by Carnath-Emory » Mon Sep 30, 2013 3:43 am
What does he ask of her, if not a collar for his throat? Exactly the sort of leash that she'd loathed, as a child; that, as a woman grown, she'd learned bitterly to resent. That she'd once been in such need of just such restraints had only fueled her loathing.
What does he ask? And with such solemn need, so that in the end it is not unlike what Cherny had told her - months ago, during another lifetime, just as complicated and in entirely different ways. Tasty porridge, he'd said. Tasty porridge in a magical bowl, the tender lies a child might tell, a child or else a desperate adult; the sort of loving deceit of which she herself was never quite capable. Not when she was told to be; not even when she longed to be, those moments in which it seemed like a single word, falsely-said, might be the brightest kindness she could bestow.
Until a Lady's grace lifted a thousand heavy burdens from her soul and replaced them with the capacity to deceive.
That, too, she'd struggled desperately to shed.
"Glour'eya." Because it's to her that the words must go, and of all the things she might have said under gentler circumstances - of leverage, of the ways in which a swordswoman might be effectively compelled - in the end it is only this: "I am not glass. I do not break."
But she does not restrain that glittering knife from the hand which hastens to retrieve it. She does not hold a girl back from her escape - and in the wake of what Catch has said, horrors which she wishes, fervently wishes had never been spoken aloud - what could this be but an escape? Turns her back on this, with a seamstress' charges in her ears and in the wake of the only promise she's ever known how to make, and takes the seat offered her by a Catch who, through all his angry hurt, still wanted her hand.
Steel is a gentle trickle across their fingertips: hers, his; warm yet with the memory of her veins. It does not explore his skin but only yields to the tug of gravity, where she's allowed it to flow, for like its owner it is keenly familiar with the threat of violence; unlike its owner it does not know anything else.
"There are - so few good stories about little girls with stolen horses." Because that was what he'd asked of her, days ago: that girl, that escape that in the end had amounted to so little, so much. "A girl so young - it's not her time yet, you see? She must wait a little yet. If only she knew how to be patient." Her mouth was never made for smiling. This time it hardly tries. "Two nights before he left us forever - "
He. Us.
So little need to speak the names.
" - he had me meet him near the tavern's stables, there being a thing which he would have me see. His steed, I thought. What else could it be? And I was not wrong."
Her hand had been a mindless clench upon his own, long moments ago. Had she ever actually realised? It's gentled somewhat now, in either case; long, scarred fingers have grown very still.
"An uncommon request. You know what it is, to - know a person, without that you speak much words ever at all?" A glance, wondering; knowing. "It was ever this way between us. Uncommon, that he would make this - overture. So: to these stables, and to this steed, and he wondered, would I ride with him a time? And to look into his eyes was to understand that this was no idle request; of course I agreed."
And was there anything, really anything that she might have denied him? The General, who'd wrenched that knife out of her skin and staunched the fountaining blood that followed. Who'd held a girl's arms as she put the schiavona right through her -
"I must hold tightly to him, he said." Strange, her eyes confess. "I must trust him with all my heart. And when the ground gave 'way beneath us, when his horse became - " Smiling after all, thin and wry. "Hrimfax were not the first of his kind I had ever seen; did you know this?" He didn't. Of course he didn't. "And the other, the first; it ended - badly."
The strange, dreaming daze, afterwards. Her body sluggish with the memory of wounds it no longer wore.
Blood splattered her ankles with every step she took, and none of it was his.
"I must have deafened his ears with my screaming. 'til there was no voice left in me, and then I just clung to him, terrified. This thing he wanted to show me, glorious and precious, and this was my answer to it, all this fear. But he had bade me trust him, Catch, and his voice were quiet and steady even when mine was nothing but a - a croak." Laughter. Almost laughter. "The world sank into darkness beneath us, but I held to him with all my strength, and he did not let me fall."
The breath comes to her slowly, now; her eyes are quietly for his.
"I will not put no leash to your neck, Catch. I do not want to. I cannot bear to. But if you think you want one - if you feel you need one - let it be this: when inside you it is all furious and hurting, when it wants to shout, when it wants to hit, when all the world is sick and on fire - right at that moment, Catch, you listen to what I have to say.
And we see if we can keep from falling."