by Carnath-Emory » Wed May 09, 2012 3:43 am
This girl - with her pretty, jeweled hair; with her fingertip advancing from word to word, just so; the sight engages, gently charms. It evokes old memories: in its very early days, she'd wandered Darkenhold corridors, fingertips trailing across rough stone as her lips silently shaped new words. Common words, foreign words, and all the time the texture of coarse masonry whispering through her senses. Ours, that touch had said; Ours, each clumsily-whispered word.
And these are things that she cannot speak of - here, and in such company. These are things for sisters and for architects, and in their absence it is enough to watch this girl at her work and be quietly grateful that such memories exist.
"Thousands, perhaps," she murmurs after a time. "Perhaps even more; I could not say with certainty. Not all of it was mine." And because an architect had once begun explaining this to her: had begun to speak of vast quantities of coin, how it might be moved and exchanged and hidden and made to grow, so that coin begets coin - hah! Her headache had grown apace. When the question which had begun it all was so simple, and answered with a word that wasn't: self-sufficiency. The means by which a stronghold might thrive -
"The Defense Committee," she echoes - sets upon that phrase, as Petronela might well have anticipated. "Myrken would have a committee addressing its needs," and the tone approves. "Nor should it. And if you reckon her for bossing, sera, then she is well-suited indeed," and this might have been laughter; muffled, but unmistakable. "Find two Councilors who will agree on anything but the need for a second dinner; no, they need for a strong hand. Hers does not lack."
No. It is not young Nela who should be party to such conversation; who is likely quite tired by it already. It is most certainly not Nela who can be asked the question which should follow - that while the Governor's man would name him a defiler in one moment and a saviour the next, the most immediate evidence she has on these matters is the building of a school - and a student whose lot has abruptly improved. The news has surprised; it has delighted.
It is tempered by the furious ache of a shoulder which remembers an assassin's knives.