"Do you know what they do to young girls here, little needleworker," the Third Calamity whispered in her ear, its hot and raging breath like a poison to her skin. She struggled underneath, pressing two bare palms to its shoulders -- the trowel, her sanding trowel, was across the floor, too far from her fingertips to reach. "They break them here. They bring little girls here and break them, first between the thighs, and then between the mind. They find the most beautiful girls and breed them with the most beautiful boys."
"I -- I know wh-...what they do here," Gloria whispered.______________________________________
"I don't
need evidence to feel. To feel--"
Her voice stopped mid-sentence. Tomias Eddington's hard reprimand still echoed against the wooden walls of the Broken Dagger. She, this Jerno, who always had an answer for everything, felt her guts tighten and her cheeks grow hot. She knew
nothing about Janna Haytham, save what the fermented blood half-clogging her rotten tooth had told her; it beat with the fury of a warrior's drum, screamed the name at her through Catch, through not-Catch, through--
"I don't need evidence to feel that kind of hurt, Tomias Eddington," she said, weak and distracted. "It is -- is not an agony a man can feel. Must I be more graphic with my description? Must -- must I tell you how he did not use his tongue, but another part of himself, when everyone else laughed and
laughed, and she was just behind the curtains, and as he tore at her pretty yellow dress with -- with his fingernails, she wondered why she could not masquerade as
nothing, and just be gone? Shall -- shall I tell you
more--"
The seamstress was standing. Her needle and tangled thread had been pushed aside. She balanced a gloved finger on the table as if it alone could keep her from falling back into her seat. When she spoke, she had been spitting, her lips wet, her eyes struggling to see things that were not there, the
black oil thrumming just inside her jaw.
But she could only imagine that pain. For she herself had never known it.
______________________________________
"Do you?" the Calamity asked her, its inhuman eyes boring holes in her, its lips dripping black oil that wanted to suck at her skin. "You put another girl in your place. They called upon her, and they broke her. Shattered her into tiny glass pieces, fattened her with a little Jerno baby."
"I didn't want to get hurt, I didn't want..." Her fingers stretched, reached -- they scrambled for the trowel-handle.
"I saw you do it. No one would choose me, needleworker. No one would choose me to be their beloved broken Jerno, so I saw it all; I was audience to it."
The young seamstress thrust, then, twisting her hips. The trowel danced at the insistence of her fingers, but she grabbed it, cried out, and drove it with a murderous force into the body of the Calamity pinning her to the floor. It squelched into the ribs, twisted, cracked twice. The Calamity's cloaking hood slipped away like a forgotten slip of parchment. White skin. Too white. White like silver. Eyes that bled black tears. A half-woman, her dry flesh cracking, peeling, like it could not decide between being precious porcelain or the scales of a snake--
--and from her forehead, a little spiraled horn marked the Calamity as the ugliest dying girl the seamstress had ever seen.______________________________________
But that had been years ago. Two. Two-and-a-half. And here, they spoke of Janna Haytham over a table, just the seamstress and the constable, the tension between them burning like a fire-lit string.
"Myrken Wood is -- is a place of
peculiarities," she more calmly told the constable, smoothing out her skirts and settling with a heavy sigh back into her chair. "I am not one of them. Nor -- nor am I a
liar,
Messa Eddington. Her name is Lady Janna Haytham, and somebody did something to hurt her. If -- if a name is not enough for you, then I will go with you to speak to her.
I have taken the liberty of obtaining the address of her family's manor from the census libraries in Darkenhold."
From her satchel, with quivering, shaking hands, she withdrew a folded slip of parchment and flicked it across the table at him.
"I have already done half of your task. You see? I may be a child to you, but I am no idiot. Are
you?"