To Tomias, the Watered-Down Constable

[Rance]

The next time the fellow would call upon the bar for his drink of choice -- whether for a sip, or for drowning away his Derry-thoughts -- the bartender would have a small envelope waiting to give him, its salutation scrawled in the charcoal lines of a familiar hand.

CONSTABLE Tomias EddingtonEbbenton,

I should hope this missive fines you in good health, I woult have a matter I might like to bring to the Constampulary's attension, or to yours, depending on its breadth of consern,

You see, I know a name I have never heard before, one LADY JANNA HAYTHAM, but I have never met her or heard the name for it came to me in a fit of emosion and feeling and I woult like very much to meet with you in person to discuse this matter, it is of importants,

Also I hope your meating with Cherny went well, I have got no word on weather I shoult be prepared to pummel you or your ridiculous Dairy-hat, please meet with me at four hours past midsun in the Broken Dagger on the nearest Thirdday or Fourthday of the week,

sinserely,
Gloria Wynsee

[Katie]

Tomias was very familiar with the bartender at the Broken Dagger, as the bartender was with the frequenting patron. He knew Tomias preferred whiskey over ale, and when he saw the man in his tri-cornered hat, he had began pouring it. The constable had sat down and all but knocked back the drink when a letter was pushed in front of him. They then exchanged pleasantries, smiles and such, things that happened between men when they had no true business with each other.

It was hard for Tomias to not chuckle. All in all, he had become fond of Ms. Wynsee. She was mannered, though other times so grossly inappropriate that he found her charming. Steadfast and honorable, qualities she outwardly possessed, were things he found missing too often in many folk. He was inclined to do whatever favor she asked; even more so, she had helped him and he would be obliged to return the favor.

Therefore, he wrote her, in small script and without official wax:

Ms. Wym Wynsee:

Thank you for your missive. I had a nice convursashun with Mr. Cherny. As it seems he has not reported to you any missgivins about our discusshun, I'm under the impresshun that both my face and my fine hat will remain unaccosted.

I'm happy to help in reegards to Lady Janna Haytham. I will say that I'm not familur with the name -- but as you know, that does not mean I can't find out. I do have some quesshuns, thow, that, like you say, would be better in persun.

I think a supper of stew would be best served at the Broken Dagger. I currentley have a room there; feel free to have the bartender send one of the dish-washers to come get me if I'm not in the main room.

Sincerely,
Tomias Eddington.

He closed it and penned her name in all manners of misspellings. Tomias was not exactly aware how badly he spelled, but as it was that people kept writing him, it did not seem anyone minded. A supper with Miss Wynsee would, at the very least, provide an interesting evening. He began to mentally prepare himself for her chiding, her overdrawn mannerisms and his re-education on how to eat soup properly. He smiled and knocked back his whiskey.

He'd need it.

[Rance]

On the afternoon of a Thirdday, she received his response. On that same evening, she took her post-lessons dinner in the Broken Dagger, her heavy garments reeking of road dust and summer's musky pollen. She had a blank-paged tome opened before her on one of the tables in the Broken Dagger. She scraped the same words in it with repetitive, practical flourishes of her charcoal.

Janna Haytham.

Janna Haytham.

Janna Haytham.

JANNA HAYTHAM.

It was a fixture in her conscience, a name the very thought of which set one of her browned teeth to throbbing. A pressure within her jaw threatened to split it in two, but she soothed the pain with sips of broth. The ache was tidal in its ebbing and fading, each time time trying to drag away the burning afterimage of those words along with it. But she would not forget the woman's name. She would not.

If the Constable arrived as she anticipated, a mug of ale would be awaiting him. A smear of dust had been scraped across the girl's cheek, an errant stranger of dirt from her afternoon's ride. He would have no proper greeting, for the girl was busy with a hunk of stale bread, working at it with her back teeth while occasionally untangling some of the bobbins of thread rattling around on the table in front of her.

[Katie]

Tomias had spent his morning doing what he normally does. It began with a patrol, and today's featured breaking up a fight between boys on the cusp of manhood over some slight he didn't entirely grasp. Then there were the MacCaffries, an old married couple, who were quite sure that their neighbors, the Larkens, were stealing plants from the back of their property. Around lunch time, he threw a common miscreant in prison -- again -- when he stole three bottles of wine from a competing tavern.

When it came time to visit the tavern, his face had become not unlike Gloria's -- a bit smudged with the dirt of the day and his eyes looked thick and tired. When he entered, he had had the time to remove his constabulary armor and replace it with something like a rancher: long, heavy trousers, thick, boots, and a woolen tunic that had seen better days. Proudly, on top of his matted, blonde curls, was a tri-cornered, Derrian hat that he was so fond of.

His boots clunked heavily along the floor when he found her. He smiled, though briefly. She was a kind thing, he realized, especially when she wanted something. He took the ale in a thick, calloused fist and took a chug.

He exhaled, the weight of the day falling from his shoulders like rainfall, and he descended into a seat across from her. "Evenin', Mes Wynsee," he said, his Derrian drawl as thick as ever. He ordered them both stews and he watched her as she untangled thread. He didn't bother to help; he wasn't akin to doing women's work. He waved a hand and placed an order for stew, which promptly returned. He didn't hesitate to start ladling it in his mouth, while allowing the woman to take her time in asking of his assistance.

[Rance]

"Hello, Constable," she said from around her bread, the word offered with something of a tease -- or a praise.

If he ever thought the girl had any manners in her eating, those might have been dashed away within an instant. She did not eat ravenously so much as recklessly. She did not nibble the bread, but tore off whole hunks of it with her brittle teeth. Crumbs littered the lap of her dress, but she brushed them away when he sat. She chewed, jaw creaking as she untangled a long, red string from a brambled thread of royal blue.

"I did not expect you to be so punctual. That is -- is not meant to be a slight to your ethics, but a recognition of your new position. Constables," the girl said as the stew was brought, and she accepted it with a thankful smile, "must have a very busy time of it."

In a curled fist, she took up her wooden spoon and took a few bites. She was particular in separating the carrots against the side of the bowl, as if she might have thought them poisonous. "There was a party the other night, ser. A wild thing, thrown -- thrown at the behest of a councilman. Did you get a chance to attend?"

[Katie]

The girl ate recklessly and he hadn't the care to notice. He himself occasionally slurped when it came to shoveling his stew, and he gnawed his molars on tendons of poorly trimmed meat. He ate the fat merrily and then added ale to the mixture. He swallowed thickly. At her playful jest, the man smiled and initially added no comment.

It was her second notation that urged his response. "I'm a new constable, Mes Wynsee," he said, stirring the stew until he found a half-decent piece of potato. "We get smaller duties until the constabulary finds reasons to give us larger ones. As it is, I have one case that is moving well enough, thanks to you."

The girl spoke more. Tomias preferred his quiet; small-talk was a trade for businessmen, government and women. It was not his forte. Though, under such circumstances, he learned a specific tool to help him in his handicap; he lied effortlessly. "Indeed, I was there, if briefly."

The truth was that that night of the party, he was drinking down a bottle of whiskey, sucking on its open end like a useless babe against its mother's raw tit. Half of the booze had poured down the sides of his mouth and the other half of it ended up in a spray of vomit all over the wooden floors of his room. The episode he had had that day was particularly gruesome; the memories of his war times, a fellow soldier beating and brutally raping the wife of an enemy before him, had clogged his brain-guts. He relived it three times, all in a row, until his chest heaved in unrelenting panic. The only way he knew how to subside his episodes was to hurt someone, something he hadn't truly done since he came to Myrken Wood. Drink had become his tonic, for it was hard to recall atrocities while one's head pounded so harshly that he could barely see.

"But you didn't come to talk to me about parties and my timelessness, Mes Wynsee," he said, shaking his head as if to dispel the oncoming threat of another entraping attack, "What did you need from me?"

[Rance]

"New or old," the girl said, setting down her spoon and drawing out a spiraling rebel of thread until it was straight. It popped out of its knots with a snap. "A Constable is -- is a Constable; better to make friends with them and assist them as they desire, or it is you they first seek out when they wish a suspect and not a lead."

The girl -- a child, perhaps, by Myrken's standards, but well a woman in Jernoah -- had a smile that was far from pretty, and her teeth were more tarnished than a handful of dirty coins. The slatted bonnet kept back hair as twisted around itself as the multicolored threads she worried over. "Was it a fine party," she asked. "I did not go. I've not got the -- the hips for parties, or the tolerance for spirits. That is your domain. Particularly the latter." She eschewed her spoon for a pearl onion, plucked it from the stew with her fingers, and crushed it between her lips.

"Thanks to me. I'm not worth gratitude. But if you must, thanks to me for not boxing your ears. Cherny told me nothing good nor -- nor bad about your meeting with him. Nothing at all, actually. Some things, even between brothers and sisters, should remain in the confidentiality of the law." She chewed. "But that is quite a dashing hat.

"That name," she finally said, for the girl could speak with the confidence of language like a twittering starling when she must. Duquesne had awakened that in her: The upper hand is oft gained by he or she who knows the most, one of her schoolbooks had explained, and with it will come a naturally stronger affinity for rhetoric. "That name I wrote to you. Janna Haytham."

She turned her paper to him with brown-broth fingers to show how she'd written it so many times.

"She was there at the party. And she--"

his hand found her neck, and it squeezed
squeezed hard with unblemished fingers, fingers that bore
no marks
It is a hand that controlled, that took her quietly beyond the
lanterns, where he could still hear and smell and feel
the howl of humanity at his back, filling his skin to bursting...

"She was hurt. At -- at the Councilman's ball." Her food suddenly seemed foreign, unappetizing. The seamstress peeled the green flesh of an onion from off her lip. "I -- I think that somebody hurt her."

[Katie]

No matter how hard the Constable tried, Tomias was never prepared for some of Gloria's remarks. He did not believe that she intended to be insulting, but it made no difference how carefully he crafted his responses: she always found a way to poke at him. She had discussed the party and when he had initially attempted to respond to her lack of hips -- for he was not aware that party attendance and hips had correlation -- he stuttered out a few sounds when she made mention of his drinking.

So much so that he gathered enough brains together to formulate a verbal response: "I am not a drunk, Mes Wynsee. Enjoying a spirit is sometimes a requirement of the position."

His stomach flipped and by will alone did he control his occasional nausea that still plagued him. He would have said more, too, he knew, but with her insults came her compliments. Yes,he wore a fine hat. It was one of the few things from Derry that he cherished. So much so that he adjusted it so that the three corners lay properly, with one sharp one sticking forward from his head like a horn.

When the foreigner finally got down to business, he was sipping his ale -- slowly sipping, to justify his earlier claim. There were already gaping holes in the story that he would have to get answers. His brow elevated.

"How do you know Mes Janna Haytham, Mes Wynsee? How do you know she was hurt?" He paused, his brows shriveling. "Especially if, as you say, you did not attend the party where you claim she was hurt."

[Rance]

"I did not say you were a drunk. It is just that some men sleep with blankets," she said. "Other men sleep with bottles."

She could not draw her eyes too often away from his hat; it was a curious thing, and she wondered how exactly they managed to bend the rim up just so that it was as though he were wearing a flattened triangle or a hunk of browned cheese. He sipped slowly, like some aficionado of ale, like he could taste the different notes and qualities with each and every sip. She had no such prejudiced tongue; she'd discovered, that in relation to boiled jah'zoon urine, beer and potato-rum were softer tastes, welcome ones. But one seemed no different from the next.

"I -- I simply know," she said clearly. "I have got a sense for such a thing. One needs not be around to feel it like--"

Like what, Glour'eya Wynsee? Will you tell him how you knew it? Will you tell him that it was the black oil that had told you, the heartbeat in your tooth, the mud somewhere in a shattered molar--

An old stain from a weeping mug had caught her eye on the panels of the rounded table. She wondered how long it had been there, if perhaps two others had spoken in a similar way to how they did now. Over ale. She shifted her gloved hand to cover the mark. She was not wholly comfortable offering the Constable the next portion of information, shifting in her seat as if the woolen dress had cinched tighter around her collar. A streak of black sweat smeared across her forehead from a wiping palm.

"I heard it. I heard her. Getting hurt the way that only a woman can be. Do you understand," she asked, not with arrogance or petulance, but with this: an honest, unsteady glaze in her eyes, a frown on her lips. "Not with my ears, or as though it were a sound, but with--" A fingertip drummed against her temple.

"I knew her name was Janna; I knew I would wish that horror on no woman, ser."

[Katie]

Magic. More godsdamned magic.

If there was one thing Tomias hated, perhaps more than the alien races that had more than two arms, two legs and a head, it was the mysticism, the power of magic. Magic was the cause for his troubles; it led him to drinking, led him to years of debilitating nightmares, some so harsh that he awoke with sweat-soaked sheets and a cold, acrid streak of moisture between his legs. Magic, and those who wielded it, were the reason why he saw otherwise innocent people strung to pyres and burned to death. It was why he found limbs, attached to old ropes, after the horses had gone their separate ways. It was the reason why he had taken up the sword and stuck most of it, not in enemies, but neighbors, sweet girls of ages just enough to birth children.

And Gloria Wynsee, a girl he was convinced was just a little peculiar, but painfully ordinary, was one of these people. A witch. A magic-slinging, mind-invading witch, even if she only implied she could hear things. His lips turned in a natural snarl.

It was hard for him to not be defensive. "What do you expect me to do with this, Gloria?" his tone was sharp as his recently whetted sword. "Unless you have something more than what happened in your head, there's not much more than I can do. You don't know the woman, and neither do I, and you have no evidence that she was even hurt. What you have is a fantasy, a dream, and until you can do something better, the Constabulary has other concerns, those with evidence and not," he said, tapping his temple harshly and with great acrimony, "and I can't spare my time, no more betters, on it."

His chest went cold. He knew he shouldn't have mocked her, but his heart burned with a sudden anger. Sudden resentment, and it shone in his green eyes. Eyes, that without his scars, without the drink, once knew kindness.

[Rance]

"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?"

[Katie]

Tomias Eddington was once a boy with lively, bouncing curls that he rarely cut. He laughed a lot, then; he often found himself hiding in places he never should, in back alleys that were unwelcomed to those who needn't hide their behavior and cruelty.

When he hid around the corner of one of the taverns in Derry, he pressed his back against it. His breathing was labored, heaving from his small chest. He peaked around, his green eyes catching a glimpse of an older boy, much bigger and burlier than he was at fifteen. The girl in his hands was slender, with wild blonde hair and eyes illuminated in terror.

"Please don't--"

He whirled her around. In that area of town, screams were often muffled by the sounds of flesh upon flesh, brawls that broke out that were then dimmed by the marketeers hollaring their wares. No one cared for a poor girl, let alone when a brute decided to force himself within her, her screams be damned. For that split second, Tomias watched in horror that 'twixt with a violent, red-brimmed rage.

The man forced two thrusts in her by the time he turned the corner. "Stop."

The man was still inside the girl, her eye now black from when he shoved her against the bricks. "Get out of here, boy."

"Get away from her."

"Please help me," the girl cried and the rapist punched the back of her skull. "Please help me."

Tomias Eddington, now twenty-six, shook his head. The day he went from boy to man happened in that split second. He recalled how he killed him, recalled how he removed him from the girl, used a knife in a way that he never imagined and the only time he ever remembered touching manhood that wasn't his own.

Only that time, it was to toss the dismemberment down the alley.

When Gloria spoke, and hinted at something that burned in his brain for eleven years, he settled back in his seat. Regardless of how she knew the information, there were things one did not do to a woman. To take her chastity was beyond vulgar; sure, occasionally a woman earned herself a slap now and then, but to dethrone her without invitation was vile. And no laws of the constabulory would change his ways when it came to vile, disgusting men.

He nodded to her. He didn't, of course, apologize for his tone or even acknowledge what Gloria had presented. He took the paper and unfolded it. There, he observed it in silence for several minutes.

Afterwards, he voice purred in a low rumble. "I will help Lady Janna, Gloria Wynsee." He looked to her then, to explain the parchment.

[Rance]

Was that so hard to say, she wanted to snap. Was it?

The girl had a sharp tongue when she wanted to have it; condescending, rude, obnoxious -- yet, she prided herself on her ability to see things done, to persuade tasks to be completed if not by her own muscles, then by those who could. And here, Tomias Eddington turned from his stoic, hard-shouldered self to something a little more compliant, a hint more willing. When he examined the paper, she planted a finger against the battered wooden table.

"She is -- is a lady," the girl said, with emphasis on the final word. "She is no ghetto urchin or low-streets girl, according to the statistics in the census. The -- the Haytham manor should be willing to invite a Constable of your reputation, Messa Eddington."

She remembered the food she had forgotten. She reached for a pinch of bread, her young features shifting into humor, a smile -- an apologetic allowance, that, for as the tension dissipated between them with his simple agreement, she could enjoy her food again.

With a flake of bread between her fingertips, she said--

"Unless, of course, you have drank and smoked and diddled your reputation away. Is that what they say," she asked. "Diddled?"

She chewed on sourdough, then tucked her elbows in against her sides and settled back in her chair.

"Thank you," she added, more seriously, her tone better befitting a girl speaking to a man, an authority. "For listening. For reminding me that I did not call upon the wrong person for this. When you speak to her, do you want me to go with you? She will not trust you, no matter how much she should. It will not be her choice -- that is the nature of these kinds of pains, ser.

"A girl should not be alone with a man in -- in a time like this. You understand," she said.