Rough Waters

[Niabh]

This time his judgement was more correct than perhaps even he could have anticipated: she had no reason to believe he would try the same thing twice and so walked, almost literally, into his arms. Her face displayed surprise, but no alarm this time; her hand, as if understanding what was required of it somewhat sooner than the rest of her, moved obediently to his shoulder—this in a woman for whom obedience had the ring of a prison sentence.

A Tuatha queen was not so hard to capture after all: a warm night (albeit one with no stars and in a strange city), a warm, firm body against her own, a hand to hold, a dance. And a story. Particularly a story so clearly about her; her vast vanity crowded out even the ability to be shamed for her vanity. All the rest might have provided a fleeting distraction, but the story bound her more surely than when he had possessed her name. One did not surrender one’s consciousness along with the name; there was no final, merciful subsuming of identity to make servitude more bearable. Now her attention was rapt, irresistible, and entirely voluntary. While she was still physically capable of escaping, she no longer had any will do to so. It was evident in the languid weight of the hand upon his shoulder, the way she swayed to his will as he turned her, the trusting manner in she finally closed her eyes, all the better to listen.

Only when he was finished speaking did she stir, the dazzled, dreamy veil lifting from her features to be replaced by dismay as she stared into his face and seemed to struggle to remember who he was. She put her fingers against his lower lip and shook her head, already too late to silence him. “Don’t. Don’t do this.”

Don’t do it to whom? To her, to bewitch her and make her lose her way? Or to himself, exhausting himself further in his efforts to retain whatever shaky foothold of control remained to him.

Her solution to that would be to simply cut through the knot of indecision by relinquishing control entirely. But that wasn’t his way. And for some reason that mattered now.

[Glenn]

Her fingers quieted him even as the dance drifted to a stop. It could only survive the end of the story for a short while. It had been all of his quickness, all of his deftness, pulling her back along, crafting her a story that was both subtle and obvious, worthy of the night. He would have never managed it if he was at his best, yet it had taken just about everything he had left. "On second thought," he said softly, realizing that he had been walking so quickly to try to outpace the truths nipping at his heels, realizing that now, as a light exhaustion drifted over him, "there's a place to get drinks right around the corner. The princess can rot; I'm drinking with a queen tonight."

It took some effort, more effort than it ought to given they only had a limited number of limbs, but he disentangled himself from her. His retreat became a near-stumble as he apparently overdid it, which led to a bit of laughter to cover the embarrassment. Deft feet could only take him so far, apparently. "The Rosy Nose. Terrible name. No reason for you to have to walk more though. We'll let the spies think I'm plotting to give the king sniffles."

His left hand ran diagonally down across across his face, wiping both eyes in the process. He squeezed them shut and opened them, turning without looking at her. "Come on, then, almost there."

[Niabh]

She, infuriatingly, was in much better condition than he was, with a surplus of energy that could have easily carried through to dancing all night be it in a ballroom or right here in the streets. Then again, she was so much a creature of the evening that she was practically nocturnal; this hour felt like mid-morning to her. Around dawn it might occur to her to make her way toward a bed (or in this case, an abandoned rooftop pigeon croft she’d scouted out much earlier) but that was so distant, it might as well not exist. She scampered after him like a puppy—albeit a rather subdued puppy who remembered to keep her hands tucked behind her back, and who kept her eyes fixed, concerned, upon his bleary face.

“I’m not entirely certain you should have a drink,” she said, half-serious. “You look ready to drop. Plus you have your name back, and you’re already dancing in the street spouting poetry. That leaves me with scarcely anything more to accomplish.” She smiled enough to let him know she was joking, but her head was still cocked at that serious, concerned angle. “Glenn.” So odd that she could call him by any name she chose now, no longer bound to one. “Glenn, what was that about? Who were you dancing for, you or me?”

She bowed her head, walking at his side while dwelling thoughtfully on the pavement just ahead of her skirt’s hem. “It seems to me,” for no Tuatha anywhere could just let a story end without they meddle with it, “that the prince could have just as well gone off on his own seeking beauty. There’s no need to blame us for every fool thing your folk get up to, you know. You’re perfectly capable of doing it on your own. Probably that poor Queen had come there on her own business and he interrupted her, so she set him off on some quest to get him out of her hair so that she could get some work done, then forgot about him. We do tend to forget about mortal folks when they’re not standing right in front of us, I’m afraid. It’s not our fault, really. It’s just you tend to go away so quickly that it’s better to see you all as a herd. That way you’re always there forever.”

Now she was looking at him, solely at him, intently.

“A very long time ago, Sionnach, when we still lived Here with your folk, we thought there was a chance to make you all go away forever and spare ourselves. We took it. And we waited and waited in the hope that one day we could come back and take everything all for ourselves again. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for, in a way. Now I come Here again and there are so many of you, more than ever we left behind. So many more than there are of us. You’re going to be here forever.”

She looked down again, licked her lips, spoke slowly and simply as if her knowledge of the human tongue were fading before his eyes. “I am going to tell you something that I probably should not. Think of it as payment for the story, an you must. My High Queen would like to see it happen in her lifetime. She is afraid that our folk will die out before yours. Seeing all I have seen here…I am afraid of that too, now. Save that I have a way of being rid of you all, and the High Queen wants it. But none of us dares to let her have it. None of us knows what she will truly do. She’s mad.”

This sentence a whisper, a shameful admission, as if she might be overheard. Nervously, convulsively, she rubbed the knob of her throat.

[Glenn]

"It's just been a while since I had a night like this." Was it insulting to indicate he'd have other nights like this? To be fair, she'd caused the last one, but that was more about angry scribbling in a journal as he tried to defeat her glamourie with logic and almost drove himself mad (again) in the process. Before that, it had been a while. Usually it had been more about enduring tortures than fantasies and dancing. Different muscles to stretch but ones that had atrophied regardless.

Her question had been earnest and direct. The answer, unfortunately, was anything but. "You said it yourself," four words that were among his more frustrating, "it's all more enjoyable when the other person's enjoying it too. Some of it was for me and much of it was for you and some of it wasn't it at all and that was especially for me but a little for you too. We could pick it apart for days but isn't it better just to agree it was for both of us?"

That was the simple part, really, because then she had gone into the story and the unrequested payment; he didn't contest any of her commentary. Fatigue had him in its grip and that inspired a certain selectivity to his arguments. "I don't disagree," for he had chosen specifically how the Queen would enter the story: servant instead of beggar woman. He was exacting and measured in ways that other humans she had encountered might be casual. Details mattered. "It does little for my pride, though. I'd hate to be forgotten," and for Burnie, a man who saw most religious texts as declarations of war and all afterlives as unlikely sentences, wasn't that at the crux of so much of what he did?

She then told her tale, short as it was, and he did not intervene or interject. She stared and found nothing, no reaction, no horror, just that self same weariness. When he finally looked at her, it was with a wane smile. "Finn, you've been here for six years. This'll keep til morning." His gaze was warm, but it didn't linger. He was back to walking (though not swiftly), head forward and, with effort, focused on the road ahead. "Right now, we follow the plan. We round this corner. I go inside. I get us drinks. We sit on a stoop. You ask your questions about what you saw of me, what I said while I was in there. I'll ask my questions of you based on what you showed me. You get to go first because I am a fucking gentleman. Heroism and horrors can hold til the morning."

[Niabh]

“In where? In the carriage?” Confused, she glanced back over her shoulder in the direction from which they’d come, though the carriage itself was long out of view by now. Comprehension came rapidly, but still later than it should have done given the circumstances. He meant the glam. Strange to think of being inside a glam, as one might be inside a house, but then, of course he would. She relaxed and nodded in understanding. Her body language had subtly shifted and she had repositioned herself to slightly behind his shoulder, in an anticipatory, protective location like a bodyguard—largely so that she could dive and scoop him up by the armpits if he should visibly wobble.

Even now, this was all something of a triumph. She’d worn out Glenn Burnie. This was not how she preferred to wear out her men, and it wasn’t as if this was something she could proudly boast of back in Myrken, but a personal victory was a victory all the same.

Her lips pressed thin at the somewhat vague and disappointing answer, which veered dangerously to a return to form. At this point, she was not as annoyed with it as she might have been earlier. A circumloquacious answer was better than a question entirely avoided. Something had shifted. Outside the heat of the moment, she might be able to define it better than that. But Tuatha responded to such shifts on instinct, and she was self-aware enough to question if the urge to protect him was in response to that shift—that she might dig more out of him if she but kept the source from tuckering out—or genuine fondness. Or both. For her, the two were not in contradiction.

In any case she gave him a wry smile in return, with a sardonic bow of the head, when he suggested putting off talk of the Queen until later. Frankly, she didn’t mind putting off the Queen until later. Until doomsday, could it be managed. There was quite enough before them as it was, and little time, judging by how he was walking just now. “A fucking gentleman does not refer to himself as a ‘fucking gentleman’ before a lady,” she remarked primly. “Or so I have been told. Go get drinks. Get coffee, if they have it. You look as though you could use it. If you try to fall asleep on me, I’m leaving you propped up glammed as a leper with half a nose.”

Here was a stoop. She sat down upon it, her knees neatly pressed together, looking like a forlorn princess abandoned after the ball.

[Glenn]

It wasn't quite like dancing, but Burnie knew a thing or two about staunch female bodyguards. Her presence there seemed to steady him somewhat. He was walking better now. Maybe it was because he no longer had to walk and talk or walk and think. Maybe it was because he knew he didn't have to go so far anymore. Yes, she had worn him out. He had temporarily obtained her name and her surrender in the process, but she had tired him out. In truth, that wasn't her most significant victory. It would be morning, at the earliest, until she'd see what was temporary and what was not. Still, there seemed to be still more gains to be potentially made this evening, or at least to be secured.

"I don't believe you," he shook his head again, still an airy action, light and comfortable. "Who told you that? Oh, no matter. Let me go see if they'll make me coffee." He was already moving on towards the door. He needed a few seconds more than he liked of walking for him to find a comeback. She was already heading towards the stoop when he did. "And anyway, you like my nose. It's indistinguishable."

----
It was a good few minutes before he came back, seeming somewhat more alert. There were less forgiving fellows within the tavern and he had to make conversation with them during his wait. In one hand was a cup of coffee, with sure signs of it already having dribbled down his arm (though not having scalded it, which gives some further indication about the scale of the spill). In the other was the poor excuse for beer that one would find at the tavern that was the closest and not the best. "Did you want wine?" He couldn't remember if they had spoken about this. They had spoken about many things and he was not quite as sharp as usual. "You seem more of the beer sort but you're dressed for wine."

After handing the drink off, whether she wanted it or not, he'd sit beside her. He refused the stoop entirely and plopped down to the ground, sprawling out in a manner that would have seemed unlikely the previous day but that also paled to the sort of wallowing he had done within the glamour. "Ask me something and I'll try to answer true."

[Niabh]

“Beer’s beer.” She accepted the tankard, took a tentative sip, swallowed. “Except for this. This is water.” Still she took another sip. “I’ve accepted that I’m never going to have another proper beer until I go home.” The statement came out a bit too wistful to be a joke, as she’d intended. “I’ve thought of brewing my own. I even asked around for barley, but when I tried to explain what I wanted, the man wouldn’t sell it to me. Apparently when barley Here turns purple, it’s ruined and they throw it out. I even offered to buy what they’d been throwing out but he wouldn’t hear of it. I think he thought I was up to no good.” She took another swallow. “So much for it. I did not know one could dress for wine.”

With dry humor and a touch of envy, she watched him stretch out on the ground. She did not join him, but scooted down two steps to rest her feet near him. “So,” she said quietly. “You know I am no good with metaphors. Always I find myself wondering a bit if you mean me to take something as true or if you speak in a figure. It’s worse with mortal folk and glamour. The two sort of—” Lost for words, she gestured, fingers coming together and interweaving at stiff angles. “Mesh? Merge?”

The longer this preamble went on, the more she realized she was putting it off on purpose. She was torn. A nice long letter and she could avoid some of the trouble of translating, fumbling for words. But he could squirm out of that simply by overlooking and not answering. She had her suspicions about how willing he was to go through this, if he truly wanted to answer or if he was making a sacrifice solely to satisfy his own curiosity in turn.

More than anything, she thought, But he looks so tired.

The tankard was set down beside her ankle. Her hands clasped before her as she leaned down to look at him. “This curse. Was that a true thing, or was it a metaphor? Was it a bargain made with one of mine—like me, or one of these others your folk call fairy too? Is it upon you yet?”

[Glenn]

"Save for that night back in Myrken, I haven't been drunk in years. Not properly. I'd socially drink for a while. Always wine. Derry Red. I had to keep up appearances." He seemed wistful himself for a moment. "I haven't been drunk since I was young. What a strange notion. I took care after my loss. I could have fallen into that hole and never emerged. I'd seen it before. Hell, I see it now with Agony. I'm not sure I can fix that one again, not even with all of my pretty, pretty words." He sipped his coffee. While he could talk at length without breathing, having something to sip meant for pauses. In this case it was a mercy. Unfortunately, the coffee didn't seem to be much better than the beer was if his expression was any indication.

The pause allowed her to ask her question. Once she began to talk, he was patient, not cutting her off, not providing her words or trying to finish her sentences.

As much as he seemed to want to go through this exchange in the first place, he did not seem particularly pleased with this line of questioning. "How about this? There was an object which represented the curse. Upon my return from beneath the earth, I found it destroyed, ash. When my soul was rendered, the object was destroyed and the curse was broken. I think it thought me dead and could no longer sustain itself, but then I think a lot of things." There, that was easy. More words, weary and bemused, found their way past his lips and over to her ears. "For instance, I'm pretty sure it was a wizard, not one of your people, but then it could have been one of your people pretending to be a wizard. I'm not sure I ever met a proper wizard other than that day and you can imagine the sorts I've met." Despite another sip, his voice became more distant. "If it had any purpose at all, it was a mathematical one, to have someone where he didn't belong at a time when he did not belong. I have my doubts, though. So, I was cursed. Now I'm not. It was a trick. It was right after I had escaped the monastery. I bargained away my first taste of freedom for adventure, to see the world."

[Niabh]

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she leaned lower toward him, her elbow balanced on knees, fingers laced to prop up her chin. She was perfectly capable of queening just as well from a stoop as a throne. “How about this: on this matter we may have different priorities. You gave me free leave to question you and I decided this one concerns me. Now that you have answered it, I am assured that it does not and we need not press further.”

He had already stated that he disliked the queening on principle, and she was running the risk of shutting him up with it, but that was a gamble she was willing to take. She pitied both his exhausted condition and her role in causing it, but she did not pity it quite enough not to take advantage of it. In this case, dealing with someone who might still be under a powerful curse was something she needed to know for her own well-being. Moreover, if it was truly something one of her own folk had done, she might know how to undo it, or at least understand how it had been done—something useful, at any rate. Where she was from, curses were akin to colorblindness or being born deaf: unfortunate, but everyone knew someone who had been so afflicted.

“Mayhap you’ve sworn off the bottle. From what I saw, that is for the best. You’re the sort who’d never find mirth in it, only oblivion. You’d destroy yourself with it. But you were blind-drunk on glamour and thirsting for more.” Her expression became wistful. “Oh, you’d never last to sunset back home, Sionnach. We’d make a meal of you. There’d be some who did it because they’d hate you and wished to see you ruined. They’d push you until you lost yourself and who you were, and then they’d yank it all back and leave you to crawl and crave it for whatever life remained in you. But there’d also be ones like me.” She gave him a sad smile. “Who wouldn’t know any better and would only think they were making you happy by giving you what you wanted, never realizing it until it was too late. A year ago, I might have done that.” Her head drooped forward, a rare admission of culpability. Still she smiled, though this time only into the beer at her feet. She tapped the tankard with a toe just enough to set her reflection rippling. “I would have felt bad about it afterwards, but my feeling bad about it wouldn’t help you not one whit.”

Her gaze shifted back to him. “That’s why I spoke before about this void you say you feel, this hollowness. If the root of the trouble is her, that might be explanation enough. But I can’t help but feel it runs deeper. That’s not…I’ve only ever seen something like that in little children Here, but it doesn’t harm them. They only accept it.” Her voice by now was breaking, not from emotion—for her face was ever that same smooth mask brushed with only mild puzzlement—but from the effort of articulating concepts for which she had never bothered to apply words. Glamourie was something she knew so instinctively that it had never occurred to her to even be curious about how its effects worked, so long as they did. “Were you…aware of any of that, when the glam was on you? Do you know where it might all come from?”

[Glenn]

As she leaned towards him, he went out of his way, far out of his way, to make it obvious that he was staring directly up her nose. That involved no small amount of leaning himself, but even weary, he was an agile being; more than that, he was determined. It was, if nothing else, a new use of the word 'undermine.' "I can think of a few ways it might concern you. I cannot be wholly sure that it did not color my opinion of magic in general." He pursed his lips, thinking that through. "I don't believe that coloring was from the curse itself but from the effects of it. The color was red. Even though I so often try to see you for who you are, I do not hate you instinctively for what you are. I may have felt otherwise upon my arrival in Myrken." Now, then, the queen bit was another story but he was dealing with that by having a lovely conversation with her left nostril. As ways to defy her went, she probably still had the upper hand, not stymied in the least from achieving her goals.

When she began to speak of her people, he slumped back down. "I think how I would or would not do in your home is more talk for tomorrow, Finn, for certain revelations are actionable. In fact," and here, his next defiant act, a mere smile, upside down because his head had arched this way instead of that. "I think I'd be rather potent among your people." He waggled a finger, though less at her and more at existence itself, "if we get past that..."

That, of course, was everything she was talking about. "That's a fair question. Was I aware? I was acutely aware back in Myrken but that was because you were giving me everything I did not want. No, I was less aware, especially at first. The longer I was in it, the more aware I became, but also the less I seemed to mind." The tilt went from upside down to simply askew. He was no longer smiling. Instead, he was focusing, but ended it with a tiny shake. "Whatever I'm feeling still is me and not you. It's more than..." That brought forth a laugh, soft, slightly bitter and slightly amused. He rubbed at his eyes with his palm. "I can't even finish sentences. What have you wrought?" which was just like him after saying it was all him and none her.

"The question at hand. Rhaena Olwak and I met and began to hold hands 'neath the bar. She was a veil-wearing trader. I was a be-cursed lie of a mapmaker who could not leave the confines of Myrken lest I wished to wake up thousands of miles and a few months away with no idea how I had gotten there. Nice kids. She connected her mind with my own. This was a bad idea, forbidden, not at all to be recommended. It was a river and the river flowed one way. My shabby, shoddy human mind was not strong enough to bear the weight of it and certainly not strong enough to bear the absence once I had a taste of it. Others tried to intervene to block the connection. We were far too clever for them." Despite himself, he smiled again at that; them against the world, young and and in love and so, so foolish. "We made increasingly poor decisions. She lost her morality, then a hand and her courage, then her substance, then her sanity. I lost my soul and then, finally, her. Over the years, my mind, did in fact, grow strong enough to carry the weight. In the time that has passed, with the loss of her, the strength I built up seems to have atrophied. What you offer is not the same, but just go and try to tell my starving mind that. Poke at it and it'll eat your finger whole."

Somewhere in there (right around the wry, fond, wistful smile), his eyes had shut. Now they opened again, even he outstretched his arms over his prone head to allow for the world's largest shrug.

[Niabh]

“You can’t finish sentences because you’re half-a-snore shy of falling asleep on the street like a drunk. An actual drunk, not just a nuisance whose personal problems are so delicate and unique that the fruit of mortal vineyards are like unto ash, or some such claptrap.”

Setting the beer well aside, she suddenly bunched up her shoulders and pounced from the steps, skirts and all, in a somersault over his prone body to land crouched on the walk just beyond his shoulder. She struck ground in the tattered kilt and open-throated blue tunic, hair hanging loose to dangle in his face. Not a sound nor a second of warning nor even a change of expression.

“There is only one way you’d be allowed to be potent among my people, and you would not enjoy it.” From her stony expression, she was deadly earnest. Her shaggy head tipped to the side in acquiescence. “But you speak true. It’s not a matter worth arguing just now.”

Easing down to a seat, she pressed her knees together and tucked her feet beneath her—not the most comfortable position for kneeling bare-legged on pavement but she seemed willing to stick it out. “You’ve told me all this before. It was in the other letter, the one that was not meant for me. Even the same turn of phrase. Hands beneath a table.” She frowned at that, ever so slightly. “I would wonder at that. I would wonder too, if the hollow was there even before her, but that you never had time to worry about it. Did you feel it before her?” A hand brushed beside her face. “It scarcely matters, really. It’s there now.”

Even now, she had the same instinctual urge to draw away from any mention of his lost lady. It felt like curiosity bordering on cruelty before, but now it seemed…appropriate, if not outright opportunistic. Ah well. Worse that could happen, he’d go slightly mad again and now she knew how to fix that, or at least put a stopper in it. “You saw her,” she said, relentless. “The glam broke down the barriers and you remembered. What was it that you saw?”

[Glenn]

"Claptra..." He had been in the process of repeating that word quite useless when she went sailing over his head. He clenched his eyes shut and opened them again. If there was alarm, it was that he had stumbled his way right back into the glamour. His lips became a loose circle and he exhaled slowly through them. Then, at the very worst time possible, he sat up and scootched back over the ground to the stoop, taking the beer and swallowing a large gulp of it.

There was a newly recovered alertness to his eyes as he stared her down, as if the stoop was a wall and his back was to it. "See," the challenge was starting to reenter them, ever so slightly, but it was tempered by a fondness he couldn't or wouldn't hide. "you can be cross with me tomorrow. If you would like a preview, the obvious answer is to do everything in my power to benefit your people and a certain charming, passionate, and brilliant and deserving young queen that I know so that they need not be at odds with my and mine. The rest can come tomorrow."

His rebellion (collusion?) was short lived for she brought the topic back to him quickly, first deeply, and then so deeply that he felt like he might drown on the beer running down to his stomach. "I didn't realize. I'm sorry," which would be him apologizing for repeating things he had already told her in a letter that they never really spoke so directly about pertaining to the late love of his life. It meant that he was subdued when she asked her final question. He might have bursts of clarity and fire, but they currently could only last so long.

"I saw her die. I saw who killed her. Everyone in Myrken was affected by her death. They all lost a half hour of memory. No one was sure who killed her. I was connected to her still. I felt her death. Then I forgot it. Now I remember." They were short sentences and at the end of them, despite every single thing they had said in the minutes before, he, glassy-eyed, began to bring the beer back up to his lips.

[Niabh]

"No you don't," she said quietly. "You run and run and run. You run away from questions you don't like. You run away from questions you can't answer. You run from the ones you don't want to answer. You run away from ones that make you the least wee bit uncomfortable. It's all one with me. But an you're going to run now, have enough dignity not to run to the bottom of a bottle. That's beneath you. Particularly when you know that I'm a much better bottle. I'll bargain for it, even: you stand your ground and answer, I'll glam you enough that you can get some rest this night. Proper rest and proper dreams. And by the time you wake, I'll be gone."

And then he took her by surprise. Her gaze remained unwavering, and she did not stir outwardly, but her stomach spasmed, her throat clamped convulsively, the nasty flavor of bad beer was on the back of her tongue. I forgot it. Now I remember.

Without once shifting her gaze off him, her hand flicked out and slapped aside the tankard. Between blinks, her eyes went full black again. The left ear sprouted through the bushy mane of curls. Then the right ear. Both swiveled toward him, tips quivering. Her whole body tensed, her only real movement the quiet shifting as she braced her feet to spring.

Still she did not seem angry. She did not even feel particularly angry—not even the familiar frustration he usually roused in her. It was that he dared drink at all after what they had just discussed, that galled her as much as the boasting. Mayhap he needed the defiance to feel present, particularly now when he was scraping the last of his resources; mayhap he needed it to feel safe.

“I'll ask this once, here and now,” she said softly, though there was nothing soft in her face, nothing at all, “and if the answer be nay, say nay and no more need be spoke of it. Was it you? Did she make you do it somehow?”

[Glenn]

The first drink:

Rhaena Olwak was not an illusionist. The Ashfiend's memorial of pain took one out of one's life and into his. Sarayn Dala'vaesa's drugged letters produced odd dreams. Her cursed ring shifted interest. Cameron Holbrook's Chimera dreams were undeniably unreal. Catch's blood, consumed, expanded one's perceptions far beyond the scope of everyday life. Against every threat, against every violation, he had his intellect, his craftiness, his stubbornness. He knew who he was. He knew what life was. He knew what life should be. He could cling to his beliefs and push back against the Power before him.

Then there was Golben. Weeks felt like days. One turn became another. A mapmaker, then far more experienced than when he was holding hands under a table with the Olwak girl, could not trust his eyes. Even that would have been surmountable, but he was made unable to realize it.

She leaped over his head. Her, who had all but fallen out of a carriage, who had danced with the grace of a goddess. Perhaps days later he would come to realize the difference between her inside a man-made structure and out in the night, feet upon dirt and grass, but in this moment, he did not. Instead, he felt like he could no longer trust his eyes, no longer believe in his own perception. He could act, however, and he did. Grabbing the tankard and drinking from it was an act of defiance, was an attempt to do what he always did in such a situation, to get the person with more power to act in anger, to hit him instead of magic him.

Because of his particular reading of the situation (a faulty one at best), it worked too well in entirely the wrong way.

The second drink:

The second drink did not occur, despite his worst efforts. Instead, her words assaulted him. His response was not at all a retreat. No, the attempt at retreat came immediately thereafter, when it was far too late. She never gave him the chance.

"No," and because no was not nay, and because he had to, he continued. "I was in Golben, the labyrinth of my own making, where she put me after Giuseppe's betrayal. I had lost myself there. When she died, I was on the verge of starving without even realizing it. They found me." He was running again, giving her information she didn't need, that wasn't relevant. Realizing this, he looked at her with alert, hard, harsh eyes. "It was not me. I wish it was, for that I could have managed. You may not believe it, but I could. There wasn't anything left of her but the strength, a momentary strength, to be brave enough to die. By that point, I had already killed her twice, killed everything that mattered save her body. Better me than an innocent. Better me than she who was forced to do it." He swallowed, his throat parched, the emptiness within him all consuming. "That's horrible. Unspeakable, but it's the moment of her death, that darkness, what came next, that oblivion. I shut my eyes and I see it. I'll have to find my way through that now."

He took another step forward, closer to her, anger starting to well inside of him, a churning, indiscriminate rage for the loss he felt, the loss he made, even for her role, unasked, in the remembering. How dare she say what she did? He'd swear against his true name to answer any question she might muster. "No running. I'm not afraid of any of your questions, Finn. I'm not afraid of my own. I don't want a bottle, not that one and not you. Darkness or no, I'm better off than I was yesterday. I'm better off knowing. I'm better off remembering. I'm better off facing it instead of hiding in a room." He softened then, rage giving way to something that may, just may, have been wisdom. "It's just, Finn, I'm better off not facing it alone. None of us can face it alone, not really. If I've learned anything, then I've learned that."

[Niabh]

The longer he spoke, the harder she had to force herself to focus. She did not want to be hearing any of this. Part of her recoiled on instinct from death, the very idea of death, how easy and awful it was for them, its only mercy the fact that when it finally happened, they wouldn’t know. That he did brought not pity but horror. But she bought and bargained and bullied it out of him, and the price she paid for that was having to listen and remember all of it and never fall back a step nor drop her eyes, not even when his burned like coals.

She had no true Sight, not like Meg, not even as much as Brammie who had just enough of it to always turn up exactly when the sweets were cool enough to swipe one, to be right at someone’s elbow just as they offered some small prize in exchange for a chore, or to move unerringly to the very spot where she lost her earring. More might than Sight, Ainrid had once said of the Nialls. But she had enough wit to recognize that look. Lashing out, looking for someone to blame for his pain. Well often enough she’d found herself doing the same Here, willing to blame them all for being baffling before she’d blame herself for being baffled, then growing even more furious when they were too stupid to realize they were at fault.

“What have I been saying, then? You need your own folk. It’s not that they know what’s happened to you; they know you. They know what all this feels like—death and loss and things. You’re one of them.” She shook her head so fast in frustration that her curls set up a dry rustle, like so many sprigs of paper. “Why do you think I keep pushing you toward the door, man? The coin, this stupid ball, agreeing to meet you in Myrken…I even made you crash a wedding and you weren’t even there for that one. Go and find someone. It’s not like you’re the only man for miles. This city alone has thousands of folks just like you; surely you can avoid pissing off one or two of them.”

Even as she spoke, bitter, uninvited self-pity twisted in her chest. Must be nice to be able to turn your back on people for as long as you wanted and know they would still be there whenever you decided to come back. Must be nice to be so spoiled for choice in company that you could choose to be alone.

From the back of her mind came Ainrid’s brusque, cheerful advice: mostly we only wish for other people what we would have for ourselves.

The very realization that she had to imagine Ainrid, that she couldn’t have the actual article to speak to her or offer her wry advice or assure her that this was all, somewhere in the world, completely normal and would pass, only underscored the sense of distance and helplessness. Her hands fell slack against her thighs.

“You know what’s there now. You can’t bury it and you can’t run from it, because it’s part of you. It..these things do have a little less power when you know they belong to you, when it…when they don’t feel so much like something outside yourself with a will of its own that can steal up on you in the dark whenever it wants. Whenever it turns up, you know that you’re the one who summoned it there.”

The words stumbled because they were not her own; they were Ainrid’s. She was both trying to recall what the bard had said and trying to translate it, all at once, and fearing she might be mangling both. At the time, it had been a comfort to her, and now it was all she had to offer for comfort in return. “When the memories come, they don’t come to punish you. It’s your own self trying to give back something that’s part of you, so that you have power over it. Not the power to banish it, but to take it back into yourself so that you can be whole again.”