To: Rogue / From: Rhetor

[Glenn]

"Laws." She spoke. She advanced, she waved her hands about and mentioned their bargain which he hadn't forgotten, but for which life had gotten in the way of as it so often did, and then, she invoked laws; oh, first she invoked Marshall Emory and that was something, yes, for she was something and she understood and everyone knew that. Granted, everyone tended to think she understood what they understood, but that was a real Myrken thing too. Then, though, it was laws.

And she'd been doing so well too. He was a creature of physicality and that was a real Myrken thing, just as much as anything else. There was an urge to strike at her, to push her back into a state of fear, to quiet her, to shut her up. More than that, though, there was a need to do something. She thought that she was driving him back with words. She misread his restraint as weakness, or even worse, chose to see it as an invitation. It would not do. He drove forward, at her, but ultimately around her, leaping up until he stood upon the precarious fence she had been leaning upon. There should not have been enough surface area to hold him properly, but there he was, crouched slightly but still above her, glaring down.

"Laws can't stop me. Laws can't protect you. Laws can't deal with her. It's quaint," the word harsh, strong. Elliot Brown knew words too, not many, enough sometimes, "that you think so, though."

[Rance]

The boy's movement forward startled her. She let out a gasp, and her heels pivoted in the mud and slush to turn her hip and shoulder to him as if she were expecting a blow. But then, like a gust of wind, he swept past her and leaped up upon the fence. His athleticism was admirable, but she knew his game. She knew it, for a girl who had played that very same game years ago back in Jernoah.

"I was more impressed by the thing you did with the wine," she said, lifting both her hands up and in each lofting an invisible glass. "Where it leaped from one to the other, and you did not spill a drop, and I thought to myself, this Elliot Brown certainly is quite the fellow.

"If," she added, "he was not such an insufferable turd."

He perched like a bird. She crossed her thick arms beneath her cloak, turning to face him. Looking up was something she had been made to do, was as much a part of her as her tarsweat and her dark skin. No, if he thought his looming made her feel smaller, more miniscule, the boy had been thinking too much like a Myrkenite -- if anything, it gave her comfort, expectation, prediction, to turn her eyes up toward someone who thought he was her greater.

"We are done talking about laws or the law-nots, Elliot Brown, though I do not think you would have such -- such a high view of anarchy when faced one on one with the Marshall."

With a little grunt, the seamstress lifted her boot and hammered it against the side of the endpost, setting the whole fence to a precarious wobble underneath him.

"You did not answer my question," she said. "So much for not being false."

[Glenn]

"I am going to go to Ariane Emory." His voice was soft. She kicked and he held his ground. Every instinct told him to lash out, to muddy her clothes, to ruin what she had worked hard at in preparation for her lesson, to topple her sandcastle (which is a notion no Myrkenite properly understands, being so far from the ocean, but the jist of it was flowing through him so thoroughly). His soul screamed for this. And so he fought it, choosing to focus on one other thing instead.

"I am going to go to Ariane Emory and do what you are doing right now to me." He was perched, but now, slowly, despite the onslaught of her foot against the fence (and maybe if she had some nice shoes she could really put some oomph into it, enough to topple him; this though? This he could handle). Muscles moved with lithe, trained motion, ever so carefully, and there he was, standing on the fence. Before he looked down at her. Now, he didn't even bother to crane his neck for the effort.

"I am going to go to your scary Marshall Emory and I am going to do what you are doing right now to me and I am going to tell her what I am going to do, just like you're doing, and I will tell her that if she wants to stop me, she will have to kill me, because I am afraid of nothing else in this world that she can do." His voice was crystal clear. The words were quick but the emotion was honest, was full of pride. There were other forces at play here and she had invoked them first in the same sentence that she mentioned the law and then again by using the Marshall as a weapon. "And I am going to take what is hers and I am going to make it mine, and she and everything she cares for will be better off for it, because I am Elliot Brown and that is what I do. Perhaps you'll be able to watch from out the window during one of your lessons. I'll remember to wave." He stepped backwards, one time step, landing as if the fall was nothing at all, and then the fence was between them.

[Rance]

The seamstress was a lover of words. She needed to be. Without them, she would be mute in Myrken Wood, mute and without coin, a vagabond who spoke only another language. Not speaking the Standard, one might just as well rope themselves from a rafter. It was the initiative of the traveler to learnhe native tongue and if that could not be achieved, then nothing else would.

But Elliot Brown. Sometimes Elliot Brown just had too many words. Sometimes he vomited them out like he was trying to fill the world with them.

Fill the world, or fill himself.

"I will wave right back, Elliot. The proper kind of wave, where your arm is at attention," she bent her elbow into a perfect angle, "and you swivel the palm upon the wrist," demonstrating, "and each digit is exactly one finger's width apart from its brothers.

"Hello, Elliot Brown," she trilled, in a higher, more girlish voice. "Hello!

"And that is not the only thing: I will do you this favor; that regardless of what it is you intend to take, whether it is proverbial, whether it is tangible, I will say not a thing to the Marshall. If ever she needed a seamstress to warn her against arrogant boys and foolhardy sedition, then perhaps she should have never held the office at all."

She clapped for him, though, for his balancing and his muscle-movement, his angling this way and that just to keep from falling. When he was done and his feet had fallen to the other side of the fence, she leaned forward to rest her elbows on the wood. "You should just go and join the circus, Elliot Brown."

The girl reached down to gather up her strap-slung bundle of books, tossing it over her shoulder and holding the leather thong tight against her collar. "Balance on too many fences, walk across too many rails, Elliot, and it is inevitable that you will fall. You are not perfect. But when you do fall, I will gladly extend a hand to help you up.

"Falsehoods aside, I like you, Elliot Brown. And whether you are roaming free or rotting away in a criminal's cage, I will still like you. I would even visit you. You see? It is the least one friend can do for another."

[Glenn]

She had an answer for everything, didn't she? What had gotten into her? "I walked before I ran, Gloria." His eyes were cold suddenly as he stared at her, cold and beady and focused. "I walk before I ran and I saw what happened to boys who didn't. I burned their corpses alongside their knights, my mentors. Because they charged forward before they were ready. And I spent a long time figuring out how to be ready. And I know when I'm not. And when I'm not, I don't. I'm not sure you know anymore. It's good to be brave. It's good to not give up. It's stupid to die when you don't have to. You'll help me up."

That's what she said wasn't it. A hand to help him up. He was turning now. "And, they won't catch me. And, I don't need you to visit me because they'll not be able to keep me even if they do. And, if I fall, I'll make sure to land on you." He turned his back on her the rest of the way, one step after the other, walking away. "And when you die, I'll burn your body, Gloria."

[Rance]

And that was her victory: that the guise of a story he had given her the last time had been peeled away, and it revealed the dermis of the truth beneath. That the Boy Who Burned Bodies had been Elliot Brown. It was confirmation of the feeling she had -- and because in that moment nothing about him was false, she said nothing. He turned and strode away. She did not raise her verbal to deflect his words. They were him, they were Elliot, so she let them slide right through the joints of her armor.

The rest of the time, he parried and stabbed with an invisible knife forged from the kind of words that meant nothing, that had only the sharpness he thought they should have.

When he finally spoke truth, she let him have that strike.

She attended her instruction at Darkenhold with her usual fervor. Occasionally she looked out the window, only to be drawn back to attention by a harsh snap of fingers. She fulfilled her lessons and returned home in the early afternoon.

The next day, the bartender would have another delivery for A FRIEND, ELLIOT BROWN. Two small packages wrapped in burlap, drawn tight by twine. In the first, there were cold, fragile twigs, broken kindling that might be used to bring life to a dying fire.

In the other package, a fist-sized hunk of smooth coal. Words had been painstakingly painted on its black surface, a bright and almost blinding blue. A lone sentence wrapped around the entire piece. Not a single letter was misplaced.

Do not make promises you cannot keep.