Broken Words

[Rance]

Once, she had compared Elliot Brown to a pimple, a bit of grease clogging a pore that had swollen with infection. She had told Cherny that his outside was hard, red, enraged; his inside, though, was whiter, and when the nails might be dug under the skin and relief given to the blemish, they might truly see him. Unpleasant analogy? Yes. Utilitarian, accurate? She believed.

Not a single change in her face as he spoke. The seamstress knew the importance of words; she knew how to sing them, how -- in Jernoan -- to write them, how they might be read. She knew, too, how to speak them.

And with that came value in listening. Synthesizing.

"And then," she said, when a moment had passed all had been silent. "And what if I make the wrong choice, Elliot Brown? What if I have pushed myself too far away from what it is that made me Glour'eya Wynsee, who stands here now -- before you, afraid -- and I become some lost thing, some girl without direction? Derelict," she said.

"My Jernotown," his word, chosen specifically, "is a place of derision, but it is mine. It may not be my choice to be free of Jernoah, for it is in my veins as sure as this tarsweat under my skin, as sure as the thing beneath this glove," black-gloved fingers spread, thrust before him, displayed. "But I strive, Elliot, for it is not so easy to shed and forget.

"We are shaped by what has come for us, yes? For good, for the worse. Putting the sticks to poor shoulders," she said, tilting down her head, bonnet giving a bow that said nothing, but everything at all -- understanding. "Or burning bodies--"

--like Myrkenites do.

"You took a secret from me, Elliot." There was no accusation in her voice, no harshness, only that lilting accent. She reached up with her palm and knocked back her bonnet, her oily hair like old wax, her cheek smudged with dirt. "And now I will give you another to bear." Like you have given one to me.

"I ask that you bear it for Cherny," she said, as if it was a quiet pact. "Because he is better than us. Yes?"

[Glenn]

What does he say to that?

How does she make sure she doesn't make the wrong choice? "You can't. But at least you made the choice. At least you put yourself out there. At least you dared to live. There's shame in failure, maybe, but there's so much more in not trying. In not..." In not what? Pushing against the the impossible? These are words that Elliot doesn't have. It's a feeling. It's surviving in Myrken. "You be here long enough. You'll know." It'll break her heart a thousand times, but she'll know. "And you'll be a damn sight better off than if you had stayed in Jernoland." You'll look everyone right in the eyes and you'll know.

This was too much, though, too much for him. She took her bonnet off and he wanted his hood back on. First Galacia and now this. Too many words and too many thoughts and too much for a boy who lives free. She said things that should have gripped him and they didn't. He'd found his freedom, at least from the old things. He realized it though, and for a moment he mourned for the boy that was and the man that might have been.

"There was one thing I meant to do for Cherny, since he was better. He refused it and he won't be better forever," and it was spoken in the tone of an Elliot that never wanted to hear that tossed back on him again. "You want me to keep a secret, then I'll do it for you, this once, because I still haven't decided what I'm going to do with the first one."

[Rance]

At least you put yourself out there. At least you dared to live.

Not all things had been her choice.

"I will say this, Elliot," she said. "Your letter to me eased an illness in my heart; I feared I had done -- done things to your body; I feared that I might be imprisoned, that a game of scares had become something more."

For that moment, bonnetless, the grains of grime visible along her neck, the old stains of tarsweat crawling in dried lines down one side of her temple, she was not a seamstress -- she was just a girl.

"The secret you bear now means nothing, Elliot Brown. It should -- should not mean anything. For you to flaunt it and share it with the world, it would be a contradiction to what you have said to me this very day, to what you have written in your letter. It is a thing of my homeland, a mark of it, and were you to shout it from the mountains," a phrase he himself had used, "then I would always be Glour'eya the Jerno. I would never be Gloria the Seamstress.

"Your lesson is to move me past shame, Elliot -- and I, with my guts, am trying. But to speak that secret aloud and ensure this malady is -- is always in the minds of others, you would be making my choice for me. I hope your words are from a better heart than that."

And that was the challenge proposed to him: to see if his words he gave her today were things of golden value, or if they were like cotton bandages, easily saturated, bled-through, discarded. She did not give him her eyes for long; she would not hammerhose thoughts into him with a stare. No, if he were to speak it aloud, she would handle what would come.

Finally, she girl took her stained skirts up in her fists and settled on one corner of the chopping-stump, its face blemished with a thousand of Catch's mighty strikes. She ran her finger along it, feeling the ridges, wondering if the echo of a cracking a'algaszh still clung to the trees. "The secret?" She turned her head, looked through the snowy ferms, to no spot in particular, her hands gathered in her lap. "I do not always miss the knocking, Elliot. I do not always miss striking the rat'vak until they cried, and I cried; I do not always miss beating little girls with my fists, and spitting upon them, or getting the marks of their teeth in my knuckles.

"I fight it back, but it is hard. It is hard," she said. "And I cannot tell Master Cherny that sometimes, I wish I were that girl again, if only to pour those feelings out of me. To get them gone as quick as they arise."

She clenched her skirts like they were living things, strangling them, an answer to their constant wrinkles.

"But you, Elliot, I will tell. If ever I must. I give you my word, so you understand that I am giving this desire to be free my all."

No other words of that. Nothing else, about the walls she sometimes struck, or the way she had once bloodied her knuckles on the pile of wood behind them just for the sake of it. But there was one untouched inquiry:

"May I ask -- may I ask what he refused, Elliot?"

[Glenn]

She feared that she would be imprisoned. It was strange. Elliot should have that fear, more and more. He valued freedom so. Didn't he just say that? Look at his proclivities. If he was caught, that freedom would be taken from him, or worse, yet it did not seem to be a fear in the youth. "It wasn't a game." His voice was quick. "Some things are games. That wasn't one of them. What I told you, the limit I gave you, that wasn't a game either. I didn't do it for fun or to compete with you, to beat you or whatever. Don't think that and don't say it."

The secret, though. Back to the secret. "I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced that you won't let your shame cripple you still." He looked away. "Show it to me. I'm not going to tell anyone, because then people would.. we can be hard on what we don't understand. To survive. You understand that because you've been here long enough. i was never going to make you show everyone." It wasn't a game. Didn't she see? "I was just going to make you confront it yourself." She was right. If she had agreed with him the first thing he would have told her to do was to hide it from everyone. "You're not hiding it because of what they would think. You're hiding it because of what you think about yourself. You're hiding it so you can hide yourself, so that you can keep yourself a prisoner. I'm okay with you hiding it because of them, because of us. We are what we are."

Then she tells her other secret and maybe it comes as a bit of a surprise, maybe not. Elliot's not exactly being emotive today so it would be hard for her to say one way or the other. His eyes were steady and cold. "I tend to throw things. Used to be shoes." Now it might well be daggers. "It's normal, right? We control it when we got to. Professional reasons. I guess you don't want to screw up a seam or whatever. It's okay to be human. It's less okay to hide it to make you feel better than everyone else." A slight shrug broke through the ice of his demeanor, but that didn't make it warm.

"Help." Simple, this answer to her last question. "I offered to look after him. No one did that for me when I was his age. My ma and pa had lot of kids. There wasn't enough to go around. Cherny's got less than that; work, sure, but for an evil old bastard and for next to nothing, I bet. I would have looked out for him. Clothes. Food. Protection. He wanted nothing to do with it. So I don't owe him nothing."

[Rance]

Don't think that and don't say it. He told her about choices, yet he made a demand.

"Shame will not be shed in an instant, Elliot Brown. It is not a thing you can shrug off like dirty clothes. I have given you my word that with every ounce of sweat, with every consideration, I will be done with it."

But it would take time.

She did not know whether his request -- show it to me -- was figurative or literal, so she responded as she thought she must: by lofting that gloved hand, pinching the fingertips, and drawing them free. Underneath that black fabric was a hand as thick as her other, given the crude likeness of nails and knuckle-wrinkles. It was a mirror, reflective, smooth like an alchemist's mercury. She held the back of it upright, so he might see himself in the reflection, for in that moment, she would own that shame, like he had owned the lash of the a'algaszh.

"This is mine," she said, softly, not like a verbal combatant, but like a child. "I hide it away for the reasons you say; likewise, I hide it away from myself. It is not just my shame to bear. You see? But today, I learn to fight shame. Yes?"

There was no one around. Because of that, she dropped the glove to the ground, a symbol like something out of one of her poems.

No more was spoken of this anger bred in her, sand-hot anger that she hid in her seamwork, that she swallowed down and pushed away because it was her quiet, private treasure. She had given him that, and that was all -- a little piece of her for Elliot Brown that he could understand, an unspoken expression of trust.

"The mistake you made, Elliot, in the case of Master Cherny, was that you lied to yourself. Boys do not understand what girls know, that boys are tender and sensitive types. I watch out for Master Cherny because he has no choice in that.

"He is like a brother to me. Catch once asked when I first met him if I was his mother, but I am no damned mother," she said, a snap of the words, quick and immediate, as if to sever any lingering echo that she might be confused for one. "But you, Elliot." She looked at the older boy directly, as if giving him no option to look anywhere else. "You want him to be safe; you want to look after him. You give him a blade for yool, and you tried to turn him away from your attempt at killing. Killing, Elliot.

"And yet, you gave him this offer of your aid, not so he could choose, but so you could shed responsibiliy when he -- when he inevitably denied it. A boy will be a boy, full of pride and puffed up to the seams. You see?

"You care, Elliot. But that too is less okay to hide...to make you feel better than everyone else." His own words were not hard to remember; her culture was one wherein whole histories and poems were regularly memorized. "You care for Cherny. Perhaps a little for me, too, else you would not be here. For those girls you stretch yourself between." How did she know of them?

"It is like you are ashamed of caring."

[Glenn]

She was rather good at shrugging about dirty clothes. Elliot took a deep breath as he heard her. Too much. What happened with Niall and Raia, what then happened with Nova, the talk with Galacia, the whipping. In some ways, though, this was the worst of all and he was quickly reaching his limit. "Your word's earned the right to decide what you'll do." As if it was his to give, but didn't he tell her? He was Elliot Brown and he took what he wanted. She then had to find a way to take it back or not. In this case, she earned it back.

Others would have questions about that hand, what it did, what it meant, how it was transformed. Elliot, though? Today? No, he just nodded. Two years ago he'd be horrified. Two years ago he'd have said terrible things and meant them. Now? Now he had a battlemage on one arm with her scars and tattoos and a pale, demon-tailed being of light and magic on the other. Now he spent his mornings with an elf and in his own way he loved all three of them. "It's nicer than Olwak's."

Her dropping of the glove earned her another nod. Elliot was full of these gestures lately, a trust fall with Galacia, meeting Niall in the middle of a room for an embrace after deciding to kill with but a look, and yes, moving into that strike like he had. It meant he could appreciate certain efforts and hoped that she could as well. That nod meant something.

And then, well meaning, caring, concerned for that brother of hers and for the soul of Elliot Brown, or maybe, just maybe, simply trying to turn his words back upon him, she went too far. "I'm not the one with a hand to hide and I'm not the one to hide that hand, Gloria. I do what I do. I care how I care. I show what I show. It's mine to show and I'm aware of it." He'd rise to his feet, would put his hood up once more. "I don't run from it. I don't hide from it. And you'd do well to remember that, 'less I decide to show even less of it to you."

[Rance]

"I will remember it," said the girl. "I remember lots of things, Elliot Brown."

She could almost see him sliding back underneath that rawhide skin of his, but she did not try to keep him from it. It was a comfortable kind of skin to wear. It suited him, even if it did not become him. The Elliot Brown that pulled that hood back over his head was not the same one who had written that first letter to her, was not the one who chose to meet here, at a stump still scarred from her whistling strikes with the a'algazsh.

He was about to leave, she imagined. There was nothing left to say. He had opened himself up just enough for her to peer inside and want to get her silvery fingers between the stitches and pry, pry them apart.

"I ask you to consider two things, Elliot," she said, as she shot to her feet and brushed the chips of wood from her threadbare skirts. "Two things. Yes? Think of them like an apology for yourself, for even stepping this far out of your important personal business to help a foolish girl:

"One, that if you've ever a way you wish to aid Master Cherny, you will let me know it -- and I will do my best to see it through, within reason. That is a favor for the good part of your heart," she said.

"And two? That I have promised you I will try to be better this day, and I hope so will you. I have only a glove to take off, Elliot, but I think you might have more. Beneath the wine-tossing, the names, the teasing, and what other less-than-true things make you, I think -- I think -- there is a better Messa Brown. One I would be very elated to know through more than just letters."

Then, without hesitation, the seamstress thrust out her mercury hand, elbow locked, the sweat-blackened sleeve pulling halfway up her arm, showing the bronze skin beyond the wrist, the normalness. Offering to shake. A motion she had only recently understood.

"This talk has been very nice," she said. "A very fine talk."

But she knew by his motions, by the language in his body, it was time to be done with it.

It was time to be granite again.

[Glenn]

He was done considering things, more than done. He didn't really want to be thinking in the best of circumstances, and they were far past that. If he had to, Galacia or Solena were far better partners for such a thing, even if Galacia's questions were sometimes hard. Gloria's were as well, but with far less incentive. She kept pushing. Two things as an apology for himself. Perhaps something was lost in translation there. The scowl she could see behind the hood. They were close enough now.

"Help Cherny. Fine." That was easy. "Stop calling him a Master for one. He's nine. His biggest problem is that he decides that doesn't matter sometimes."

As for the second, a more pleasant nod. A more serious one. A better Elliot Brown within him. He spat boyishly into his hand and held it out, would take her hand, no matter how strange it was, how potentially dangerous. It would be a fine handshake, a fine way to end this day of talking, right?

Or at least it would have been if he had let go. Instead, he held on and pulled her in, closer to him. "Know something Gloria. Know one last thing." It was a near whisper, for they were so close, a warning. "I've made my decisions. I've made my choices. Dark choices, but they're mine to the core and I don't regret them. If you get too deep into my business, you're just going to get hurt. Worse than you think you can. Worse than you've ever been. The kind you don't recover from. Mind your distance. None of this is a game." No, there was no better Elliot Brown to be found, not anymore. He'd made his choices.

[Rance]

"There's a difference between aid," she said, "and stupid requests; I will call him what I feel is right, unless he tells me otherwise."

She was not dissuaded by his saliva. It was with a very firm hand -- the kind of hand that knew how to hold a whipping branch -- that she clapped her palm against his. The silvery flesh felt no different than normal. Warm, lifelike, a sufficient analogue.

He pulled her in, until her chin was almost against his shoulder and his words were stiff against her ear. Her black hair had the stink of firesmoke and sweat; her hand tightened around his, not that this might be a moment to be shared, but that for a second, she could have been scared, could have been frightened by him--

But she was not. Not like this. Not in this moment. She'd had several like them. With Solena, who had told her to say silent, and yet, the seamstress had stood her ground. With Catch, whose soul was filled with black smoke in his times without control, who could have torn her to pieces in his wild, furios rage, and yet, the seamstress stood her ground.

Jernos were stubborn people; Gloria Wynsee was no different.

None of this is a game.

Yet, it was without fright that the girl in the dirty dress knew that his words were meaningless, because she had already been drawn into his business. The second he had given her an ultimatum, the second he had leaned into her strikes, she had been dragged into the world of Elliot Brown, and now he had given her this: a chance to think he was something entirely apart from how he claimed to be.

Jernos were curious people; Gloria Wynsee was no different.

Niall -- they did not speak of Niall, for there had been no need, what would speaking of her even accomplish -- would never forgive her. Solena, too.

She nodded at his words. Stern. Forward. Understanding.

"If maybe -- if maybe you did not let a girl beat you up in the first place,you would not have to worry about that, Elliot Brown, " she whispered back, squeezing his hand -- a sign for her of friendship, and perhaps to him, a sign of nothing.

She pulled her palm away. She gripped skirt-sides and lowered herself into a faint and appropriate bow. Then, with a stumble of her feet over an errant branch, the girl scooped up her muddy glove and was gone.