There would have come a day--
"Do you remember, Ariane," and they drank not tea, but a hard bottle of something sharp and volatile, the kind of liquid that burned on the tip of a tongue like a pek'oret
sting. "Do you remember when all of that strangeness occurred? I was so young and you were the most brilliant creature to me. You were. I thought I'd want nothing more than to turn out just like you."
"Mn -- Yes. I remember."
"And do you remember," and Gloria Wynsee was laughing now, each spasm in her mirth punctuated by a hand that raised and then fell to clap against her knee, "how I was so foolish, I thought I could change everything, put the world into such fine order because I came from a world that was in such disarray. And we fought. We spat at one another. I thought I was so clever. But it was just too much emotion and so little logic. I used to stutter then. I used to cry so easily."
And Ariane smiled, scar and all, perfect.But that wasn't then. That was only a potential permutation, a future that might never be, a flicker of circumstance that came to the young girl's brain as she stared up into the Marshall's face. And perhaps Ariane had never seen eyes that were so witless before -- so witless, willing, and sharp, so scorched and burnt by the Sun that their color had long ago bled away to leave steely gray, and the pupils never swelled nor reduced, but stayed simple, spark-sized, and sharp as a hemming needle.
If you terrify them into anger right now, into panic, then dozens suffer. Here. Immediately. Indiscriminately - do you know that word?"If you think that's what I would want, then what do you know of me? But it is there -- the panic, the
anger, it's there and I'm afraid of it."
And better it be turned, her lips never said,
toward a common point than spread out like fire, for to utter such a thing would turn against every disgust she'd had seeing those toes dangle and sway in the wind. "I wanted to know from
her. I wanted her words, her eyes, her stare. I wanted to know that she knew nothing about -- about any of this, that she was just as broken as you were, as I was, as everyone was, when the Lady reigned.
"I was with him and Calomel and -- and Giuseppe. We were in
Golben, and he knows no wiser than any of us what happened here, whose blade went to work, who struck. To know that is a defiance of -- of the
only common truth we all share after the Black Hour. Don't you see that, Ariane? Don't you," she asked.
"I want an end to all this sickness," the girl repeated, wielding Ariane's words as she'd already done months ago, brandishing a Lady Marshall's Darkenhold threat against Noura. "But making us believe we're all sick and that he's the exception, in having this knowledge, isn't a solution. Neither is hanging. Neither is
killing."
And what she never answered, what she couldn't answer:
Then what is?The
weight and the
wait, both astoundingly crippling virtues that the girl felt straining her shoulders and clawing at her skin. To Ariane's final words --
Go to him - after this -- the black-sweat face dipped down in an agreement, a promise, a guarantee. But because she'd already said too much (What was
Haberdasher's, she wondered; what was
Townsedge?), she folded like a fabric doll beneath the Marshall's advice, then surged forward past her, shattering their pocket of seeming silence, shouldering her way through the membrane and back into the reality of what was around them--
* * * *
From the stage's edge, a broad-nosed man with a sprawl of white and bristling hair shouted to Genny, "
Saved us? Open your eyes, you dumb Inquisitor bitch, or get back to your feckin' pies and let men handle this. She took that Governorship because her mind was already mince!"
"What lor' of it thar wot," prattled an orchard-hand. "Profe! Bring us profe. Ain't that wot yar
do, Inquisitor?"
And as Catch bellowed his ownership of the deed, a circle of people around him bent back as if pushed away by the sheer dominance of his voice, his claim.
"We'd sooner believe the
lunatik," crowed a woman with a square jaw and a prominent, shining nose. "Proof indeed. Show us. Show us!"