Of boys, blood, and teenage angst.

[channe]

Agnieszka -- queen regent of the thousand unpronounceable syllables, or 'Hey You,' if you're Kiki -- is going through her paces in the ankle-deep snow behind the Baker farm. It's an grey, overcast day, but the sword catches what chilly light there is as she moves methodically against an unseen opponent, repeating a particularly tricky set again and again, quicker and quicker, succumbing finally to an angry scowl, a frustrated shriek, and a vicious kick to a rotting log nearby.

She's not concentrating -- she knows this, and she knows she'd be in hot water for it were her teacher here to correct her -- but, really! How can she? Ignas makes her so mad -- he had promised a fair spar, but she ended up facing someone who could, and did, bend his bone around her blade! "You need to know how to face a freak," he'd said, or something rather like it -- and then he'd kissed her against her will, right in front of the Broken Dagger, with his blood running in rivulets where her sword had carved chunks from his arm! Her sword had cleaved clear to bone, and he walked into the Dagger fifteen minutes later, completely whole and pretty as you please! A freak, indeed!

With that thought, what little concentration she has left flies right out the window.

She kicks the rotting stump again and again, reliving the pleasure of popping her fist right into his weaselly face.

"You can't get laid even when you need to! You got your arse whipped by a werewolf! You sack o' worthless shit! You're old enough to be my gran-da! You're disgustin'! Why did you do that?"

After a while, she realizes what a pathetic figure she must cut, were any of her neighbors looking out the window -- Agnie, the crazy Kaczmarek, in the snow, swearing like a sailor at a rotting oak tree. She makes an attempt to compose herself, dissolves into giggles, and soon it's back to the oak tree, now, which she yells at wildly, her face chapped and red from wind and annoyance.

"I hate boys! I hate them, hate them, hate them! I want 'em all to die!"

But, as she utters the words, she knows that's not completely true: there's the young ocarinist she met outside the Rememdium on summer day that was hotter than the very depths of Hell -- she likes him and watches for him, even though he doesn't come around often -- she likes the way he's a bit patient with her madcap inquiries -- a bit too patient, she's given him a trillion hints --and so a whack of boot against wood for Auberon!

"Not that your thick head'll get it," she shouts for him --

-- and the others! While she's at it, Kerrak will get a swift kick to the log, as well: as much as she appreciates and takes the opportunity to beat up on his newest recruits, she deems him just as big a bastard as the others. Does he really think that she fell for his 'maybe you'll get to fight me' ruse? "Oh, yeah, th' girl likes ye, Counc'ler, why doncha just make fun of her some more from your big fat horse, right?"

And Ignas, who believes that a kiss is just a kiss.

He'll find out differently. She swears on it.

[channe]

Even in times like these, people find ways to prosper.

One particularly salient example is that of the few shop-owners whose buildings border the massacre-sword, where the shoemaker's ladder is always placed haphazardly on the side of the building, and for a shilling or so he'll allow you to climb up to his roof and gape at the place where the glowing demon-metal, with its funny and frightening red eye, pierces the earth.

Agnieszka is there with her brother Lucasz, sharing a loaf of bread. It's chilly out, but the kid's been pestering her to see it for weeks and she just can't put up with it any longer without going absolutely insane. He is a gawky ten, on the cusp of an energetic eleven; and now, he stuffs cold bread into his mouth, chews and fixes the sword with a critical gaze.

"It smells," he pronounces.

Agnie snorts. "Jus' garbage next door."

"Naw," the boy says, narrowing his eyes. "It really stinks somethin' awful. Agnie, what's it for?"

Agnie frowns. "It's a sword, silly, it kills people, what d'ye think it's for?" And she pauses to stare at the sword one more time. "Ok, now you seen it, and we can go home. It's not safe to be out. Mum'll kill me." Strange words, she knows, for a girl who is never without a killing weapon of her own.

"AG-NEE," he whines -- the petulance of a young boy who thinks nothing can go wrong, not even in a world where boys his own age can be shattered and destroyed like so much unwanted trash during an unnaturally silent night -- and frowns. "You can go out! An' drow don't scare me!"

Agnieszka clambers to her feet, clutching Lucasz's upper arm. "They should, you little rat," she cautions -- not that she had been old enough to remember much during Myrken Wood's first siege by the drow Audmathus, but the mere mention of his name tacked to the door of the Council Hall had sent fear buzzing through the populace like the plague of the summer before -- and her own experiences with Jirai. Well. That was enough.

They remembered, and passed on their stories.

He draws himself together stubbornly, yanks his arm away, and sits back down to stare at the sword again from his rooftop eyrie. "Nothing scares me."

Agnie responds by reaching down, hugging him around the waist, and hauling him up like a skinny sack of beans. Lucasz shrieks.

"I can go out, 'cause I can fight an' take care o' myself. Yer a little rat. You know Jenny Brace? Miz Poole's two gals? You wanna end up like them?" she says, almost viciously.

Lucasz whimpers a little -- perhaps he remembered the neighbors shuddering in the Bakers' anteroom after the attack, their words speaking of bones shattered in fifteen places and skin burned to black while his mum dropped off hot food from the Kaczmarek stove for the grieving family, her own children in tow for safekeeping. "No," he says, a moment later. And then, just as quietly: "did the sword kill Jenny?"

This is an answer that Agnieszka does not know; there are too many people killing other people these days! So she dumps Lucasz back on his feet, and gives him a little push towards the ladder, her whatever-comes confidence returning.

"Prob'ly. Doesn't matter. Now we gotta get home, an' if you tell Mum where we were I'm gonna flay your hide," she says, oh-so-pleasantly. "An' if you ever come back here without me or Mum, you're gonna be so sorry an' I'll never let you touch my rapier ever."

"But you promised..."

[Vanidor]

The horseman had stayed back from the crowd, not wanting to get involved with the press of (foolish in his mind) people that desired to set better eyes upon the blight that rested upon that space of land. The animal had stamped its feet in irritation. The creature was bred for war. For the charge and the scent of sweat and blood. Not for standing idle and watching as folk milled to and fro. Yet the rider was in command, his fist loose upon the reign and bridle, the other hand rubbing soothingly upon the equine neck. Mollified, the beast remained idle as the warrior surveyed the scene.

The Captain had wanted to shut this little operation down. For he believed it formented some sort of dread in the people. To gawk openly at such an atrocious display, but he could not do such a thing. Not yet. Aeryn would have cut it down, were his sword and arm strong enough to enact such a thing. And Jons quipped that they should decorate it with festive lanterns and ribbon, thus removing from it it's terror and mocking the ire within the blade. The scout just shook his head and took a breath. There. The two he was watching was... moving, heading back down the rickshaw ladder and reentering the gathered crowd.

"But you promised...." He heard the lad say, the scout twitching his lips slightly in a smiliarity of amusement. He had not quite heard the rest of their conversation, lost in thought as he had been, but he could guess. He had seen the way that several of the girl's kin had eyed her whenever she bore that whip-slender rapier. He'd seen enough of his fellow soldiers gawk as well, for sword-weilding warrior maidens were not a common thing. The scout twisted his head, adjusting his gaze back and forth down the street. Then once the pair were a suitable distance away, he would nudge his impatient steed in the ribs and continue shadowing her as directed...

[channe]

Ah, yes, the girl’s kin.

Her father, a cripple made sour by his disability, is remarkably blasé about the whole matter, but her mother’s been made a constant, hand-wringing mess and her married sisters have ceased to invite her to spend time with their children. That the Kaczmareks do not condone her ‘outside activities’ is easy to be seen; what they intend to do about it, if they intend anything at all, is a little less clear -- as are what barbed words would come out of their mouths were they ever to meet Ariane Carnath-Emory in person.

Also unclear: why, exactly, she does what she does.

What would this scout see, when he follows her?

Today, perhaps, she and Lucasz would stop at a pastry shop for shilling-candies; in the shoemaker's, to pick up someone's mended workboots; and then, down the longish road to the Baker farm, where she drops Lucasz off before dissappearing back up the road before her mum can drag her in for house-chores.

From there -- where?

She rises early in the morning to complete a slate of chores that she does recklessly and somewhat haphazardly, and as quickly as she possibly can. Afterwards, if the scout follows her long enough, what will he see? Someone who, while not serious in the stable, seems to be quite serious about her training, spending hours perfecting footwork exercises and keeping up with physical conditioning even though Ariane has not been seen in a month or so; a girl who shrugs off the funny looks sent at her by townspeople and the rude comments of soldiers at Kerrak’s camp with regularity, only to turn around and seethe and churn about it later when she thinks she is alone.

And, yes, she's taken Kerrak's offer to heart, visiting his soldiers three or four times a week to spar, treating it all in a very businesslike fashion: arriving, ignoring everything but whatever fight she picks, and leaving when she’s done -- no matter what happens, or what she's offered, or what kind of words are thrown at her. Why the soldiers participate, who knows? Perhaps a few enjoy beating up on the girl; perhaps she’s a source of entertaiment, and they have bets amongst themselves about who’s the next one to be beaten by a woman.

Few of them, however, can doubt that she’s resolute -- for now.

When she’s not training, she been known these past few weeks to hang around spots where a drifter named Auberon is likely to be found; she also visits the Broken Dagger with a stunning regularity. Plus, her younger siblings are never to be seen around town without her or her mother tagging along.

All in all, her routine is, well, rather routine.

Perhaps nothing has happened yet precisely because nothing has happened: the exercises are useful, but academic; her spars with Kerrak’s intermediates and other interested parties end in bruises, scrapes, and minor wounds now and again, but with life for both.

It helps her ignore the nagging thought that hers is a business that will, in the end, get her killed. Like hundreds before her, she is young and brash; it is an easy possibility to discredit.

[Vanidor]

So then it would be upon her next visit to the stalwart encampment belonging to Councilor Kerrak that her routine would change slightly. For rather than being allowed to join in with the men who dueled with her simply because Kerrak had made her the offer and she was a woman she would be directed to another spot of the camp. Away from that circle of chalk etched upon the ground that denoted the enlisted men's sparring ring. Away, as well, from the soldiers that eyed her like they eyed many females (for she -was- pretty) that came by the 'camp. She would be led to a more enclosed space. A more permanant circle.

This being one of the few buildings, besides the armoury, that she had never been allowed access too. Of the few structures within the wooden walls it was the largest, and within it was empty except for wooden chairs 'round the centre and a few practice mannequins at one corner. In the centre of the room would wait Aeryn. A whipcord slender youth who had seemingly started his first real spurt of light brown fuzz on his face, his hair pulled back into a tight tail. Still, he had a sinister look about him. His upper body (which was bare) bore a multitude of pale-white scars, his arms muscled and tight. At his neck a pendant of a dolphin swung on a silver chain. His stance was all calm and relaxation. And once Agnieszka Kaczmarek had stepped into this room and into this circle, he would only nod his head and draw the rapier that hung at his side.

This was what she wanted, wasn't it?

[channe]

If there's one thing she's sure of this morning, it's what she wants.

(This morning; in the future, who knows? People change, in a Wood in which everything changes.)

The girl has guts, to be sure, plus ego and bravado a-plenty, but anyone with enough experience training fighters could see a steady undercurrent of doubt running underneath the thick skin she’s been so sure in cultivating. And even though she makes an attempt to walk in like she owns this place, she knows, deep-down and sure as she was born, that Aeryn is its ruler and keeper, and that she’ll leave hurting like a bitch.

Ariane is not one to sugarcoat the process; the girl knows what she’s in for. She has been promised pain. But that's almost secondary -- this is all so very exciting, every single time, every fight that she wins and every fight that she loses; it’s all very inspiring in a twisted way, after all, this is the girl who was routed the other day but still pestered the router with questions all the way to the crossroads, anyway --

-- and that’s why, when she dons her practice leathers, steps into the ring, and draws her own sword, all the nervous and jumpy neophyte can say is a jaunty and too-loud, “Hello, er, such a pretty day, yeah?â€

[Vanidor]

It would be on a day such as this, after the gruesome spectacle and slaughter of a man, that Agnieszka's training would take an apparent step... up. For if she were indeed to come out to the training facility maintained by the elite of a certain Councilor's men, she would be met not by the usual.

Not by the swift and smiling youth who had been trying to train her in the proper arts of weilding and maintaining the pig sticker that swung at her side. But instead by a gruffer man. Lean and wiry this one was, much like the others who tended to linger 'round the covered training circle. Yet instead of a properly padded and coifed training blade, the man carried live steel in his right hand, the scabbard held loosely in his left. The man twisted and then lowered the point of his cruelly curving sabre into the dirt.

"Angieszka. Captain al'Nerun asked me to take your training to another level. Now, you can take the offer now, or you can continue playing with Aeryn. If you are ready, put your things to the side and prepare yourself. And prepare yourself for a little bleeding, I don't promise to let you leave here with just a few bruises. If not... I can always call Aeryn here, and let Him know that you didn't want to bother." And then Jons would turn aside and step away from the girl, his sabre coming up and sliding into the metal scabbard with a gentle hiss.

"Just let me know..."

[channe]

Agnieszka is suddenly and keenly aware of the fact that she is going to die.

Not on some battlefield years from today, no; it isn't even a matter of months or years. Now that she's stepped it up on both sides, Miz Emory and the Councilor's men are going to make mincemeat of her flesh and feed it to the pond eels in a matter of days.

(Not that it matters: she'd rather be mincemeat in this endeavour than successful than anything else; it's quite obvious she adores it, for some very odd reason --)

It's this thought that suddenly seizes her, along with an accompanying paroxysm of alarm (oh! she hears Miz Emory's warnings about this one bouncing about like rabbits in her head!) and makes her typical sally to deal with it by adopting her old standby: insubordination.

So she does what she's asked. She puts her things to the side, steps into the ring, and smirks at the man. "I don't come here to play."

If you can't beat 'em, goad 'em.

---

Later, as the sun is setting and the shops along the plaza are closing, she skirts Straka's barracks as quickly as she can (that couldn't have been a very good bout for her, after all, and it wasn't her only of the day, having two appointments some days), hovering for a moment in front of a darkened opposite window. She could be an artist, the way she studies the doorway with narrowed, searching eyes; she could be a judge, the way her eyes swim with an unknown, triumphant verdict.

But she moves on.

---

Ariane was right: she is not the same girl that came to her so many months ago. You can only be impressionable until an impression is made; you can only be malleable clay for so long, else the rains come to tear you apart. Something has changed, behind those wide green eyes; something has begun to congeal.

---

She'll haunt another window, later that evening; the Swithins'. She'll jiggle the doorhandle, to see if it swings open; if not, she'll try the window. If the door is open, she'll go inside; if not, she'll raise her father's lantern and squint through the pane, looking for God knows what.

[Carnath-Emory]

Captain Daniels has disbanded Straka.

Of course, there's no saying how long that will last, if it ever really begins; the Order has died and been reborn from its own ashes several times during the last decade, and likely will be again in years to come. Daniels evidently wasn't the first Captain to find his experiences with the guild to be... unsatisfactory.

But still: the Order has been disbanded, and regardless of how temporary this condition is, it's meant that certain duties have gone unattended. For the very first time, preoccupation on Straka's part will actually prove beneficial to Agnieszka, if only in a minor way -- for that door yields obediently to her testing, and she will find the interior almost untouched. Perhaps, canny girl that she is, Agnie will realise that with Gorje still unaccounted for, no would-be heirs have quite dared strip the place of its goods. Then again, it might have been the blood that's held them off.

There's quite a lot of it, after all.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for clues -- if that's what the girl is actually looking for. Councilor al'Nerun would likely have had an easier time deciphering the wreckage that Agnieszka will pick through; Captain Daniels most surely would have. For instance: she'll notice the broken window in the living room almost immediately, what with the wind that gusts through. She might find dried red stains on the hearthstone, and guess at what had happened here -- but will she see it as they would?

This is the work of an inexperienced archer: it had never occured to her that the glass would throw her first shot so awry. But so it does, the arrow shattering the window and startling Alwyn Swithin so well that he almost falls into the fireplace. The second, however, catches him low in the back as he flees, doing the job the first was supposed to: freezing him stiff in shock, and knocking him down to his knees.

A good search of the room will net her that first bolt, and she'll find it a little flattened about the metal tip. Diligent enquiries at the local smithies will waste both her time and theirs, however; the arrow is not of local make. Having explored the first room, will she dare the kitchen? For that's where thin trail of bloodstains will lead her, even as winding and unreliable as it is. Down the narrow hallway, she'll follow that gory path --

for he'd run, and she'd chased. Hah, no: he'd crawled, and she'd followed at her leisure, the Swithins enjoying a property placed at some remove from its neighbours. He'd staggered, upon regaining his unsteady feet; he'd spun and whirled in his fear -- being the younger of the brothers Swithin; being the more newly arrived to his Belief. A bloodied hand had caught against the wall and groped blindly there, for Alwyn had eyes for nothing but the dubious escape route that was his kitchen. She'd hit him for the first time then, hard enough to knock teeth from his jaw, and the hand had stuttered against the wall, had drawn long, feathery stains. Like crimson-plumed birds, they'd seemed.

Like nightingales.

-- until it culminates in the slaughterhouse that had been the Swithins' kitchen. She'll surely give wide berth to the broad stain that dominates the room: it's sticky enough about the middle that too long spent there will have her tracking bloody footprints around the place soon after. Not that hers would be the only one: there are three distinct sets, one of the brothers having had a fondness for hobnails -- and another being significantly more narrow about the toe, although slight of heel. Will she guess it for a woman's? She'd be right to.

As it happened, there'd been no real need for the knives after all, but she'd sheathed them in his body anyway, it seeming a shame to carry them unused. This had been an error; a twist of his body, and her second blade was opening the femoral artery that she'd been so intent on avoiding. The first brief spout of blood had been strong enough to colour her face and scrawl gibberish arcs across one of the walls; within minutes, the pool of it on the floor was broad enough to touch distant tablelegs, and ultimately, that was what broke him. For he hadn't much cared when she seized the back of his neck so bitingly -- but oh, how he'd gibbered when she'd pushed him down towards that mess! She'd held his nose to it, like a reluctant kitten pushed at its milk; she'd pushed his cheek through it, still warm from his own body, and perhaps that was why he'd finally begun to shriek.

Severing the tongue had proven far simpler than she'd expected.

And Agnieszka will certainly find that, if she can stomach more than just a glance at the kitchen: a small stump of muscle, gory about the broad end, fallen under the dining table. There's brother Gorje's ear as well, but that had tumbled further away, and does the girl really want to investigate so thoroughly? Does she care to look so closely at the bloodied floor, and decipher the slow struggle that left those smeared stains describe? Does she really want to know at all, now that she's here and confronted by it?

[channe]

And the answer: no, no -- but all of life's lessons are not easy.

----

"Gorje? Are you home? It's Agnie," she says, tentatively, pushing the door open.

Agnie is illiterate, whether one writes in the language of men or the language of death: she can't glean a nugget of information from a paragraph or the hearth before her, and she has no translator beside her, no conversant investigator to draw conclusions from scattered shards of glass and the patterns of spilled blood. The broken window is noted and the bolt left unnoticed as her attention is drawn to the trail leading to the kitchen.

This is, in many ways, a new kind of training for the aspirant: academically, she knows that the end of a battle means a blade lodged in flesh and muscle separated from bone. But she's been learning the steps to the dance without yet being invited to a true exhibition; this, this, now, is the royal ballroom, and the dance floor is soaking in Alwyn Swithin's blood --

I will never be like this, is her horrified thought -- I will never be a murderer --

(There's something to be said for Agnieszka's professional growth over the past year: she vomited at the sight of so much blood during the Flux, but now she stands at the doorway to the kitchen, her stomach churning but otherwise stable enough to last her a few minutes longer.)

-- Straka has not been here, she continues to realize with growing unease. I'm the first one, the very first one to know this is where Alwyn died, for what else could've it been -- where the bloody hell is Gorje?

This is the very first time in her life, then, that Agnie will read evidence like the others do: the ear on the floor whispers one of its many possible stories to her, and five seconds later she realizes the mass on the floor is somebody's tongue, and five minutes later she's careening down the street outside back towards Kerrak's camp.

(Kerrak being, of course, one of a very short list of authority figures she actually trusts: Straka is not on that list, of course, and Molly O'Neill, her father, and the very few others not fit recipients of that tale. Ariane's uncontactable until tomorrow noon, and perhaps Kerrak will know where to find her -- she will know what to do, she thinks.)

When she arrives at the gate, she'll petition the guard.

"I hafta see Counc'ler Kerrak, it's Agnie Kaczmarek and it's more important than anythin', he's the only one who can help, an' it has t' do with Alwyn Swithin's murder an' Straka's not gonna help me -- " and on, and on, and on, and she won't take no for an answer.

If he knows anything about Ariane's student and Jons' current pincushion, it's that the girl will stand there all night if she has to, making a pest of herself, until she's heard out.

[Vanidor]

The girl would be left outside for several long moments, while the guards on the other side of the gate sent word to the pavillion tent that made up the centre of the camp. Word would come back soon enough. And it would come from Aeryn, who leaned over the palisade wall and peer down at the hard breathing young woman. His turqouise-hued tunic jostled in the wind as his hands gripped the worn edges of the wall.

"Agnie! Heed, the councilor isn't here, but is instead at the meeting house. You may stay here the night if that is your wish, as he will return upon the morrow. Or I can sent a troop with you back to Myrken. Make your choice. Come in, or run for town." Aeryn would then brush back his hair, the man's fingers seemed dark with grime. Perhaps he had been digging in the dirt? In any case, the man would continue to lean down and watch. All she had to do was say what she wanted, and Aeryn was seemingly ready to do whatever she needed.

[channe]

People sleep at the Meetinghouse?

That's a new one for Agnie, who is now wearing a jilted half-scowl as she regards the palisade with some dissappointment. It dissappears into something more determined as she makes her decision and looks back up to the young man. Does she notice his fingers? Most likely.

"Aww, that's sweet of ye, Aeryn, but a troop'd only slow me down," she says, mimicking some of the light taunts she's sent him in the training circle; what follows that, however, is genuine. "Thank ye, though. I'll go back to town."

She'll run in that direction posthaste.

(What she'd really like to say is more along the lines of I miss ye somethin' fierce, Aeryn, Jons takes me for a pincushion or a flayin' doll -- but that would be unbecoming, and time is growing short.)

[channe]

They were not good men, Agnie --
-- they stood by and watched as children were sacrificed --

At breakfast, Agnieszka Kaczmarek lies to her father.
Just before lunch, she may lie to Ariane Carnath-Emory.
After dinner, she plans to lie to her sister Giertruda.

All subsequent to and joined with the first lie, a midnight lie, a lie that trumps them all.

Can I trust you to keep a secret --

But Kerrak was wrong. A secret like this one cannot simply be kept; it must be restrained and collared. It must be cowed.

There was something in his words that seriously disturbed Agnie. Despite the uncommon offers he's made in the past, a personage such as Kerrak al'Nerun does not need to explain such things to the likes of dirty Agnie Kaczmarek, a peasant to whom he holds no kind of formal commitment; her demands should mean nothing. She should mean nothing. But, yet, Agnie is now in the possession of secrets, the kind that you don't just trust someone not to tell.

Or do you?

And why did he make that last, absurd suggestion?

I keep my promises --

At the center of everything swings fickle Trust, her hold light on the quickly fraying rope that is Myrken and her people. The only question now is how long until the fall?

I think you would have a harder time convincing Her --