before it's too late." It may yet be already. Her stare was inscrutable, her mad, blue eyes hidden by the brim, but it is there. "Keep them out, and they - you - will not be harmed. You have the Marshall's word." Then, she said nothing, for Mauris may be there; she became, once more, the young, taciturn, fat-bellied boy, ready enough to be led away.
<Dame> And perhaps this was the advantage, beyond what Dame de Lanz would have ever known, of never having caught the Lady's eye: she was a monarch in makeshift gold and red -- she wore the sash of a Civil Constable, but nothing more. Her mind was her own, her frail and disproportionate body as well. "My lovely house," she said after Janna, "is mine. Not my Lady's, not your Militia's. I am its matriarch, and my husband -- old, book-mildewed coot he is -- is its patriarch. And you are my welcome guest, child, whenever you wish to be. You and yours." Before the girl left, widened with child as she was, the old woman took up the half-emptied cup of tea and said, "I hope to see you again soon, Janna. Tea and noddy next time. Tea and noddy." She used the corner of her gossamer sash to mop up some of the spilled tea, sucking in a breath that swelled her lungs and sent pains of age crawling through her stomach. The let the offer hang in the air, and when Mauris led the woman carefully out of the de Lanz home, Dame looked for her reflection in the lacquered desktop. She used her dress-sleeve to try to scrape away some of the cosmetics from her cheeks, leaving long smears of brown powder on the rigid wrinkles of starched fabric. Her eyes fell silently across her bare finger. Teach them better, Dame. Later in the night, when she stood in the doorway to Crisken's room, her eyes were red and her face was long. Short-haired girls in black clothes were reflections in her mind.