"Benedict."
Names were important. You needed something to connect you with someone else. Names or roles. There were so few roles. Master and servant. Patron and supplicant. Vendor and Purchaser. Familial ones, maybe? Husband and wife? He didn't want to think about that. Names were different. So long as you had names, you could be a thousand different things to someone else. You could connect through any of those strands, through all of them, not just through one or two. Benedict served people who didn't need names for that purpose, who had other ways to express who they were. At one point, Glenn hadn't needed at least one name. It had been the happiest, most secure thing he ever experienced.
He stared down at the three letters before him. There was a fourth but it had been put away, placed elsewhere, put somewhere safe. The gift that came along with it, however? That was in his hand, that was something to fidget with, to busy a body with so that he did not busy a mind with it, the small sparkling sort of thing that the his friend would sometimes swoop down and snatch at. In this case, Glenn was ready for it, prepared. A swift rebuke would come if need be. He needed a swift rebuke.
He needed a great many things.
"This letter is..." which was as far as he got before fading off and looking from the newest letter, from Fionn's, to the first of the three. "They're all useless. I can't do a damned thing with any of them, Benedict. Listen to this. Just listen to it. This would all be easier if you could read. Just listen:
For one, it will be admired by them;
For two, it will be yearned for by them;
For three, it will be frightening to them;
For forth, it will be threatening to them.
She's doing this just to be difficult." The ring was pressed into his right palm, pressed hard enough to leave an imprint, and as he leaned his face upon that hand, it pressed lightly into his right eye socket. It revealed no secrets. "If someone sneezes three times in a row, they think it's some sort of curse. Of course it's going to be all those things to them! Your queen's been living among them for years and she's all those things to them. I know the story of Catch. I've seen it first hand and I've damn well hallucinated the rest, thank you very much. The trick is to take small steps and not to tell them even a tenth of what's going on, Benedict. Whatever gains they see have to be mundane gains. They never know entirely what's going on but if it's a benefit to everyone, it doesn't matter. She won't hear that. She'll never hear that."
There was wank and then there was ranting. Ranting was easier to just ignore if the individual doing it didn't keep bringing your name into the middle of it. "And she thinks that I'm going to bring Finn's people blood and strife? They have blood and strife. Maybe if they had a different sort of blood and strife, maybe strife and blood, some of ours, they'd find the time to rut each other and have more children."
This would be a good point for the raven to stop him, to actually talk about whatever it was Glenn was saying, but there was no stopping him now. "And Genny. She writes like she has something to prove. Gloria has something to prove. Finn has something to prove. Neither of them write like they have anything to prove. Genny doesn't have a damned thing to prove and it's all she does. She's carrying around power and unconscious horrors, and she's fucking about in dreams. I'm going to bring her nothing but pain, but she's the only one offering me anything in this. It's all backwards. She's the one that scares me. The only one. I'm afraid to see her. I'm afraid what will happen, how bad it'll get."
He swallowed, because that was difficult, thinking through the entirety of that statement was difficult. His heart throbbed more quickly and he squeezed the right more tightly. "Because she's human. Despite the powers and the horrors, she's just human. I have to step back out that door, Benedict, and it's not all going to be queens and monsters and oozing Wynsees. I'm ready for all of them. I could go off tomorrow to your lands and it'd be a fucking disaster but it'd be one that I could navigate. Maybe I could go out and deal with a thousand starving kids, too. It's the one that'll be the problem. The one mundane, normal kid bleeding out of his pores because of some stupid disease we should have come up with a cure with two hundred years ago."
Rarely did he blame those who came before him. Sometimes, Savoy. Sometimes, but that had been years ago. He'd grown out of that. IT had never been rational. Right now, though, he was tempted. Right now, this felt rational. "Even with her, with Finn, it's because of other people. If it's just the two of us and the idea of her people and mine, it's okay, but first Gloria and now Ainrid, and pretty soon all of Myrken. It shatters the illusion and we're using the illusion as a bridge to meet halfway." One more swallow for good measure; his throat was dry. How much had he said? How long had he been talking? Instead, he gave the ring one last squeeze and looked down at the three letters. "I don't know if I can fix this, Benedict. Any of it."