The Feet Would Know

[Rance]

It had only happened several nights before, but still it was a recent memory.

No one might have thought any better of two girls walking hand-in-hand along the winding paths. So many thousand pairs of feet before them had flattened down the earth so that even at night, if one could not see -- and they scarcely could, having no lantern by which to brighten the black woods around them -- then the smooth dirt underneath had a vastly different texture than the underbrush. The feet would know when they'd wandered.

But only one of them led the way. A smaller girl, in her one hand a tiny, makeshift nest and sleeping bird. In the other, another girl's fingers, as if one were tugging the other like a sack of feed. The second girl, larger, with a bonnet hanging off a worn ribbon from her neck and hips meant for mothering, followed the younger one's steps with weary loyalty. Bird-mother and seamstress had no direction. The night bowed in around them, suffocating.

"I do not want to go back there," the seamstress whispered, her voice hoarse and rattled, her steps given a limp because of her lost clog. Stocking toes dragged through the dirt.

Only minutes before -- it seemed like hours, and hours became days, months -- they had been in the Broken Dagger. Time had passed, but not in seconds. Instead, in snippets of memory, events the exertion of which still inflamed the seamstress' cheeks.

touch of a tongue

a shattering mug, the shards like slivers of dull glass

stumbling, trying to flee, words in the mind like ancient memories

a dress splattered with sour, broth-pale vomit

"Where are -- are we going," she asked, while her gloved fingers snared up her skirts from the thorns. She started to sway, and managed to find the dark spine of a tree to collide her shoulder against. She put her cheek to it, breathed in its woody scent. The seamstress tore leaves from the branches with which she scrubbed at the sticky sickness strewn across her skirts, her chest.

"Zi," she whispered, leaning against the tree. Underneath her dress, she shivered. Leaves rustled as she wiped at herself. "Your name is -- is Zi. That is what Cat-Talon said.

"Why," the seamstress asked. "Why were you good to me?"

[Angel]

Her feet were bare, and she could feel the prick of little grassy needles and leaves; the soft, damp touch of dirt beneath and between her toes--she had let her feet lead her, and they had led her here, to the forest, to the thick and the dark and the sweet, heady smell of trees that whispered to her everything will be okay.

Do you promise? How can you know for sure? Bad things happen now--i know what the stains on the floor are.

They walked for miles or for hours or for centuries. Maybe only for days, maybe forever, they walked--the fae-child's tired, shocked brain could hardly tell the difference, she paid no mind to time or direction, only to the tree's lullaby-song, and to her companion's breathing, and to the smell of sickness and night. In her one arm, the baby bird slept, protected by his nest of rags. She made a good bird-mother--it was appropriate, even, for her bones were bird-frail, and her hand was as tiny as a doll's in Gloria's larger, softer one. It was surprisingly strong, her grip sure.

"We aren't going back there," she whispered, as if she didn't want the night to hear them--the trees, with their many, many ears... or things that were worse than trees. "We're... going somewhere safe." Safer than wooden walls, safer than blood on the floor. Her stomach twisted at the thought, and so she shied away from the memory, the knowledge.

Her fingers tightened. They were slick. Slick and sticky with an iron-smell--blood. The arm that had been cut by the shrapnel of Gloria's shattered mug, and yet Zinniah didn't seem to notice, or feel, the many nicks that weeped and oozed sluggishly down her wrist, her fingers. She tugged, walked, even as Gloria stopped, and it seemed as if her mind had to catch up with the fact that Gloria *had* stopped--only then did she turn around.

"My momma showed me this place... deep, deep in the woods. It's safe. Someplace safe. Not the -- not back there," she repeated, and her fingers tightened, reluctant to allow her companion to free her hand to aid in the process of cleaning herself.

Where had her mother been, during the fight? Where was her father?

Everything will be okay the trees shushed and whispered.

Everything will not be okay. I don't think it will ever be okay again.

"I don't want to go back there either... Come on, it's -- it's not much further." She tugged, urging the taller girl to move. She hardly knew if it was far or not, she just didn't want to stand in one place for too long, with the memory of the fight and Gloria's screaming and the demon's dying in her mind--and so much fear.

"... Zinniah. But everyone just calls me Zi. Zi's right. Why wouldn't I be good to you?"

[Rance]

Shards of an old memory she was only beginning to remember.

"Oh," the girl said, to everything, to nothing at all, as leaves tumbled from her fingers and fluttered to the forest floor.

She walked with a stuttering gait, occasionally finding herself distracted by some stone on the ground. Her mind was reaching for rationale, a logic to cling to. The seamstress opened the palm of her gloved hand, where the broken handle of a mug was still gripped; it was a flattened U, a stoneware horseshoe snapped away from its mother cup. In her other hand was Zinniah's, but her fingers were loose and clutched like a babe's -- weak, pliable, loose.

"Why be good to a Jerno," she asked, with a child's curiosity. "Why be? Dark skin and dark hair and dark sweat. They are things meant for kissing. That's all. You -- you use them for mathematics; if you are a boy, you look at them with a calculating eye and say if I add to her a baby, how will it look, will -- will the baby inherit the mother's bad-looking decimals.

"Zinniah," she tacked on, an afterthought, a wholly new direction of discussion in her mind. "What a -- a pretty little name for a girl. It is not at all a lump on the tongue like Glour'eya, but it -- it is a little bit of sunshine. Soft and feather-light. Zinniah."

On the tongue--

Still, they wandered, until the older girl's knees started to shudder. She wavered, then blustered, "I know your face," to the fae-girl, hoping every step would be the last, that the safe place was only just before them, and they could sit and recline in the grass and everything could feel normal, normal--

"I had a Dream, you know. I saw your face in it."

[Angel]

Why be good to a Jerno?

She wanted to say, What a silly thing to ask. Why be good to anyone? Instead, the words that came rolling off her tongue were softer, the edges not so sharp as they could have been--still soothing, still tutting, still fretting like a mother might over their lostling child.

"My momma used to tell me that it didn't take a lot of effort to be nice--but if you want to be mean, you usually have to work at it. And it makes all these bad feelings boil up inside of you. Anger and... and..." and what? the trees seemed to ask, their curiosity a whistling breeze, their intent a hushed rattle of winter-bare limbs.

And that's how blood becomes old stains on wooden floors.

The girl paused, just long enough to look at her companion, her eyes pale and bright--she was as light to Gloria's darkness, light skin and light hair and light everything, it was true. Yet, with her own child's innocence, she could see nothing wrong with the other girl--dark skin and dark eyes did not equal hatred. She could not fathom the reason behind Gloria's question, just as she could barely fathom why babies had anything to do with mathematics.

So instead of understanding, she merely said, "But I am not a boy, and I don't think that's all you're meant for. If you don't want to kiss someone, don't. I don't know what Jerno means--all I know is that you are Gloria before you are Jerno, and that means you can be whatever you want to be. I like your name. Glour'eya. Why can it not be sunlight too? It sounds powerful--not like me..."

And so she rambled, and so they walked, because walking felt safer than standing still.

The trees grew thicker as they went on, they had lost the path long ago--had Gloria noticed? Had Zinniah? Around their legs, the bushes began to cling and pull, each branch a little thieving hand searching for something to take, to be left behind. A scrap of cloth, a drop of blood. Zinniah had to duck down low to push past a particularly thick bramble patch, with a soft "Be careful--" whispered in her wake.

Just as suddenly as the brambles began, they stopped. Abruptly, they opened into a small clearing, bordered by trees and thorns. Above them, the sky was a clear circle of thin, wispy clouds and scattered starlight. Zinniah almost lost her balance as she came into the clearing, standing straight and letting her head tilt back. A child's cry of joy escaped her-- "Safe!" she sighed, and turned to help pull Gloria through, but her hand stilled--her whole body like a statue.

"... You've Seen me?" A quiet breath, no louder than that, and so many emotions trapped in the startled sound--traces of fear, confusion, hope.

"How? What kind of dream?"

[Rance]

The jagged edges of the memories -- her night with Zinniah -- scraped against one another.

She had asked at the height of her fright, Where's Cherny?

Where's Elliot?

"Elliot said that too," she said, grinding a weary knuckle against the corner of her eye. "About -- about not being Jerno, just being a girl--"

But moments like this, it is hard.

Zinniah was an agile fox creeping through the underbrush, but the seamstress was a veritable ogre by comparison. She shouldered her way through branches and brambles, and even as thorns dug into her skirt and jabbed at her legs, she simply wrenched her knees and shins through the tangled mess, following the younger child's bath. Hanging branches crushed down her bonnet. The trees had unmoving arms -- she clutched, with modesty, the stomach of her dress, wrinkling the damp, sour-smelling fabric under her hands, as if afraid those barky limbs would try to rip away her garments, laugh at the sand-scar wheals on her flesh.

"Are you ever mean," she asked Zinniah, "or -- or are you always this sweet?"

Be careful--

Zinniah's tiny hand was a beacon of brightness in the night. Gloria reached for it, dragging herself through the ferns and brush and into the clearing--

It was a wide, innocent place, with grass all of an even height and a sky that told her it was alright to breathe. The stars were little Jernoan prayers lifted up into the blackness by chimney-smoke. You will put your praise for the Nameless on the smoke of burning incense and flames, Sister Sorenica used to say, back when she was just a listless choir-girl, eating her sand and watching men sacrifice with a zeal that only the youth innoculated with love for the Pursuit could produce. We are a people of heat -- our words require it, to lift them to the sky and burn the effigies of our desires as balls of light in the sky.

The clearing cradled her. With her ankles rustling against her skirts, the girl took a few steps in, then crumbled to the grassy floor, arms spread, knees bent, her bonnet falling away and her black hair set to a blacksnake sprawl around the crown of her head. She watched the stars.

The Dream was closer on nights like this. The Dream was a harvesting moon, swelling as if drawn nearer to the mountains by the magnetic pull of a legendary sea. Its heat burned her neck, scorched her. Years of

inevitability.

She grabbed a thin, bony girl by the pale hair and pushed her out of the way. The girl was missing two eyes, the holes burnt and black, but had a third glimmering in the middle of her forehead. The Killer snarled to the others, "Clear the way -- business for the Regent, business for the Regent, you foul bastards. Dead coming through. A reaping for the Regent!"

"Your have got to keep your eyes, Zinniah. You have got to," the seamstress trilled, staring with dizzying fascination at the pin-prick holes of light in the sky. "You -- you have three eyes in it; I swear it, I saw it."