Sense Can Be Said

[Rance]

"I told him that I wanted his lady to die."

Minutes ago--

Elliot could not stop talking; he could not stop spouting his edicts, his prides, his honors, as if he was some ever-speaking book of steely chivalry. His back was turned as he descended like a prideful nightingale upon Noura. In the seamstress' hands was Caliir's mouth-bit, an object that made great beasts obey and serve in silence. The tiniest, most arrogant and selfish part of her reached over his head, yanked the bit until it knocked against Elliot's teeth, crushed against his lips, choked him--

She could still feel the bridle in her hands. The bite of leather and rusted steel.

Together she and Duquesne sat beneath the trees. He had led her away, a pillar of calmness and patience even as she told Elliot he was a j'uk'ol, as the want to hurt him, crack him, snap his sureness and charity awakened in her sun-scorched veins. The theatrics of the attack -- If I try to hurt Elliot, maybe Cherny will go to his defense like a good squire; he could hit me, and Elliot would know him to be loyal -- had become sloppy--

For a moment, she'd forgotten she was trying to play a role at all.

But her palms were empty now as she stumbled down to sit in the tall grass beneath the bending audience of overgrown trees. Ferns had escaped the sunlight here, bowing like soldiers to the kingly oaks that reached toward the Glass Sun. They'd been striving for the sky since times before history, it seemed; they were bark-skinned gods that defied the brightness of summer day, bringing cool and mute shadows to the grass.

Her skin was soiled with beads of black sweat and she sat in a crumpled mess of tattered patchwork. She didn't want to walk anymore; she let go of Duquesne's hand and worried her skirt-hem with her bare fingers. The gloved hand hid in the grass, a deceitful artifact.

"I didn't mean for you to see that. To see me try to -- to hurt him." Her words were careful and soft. "But his back was turned, and he is -- he is not Elliot Brown anymore. And for a moment I thought that I might solve the problem the way that a Jerno does. Eliminate it, overpower it. Stifle the guilt under prayer later; scramble for rationality with over-analysis, convince myself that it was for the right reasons.

"But I -- I just wanted him to stop talking, Proctor."

[Duquesne]

The man has loosed his mare to crop the grasses growing thick nearby and after watching that dark beast drift, her lowered head nearly consumed by the abundance of her mane's long and thick waves, he turns somewhat to watch Gloria worry her skirt-hem. Dew that lingers in the grass moistens the dust on his boots as he approaches a log made white by the absence of its bark and the abuse of passing seasons. He leans and braces himself with a gloved hand on that surface, lowering himself down to sit after, being of a weary state of mind.

He listens to her explanation, which is a most valid one and honest as well -- she ever spoke her feeling and rarely suppressed anything, unlike her teacher whose unreasonable habit is silence. "Do you believe the transformation of Elliot Brown can be understood, even solved, by abusing Elliot Gahald? either by word or action?"

The man looks up at her finally, after having been surveying his hands and the patient, systematic loosening of gloves from each finger. And afterward the pair of them are held in a loose grip of his right hand, for the left had been weak and unsteady of late. "And do you expect this is the key to great leadership?" his head bends in the same moment his hand and its bundle of glove-leather gestures toward the distant tavern and its stable from which they have come. "Not even a horse deserves the bit that would bloody its mouth."

[Rance]

She never looked at him. He had that power, that mixture of soothing understanding tangled with careful reprimand; it intimidated her, perhaps more than any layweed switch or rubberwood cane. For several moments she feared that if she glanced up at him, he would have no anger in his face, but instead softness, compassion, inscribed like old carvings in wood.

Duquesne was an architect, but of more than stone or lime -- he knew how to connect one word to the next, not merely for utility, but for the aesthetic impact. She traced each question as if she could touch them with her fingers, pry the phrases apart, understand them. Understand herself.

"It would solve nothing," she admitted, hiding behind the tangled veil of her hair. "I wished he might have gotten furious with me, enough to turn about and strike. Cut my skin. Hit me in the jaw. I am a brute and -- and far from being fine. Perhaps he -- he would have wanted to break something that was so far away from being beautiful that I could have an excuse to pummel him until he soiled himself. Because I am frustrated and -- and it is better than hitting trees or bails of straw with a quarterstaff.

"It is no key to leadership," she said, "but certainly a path toward some kind of satisfaction. You see?"

The digits of her gloved hand knotted between strands of sprouting grass. She wrapped them around her knuckles and yanked them them until the gave out a pop, the minute roots torn free. She scattered the murdered brush in her lap.

Not even a horse deserves the bit that would bloody its mouth.

"But don't you -- don't you sometimes want to hit her," the girl asked. "Ariane. Don't you want, when words fail and your discipline is frayed to its edges, want to -- to just hit her until the parts that are not her bleed out through her nose?

"I wouldn't blame you." Sometimes the truth tasted of bile, stank like the red, leady water speared out of jah'zoon bladders when they'd been poisoned by disease. "Especially," she added, with the petulance of a child, "if you happened to break her dainty little parasol in the process."

[Duquesne]

Liquor had burned its way into him -- two swallows of the most strong and vile substance behind the Dagger's counter -- and the result was a welcome ease, removing the bitter edge from his ride and the morning's events. An encounter with the Lady-Thing had neither begun well nor ended well. Despite intentions and a moment of earnest exchange, something precious, they parted ways, both of them offended.

Hence a morning's hard ride.

His eyes move toward his mare, feeling he had perhaps driven her too hard... and yet one gaze over her healthy look and appetite has him settled on the matter. His attention returns to Gloria, here with some rueful action of his mouth. "I understand that, the need for satisfaction." A pause. "It can be difficult to resist, born from a deep want. Yet in the aftermath we are seldom met by the fulfillment we hoped for, but only more doubt as another of our principles has been trampled under our own feet.

"If Elliot had turned and lashed out as you had wanted -- as if he were his old self -- it would have made your work simple, too easily won." The architect lowers his gloves to the whitened trunk of his seat and rests forearms on his thighs, leans into them as he opens his hands and gazes down at scarred palms, disfigured for the torture put to them years before -- and it was torture for the sake of torture alone. Retribution. "If you deal your aggression overmuch, they will fail to respect it and therefore you."

The man lifts his head and looks at her, here with a shadow of solemn measure lurking at the fringe. And surely she has seen the sight of it before, though of late he had been in far better spirits and it was a welcome change for Darkenhold, that the man grown heavy with sorrow through the winter and spring had finally come to emerge. Yet his delicate peace had disintegrated and slipped from a desperate clutch. "But I suspect there is more to the incident than you've mentioned."

[Rance]

"Sometimes I do not care to be respected," she told him. "This is a place where respect has been skewed, Proctor. Respect is for the false princesses and stahls that flounce about in their dashing little fineries. And if -- if that is the kind of respect I must seek around here, then I would prefer to scrape my knuckles and wade in shit."

Her voice had gotten sharp near the end, crescendoed with a girl's frustration -- for as Sylvius Duquesne had known far more times than perhaps even he desired, she found it difficult to marshal her emotions around him. He had a gaze that saw through sandstone flesh and Sun-scorched resolve; she wore her honesty like her muddy sweat.

She had torn a patch of grass away from beside her hip, her elbow bent and palm gathering sprigs of ferny-edged weeds like valuable gems. "Cherny is going to be his squire," she whispered, the words themselves balancing on the edges of truths that she thought it might have been best to conceal. "He knows how dear Cherny is to me. Even here, even this -- this Gahald Elliot. It was better that I voice my distaste, go at him with the bit, and let Cherny intervene.

"Let him win his knight's loyalty. Cherny could make it seem like he has buried a history with his -- his low-streets sister for a fairer and more righteous calling."

But none of the words could be savored. None of them were victories.

"You didn't answer my question." She finally looked up to him. There were crescents underneath the girl's eyes, streaks through her tarsweat-smeared cheeks that spoke of old tears whose sound she'd forcefully, properly stifled. "You may be my teacher, you may be my friend, but you are also just a man.

"You have been drinking. Something sharp. When you were inside. I can smell it. More," she said against her sleeve, "than usual."

[Duquesne]

"That is not the sort of respect I speak of," he says, with a descent in the tone of these syllables, denoting something more enduring, more grim perhaps, than the respect offered social and political elites. And this is the last he will say of it.

And as her confession unfolds, so too does an awareness of a plan, a clever one. Infiltration. His eyes lift and he studies the girl for a long moment, though he has said nothing in response to what she has described -- his thoughts are moving here, unprepared to be voiced as yet. As it turns out, he need make no word on the scheme, for she has reminded him of the question he did not answer.

All private musings halt in the moment she does.

His features seem so schooled and yet the shadows his eyes have come to betray far more, the pressing haunt of a dozen ghosts now crowding him from all sides. And it is into this calm surface, which is his expression, that disturbance ripples in and causes a look of regret. He shakes his head subtly, for she has asked if he would not sometimes care to hit the woman the Marshall has become, and the architecture of his eyes lends itself to tension as he looks into the grass around his boots. But his student arrests his attention yet again by her latter comments and the glance he lends is quick, poised for displeasure.

The man does not seem even to breathe... and then pulls in a slow breath as he straightens his fingers into some gesture of private exasperation, then looks aside. With gloves grasped tight into one hand, he leans and commits himself to standing. "Allow me to spare your nose and place myself at a comfortable remove," he replies tightly, an uncommon display, and turns to step over the log on which he had sat, treads away some feet before he slows, stops and stares forward among the trees and all the natural obstacles beneath their green boughs.

"I have not wanted to hit her, not even once," he murmurs after composing his mood. "My father had a penchant for beatings; I will not follow his example." He shakes his head. This was not the first moment he had realized his father's brutality had prepared him for the life he now lives -- pain and torture being chief. Bitterness rises inside him.

"This must end. The governor must be found, wherever he is, and Rhaena Olwak must be made to reverse her ill-conceived works -- if they can be reversed at all." He looks grimly at his student now. "Who remains untouched by her? Who remains trustworthy."

[Rance]

He knew Gloria to be an observer, a fledgling student of rhetoric who'd already had an eye trained for the speech of a body. Her ever-struggling inability to perfectly grasp the Standard had decreed that she make it habitual to watch lips and hands and wonder on the accuracy of the speech their motions accompanied.

But it was Duquesne's voice that carried the weight here. Allow me to spare your nose and place myself at a comfortable remove.

The girl still shook from the excitement of the struggle with the knight. She was wrinkled and rumpled, her blouse untucked, her wrists and throat smeared with shining gleams of black sweat. He stepped back, placed himself at a comfortable remove while she clamored to her bare feet and gave a few vicious strokes of her hands along her skirts, wiping them clean. She thrived here as she sometimes did in the chambers of Darkenhold, hungry for debate, a challenge of logic in a closed environment -- and all she wanted was to antagonize, to infuriate; a reflection of the self, a stubborn Jerno removed from burning sand.

"So you either lie to me," she said, "or you contradict yourself willingly: You father had a penchant for beatings, yet you will threaten me with the promise of your fists while upholding your want to abstain from using them?

"My -- my nose invites you," said the seamstress, patting a palm against its curved and bulbous ridge, a permanent angle from its recent breaking. The motion was a tease, a foolish girl trying to pick fights among the ferns. "My homeland had a -- a penchant for beatings, and I am not nearly so proud to deny the want of my knuckles, ser. I would give you my nose freely for a chance to see how I might respond in kind to your jaw."

The words came out quickly, a deluge, well before she could harness them or stifle them against her palm. She breathed rapidly and with fervor. Her gloved fist was a stone against her thigh. She blinked once, and then again -- she was not speaking to Elliot Gahald anymore, though she thought she saw his face there, a phantom image--

"Proctor," she said, the word a sudden apology. Her voice deflated and dirty hands wrangled the front of her patchwork skirt, her gaze shunned to the ground.

"I sometimes wish you acted more human and less like an impenetrable column of stone," the seamstress admitted. "So that I would not think I am the only impulsive fool. We are wanting greatly for honesty lately. This whole place."

Who remains trustworthy, he asked.

"I don't know. Cherny," she said. "Menna Noura. Mister Catch. And you..."

The phrase bled, begging long moments for its completion, before it became a question.

"And you, Proctor? Are you? For I know she means so very much to you. And if you chose to drown the anger and disappointment by -- by being like she has become, I would not blame you."

[Duquesne]

If it was her aim to infuriate him, intentionally or otherwise unconsciously, she has succeeded.

Yet his reaction may not be of an expected calibre, no blatant aggression, no dramatic action of body or hands. Instead, it is in the man's posture that this change first occurs -- here, the spine seems straighter; the hands close themselves; the jaw flexes, austere. "You mistake my meaning," he says, the old damage of the throat lending its voice the sound of gravel. He had spared her nose the smell of liquor by stepping away, since it seemed to disgust her so -- had assuredly not been suggesting anything like what she heard. The man moves himself a small degree in order to view the girl and the eyes he puts on her are vivid, their green color unrestrained and unnatural. If she hoped for a sense of humanity, she will have it here, for the man's expression offers distinct feeling. The chief among these, however, is outrage.

The hand that grips gloves with tightened purpose here leaves his side, raised even as he raises his first-finger in warning. "Your temper offends -- I recommend harnessing it before you lose the privilege of your education."

With an unblinking gaze, he regards her from the midst of a most nobly disciplined wrath and the experience cannot be enjoyable, must surely be anything but, for his displeasure is palpable when roused from its dormancy. The man inhales tightly through his mouth and nose and resumes his watch of the forest ahead, though sees it differently than he had before, sees its for the spectrum which the sun's light lends -- and the eyes have changed and their quality is animal, predator. He takes time about his breathing, ignores her during this crucial practice. When finally he speaks again, his voice itself is calm and yet retains its rough nature.

"The world does not want me human, girl. It will not have me otherwise, and thus if you keep my company you must find it within yourself to endure it however you can." A pause. "Have you known me to be dishonest? I do not speak openly of private matters, but neither do I lie -- there is a sizable difference."

Irritated by the useless state of his sight, brought on autonomically by anger, he closes his eyes and addresses her latter concerns with a weary tone and a clear undercurrent of perseverance. "I will drown the anger and disappointment by hunting a solution, Gloria, for there is no honor in bending a knee to such white-washed madness solely to ease the burden of its occurrence.

"Until a viable solution is discovered, I will attend the well-being of Ariane Emory because it is right, because she deserves no less from me, and because I love her no matter her state." The man turns his head somewhat in her direction, but chooses not to look at her. "Is this human enough for you?

"May we now set aside these matters and discuss Myrken's latest divergence from Reason? for I have acquired something that will benefit resistance, something that should interest you."

[Rance]

"No," she said, the word plagued with weight. "No, I meant not to offend you, ser, but to--"

But to what? To put her shoulder to one of the few people she knew she could trust? To disrespect he who'd only recently helped excuse her from a situation of potentially dire consequence? Criticize as she might, she fell silent as Duquesne spoke; he needed none of his childhood's steel rods to discipline her. His extended finger was warning enough, so much so that she feared it would glint like a sharpened blade cut like a surgeon's bonesaw.

...there is no honor in bending a knee to such white-washed madness solely to ease the burden of its occurrence.

She pressed a palm against one of her eyes, as though the flesh might be enough to soak away the dampness at their corners. She sniffed hard enough that the snot cleared from her nose and tasted like the salt of a sea. He denounced his humanity, yet displayed it as she secretly desired -- his caustic tone, his outward expression of love for the woman of which they spoke: the marred Marshall, the mind-addled compass by which she directed her own future (I should wish one day to be like her, she sometimes thought) and the scale of external reason by which he balanced his present.

But he was off-balance and a seamstress had no idea of a future.

"Elliot Brown I will instigate as I must; it is better for Cherny's well-being that I be a common frustration for both the knight and his squire. Cherny understands this. What -- what it was you saw, with the horse's bit," she clarified, "was a child of those thoughts. Cherny came to his aid against me. I am better at selling my own stupidity than I am sewn bags in the market square."

She was comfortable to speak on Myrken's latest divergence from Reason far more than she was of their tension. Here, student and teacher sat quite a way's away from one another, he with his frustrated attention for his gloves, and she with her hands still tugging at grass.

"I will do what I must, like you, to -- to maintain my respect for Ariane. I know that what occurs isn't her doing. I know it isn't Elliot's, either, but he--" A grimace, the recognition of a contradiction, "--he I can't abide as readily, and I couldn't tell you why, Proctor. It hurts me to see what has become of her. But he infuriates me. Uncontrollably."

I have acquired something that will benefit resistance, something that should interest you.

She breathed a sigh. Resistance. It was an organized title for a fantastic ideal, one that did not suit muddy skirts or angry girls. But she tilted her chin up, tried finally to find his eyes with hers -- to show him, without meaning, that she hoped though him.

The girl was scared.

"What -- what something?" Gloria asked. "Is it something that -- that can fix her?"

[Duquesne]

The man must turn away, must lend himself to a shift of dusty boots in the forest duff and dew-laden grass. And he raises the hand with the gloves still inside it, presses the backs of knuckles to his mouth as he attempts to better manage his voice and the feeling behind it. Gloria was scared; he knew, he could read the signs. She could look for hope through him.

Who was there to lend him hope?

The question had come to mind so many times before when he found himself an island in the midst of storms, and every time the answer crept in plain and unadorned, and with no small whisper of dread -- no one but his own self. A slipper-footed lady-thing seemed to embody the hope that routinely fell through grasping hands. But it was the flashing eyes and fierce loyalty of a swordswoman that raised him up, even when she was a thousand miles removed or when she was next to him but trapped at the fringes of her own mind. A prisoner.

The man's hand lowers away from his face, lowers and hooks beneath low belt-leather at his hip; the other hand rises to follow suit, and being the left hand, it grips leather coincidentally close to some blackish knife hilt half-hidden by his jacket. And he turns somewhat to look at the girl, still so young and pressed into such adult matters -- not unlike another girl he knew once. A shadow has made itself a quiet home on his brow, but the texture of anger in him has subsided, else it has been suppressed from sight altogether. Eyes have normalized -- pupils relax, irises drain of their brighter shade until familiar darkness returns.

Is it something that -- that can fix her? He looks into the forest, watching the light change as clouds drift slowly overhead, masking the sun or exposing its color and heat. It is not her question he responds to now, but a thing she said earlier -- uncontrollable fury. "If Gahald's presence gives rise to such feeling," and he looks at her now, looks at her closely, "you must be careful, for it is the part of you -- the part of us all -- most capable of irreparable harm." He says it with intimacy. He knew that within his own being, there dwelled a shadow that could --

He shakes his head and looks into the forest again. "Be careful. Use your mind, think things through carefully before you act. The practice will keep you alive." And finally he restores the topic once more to that something he had mentioned moments ago, that something which they must ride to in order to see. "No. It cannot fix her... but perhaps it will help us educate the public. Come, let us fetch Caliir."

[Rance]

Be careful. Use your mind, think things through carefully before you act.

If she knew she could give him hope, she would have drawn it from her satchel and held it like a throbbing mess in her hands. She would have offered it to him, broken and black like pitch, a flimsy lump of oil and holy sand--

--but she had none of that. None for herself, none for him; that was the danger of being stone, for the seamstress thought only to lean against him as if he were a reliable wall and rarely considered supporting him, fearing the pillar might fall and shatter across her. But the signs were written across Duquesne -- he'd taught the girl to read body language as much as the spoken word. He telegraphed his frustration by breathing against his knuckles, by seeking out his waist where a weapon so often hung.

She extended a gloved hand to him. She sought to take his in hers, to clench it like she were gripping a shield or helping him stay upright.

"You're my friend," she said, leading him to the stables. "A great enough one for me to admit that it stings when you are so inherently right. Because I am very capable of being so unquestionably, impulsively wrong."

The stables had gone quiet, lonesome; they smelled of unraked horse's shit and the acrid stink of urine-drenched hay. The aroma was improperly common, and once inside, the horses bleated their multitude of greetings and pleas. In the furthest stall there stood the shadow of a beast that Duquesne and the Marshall had bestowed upon her. He was no horse. In all their thoughtfulness, the architect and swordswoman knew she despised the noble beasts.

Caliir's hair was a tangled mess of filthy brown curls that dangled like the branches of a weeping willow. His flat, bison-like face was blank and dull, an indelibly expressionless cast of old wrinkles in black skin. He chewed on the foam that crackled in his mouth, his moist gums lonely save for a single inappropriate tooth. With a spine whose wobbling length was as high as the seamstress' shoulder, he was a fitting creature for her -- curious flies clamored for his nostrils, the pits of his cataract-fogged eyes stared forward. Fathomless.

And for all his reek, his flatulence and seeming uselessness, he willed a smile to the face of the unremarkable girl who'd trained him with Jernoan words. She gleamed with joy when she saw him.

"My boy," Gloria chattered, not to Sylvius or even herself. Instead, to the world. A recognition. A happiness. Her blunt fingers tangled in his matted hair. She looked to the architect, and for a moment, she was a little girl with a prized pony, a child--

"Are we to ride?" she asked, for if Duquesne proposed an idea, his student would follow.

[Duquesne]

In the moment, he never expected reassurance. He never expected it from her.

The man is wordless, but his hand closes around hers and returns the pressure she lends with as much need, so that what words might have been appropriate are abandoned in favor of simpler language altogether. Gloria -- his only friend here. The thought seems strange to him. He did not view life in terms of these relationships anymore and hadn't for some time. Sentiments will see you dead someday, boy, and he knew Farazh was right to say it, and there was so much more to that conversation... but it pained him to think of the man. So he didn't.

Still wordless once they arrive at the stables, the man slows to halt and the mare behind him slows, throws her head to offer some pitched greeting in return for the demanding chorus which has arisen here. And he watches this spirit descend upon the girl as she approaches her beast, and the sight of that innocence has a man smiling, subtly.

"Yes," he murmurs, nodding light, "we ride."

[Rance]

The saddle was a wretched old piece. She threw it on Caliir's back with a bellow of breath, then worked with surprising comfort at ratcheting its straps beneath his bristling belly. The seamstress knew her animal; she always learned with fastidious interest. A life of brocade and seams wherein blood was promised for stitches not done right had clogged her with an appreciation for repetition and memory.

Duquesne likely knew the diligence of habitual self-preservation through learning the first time. He'd known the strike of rod against wrist.

She worked the bit into Caliir's mouth without care for his slobber or foam, even once using her forearm to keep his harmless gums apart for long enough to work the snaffle into his stubborn maw. "He cannot run fast. But you know him to be hearty and willing to walk. At -- at least the night is good for a stride. I'll not be wanting for sleep any time soon.

"I would be grateful--" more than you can know, Proctor; perhaps as greatly as you may understand in your own state, "--for the company."

She jabbed a bare foot into the rusted stirrup, clenched the saddlebone, and gave a great haul of herself onto Caliir's spine. Despite her skirts, there was no riding as a lady might; she simply hiked her hems up around her knees and wobbled unsteadily on Caliir's back.

"I'll follow your lead," she said. "Unless you -- you trust a lady to deliver you safely to our destination on her very proud steed." And the smile, while she did not have a proper lady's teeth, was genuine.

[Duquesne]

"The creature has an enduring spirit. Not unlike his keeper."

Eyes gaze through the portal of the stable, out into the gloom which gathers along the terrain and at the edge of the trees. Eyes gaze and are remote, here as the mind travels and needs no eyesight for its tour. And yet his hearing is attentive to every sound of shoes in straw or bit in foamy mouth, and surely every syllable that emerges with his student's voice; feeling is attentive to every vibration, every motion. A cart is on the road, swaying with wine barrels; geese move in flight over a nearby field; dishes rattle in washtubs inside the tavern; a rodent returns to its burrow to feed younglings, there under the stable's dirt. All this, accompanied by the man's olfaction, leave him especially aware of what is around him.

And yet his primary focus is not around him -- it is inside the mind. "I would be grateful for the company as well," he murmurs in earnest, blinks a natural blink when he turns his head to look at the girl, here to find she is ready to ride now. And he looks up at her after she has climbed atop Caliir's back and tries for balance there. He wanted to apologize for his anger of earlier -- instead, he looks to his mare and checks her girth. The girl needed to realize power of speech and apologizing for his reaction would not teach her a thing about the productive or destructive personality of language. Perhaps it was not rhetoric she needed to learn, but something else -- a trade; his trade.

Perhaps.

The man puts a dusty squared-toed boot into the stirrup and grips the reins and pommel in the one hand as he mounts up. There were no coat-skirts to hinder him, no indomitable length towed in the wake -- it was simply too hot an evening to justify coats, even for him. "I do trust a lady and her proud steed -- at least I will when they know the way." He smiles now, quiet with the expression as he is prone, and he lowers the rein to the mare's neck, uses his spurred heel instead to command her turn, a heel and the knees in cooperation.

Onto the road then, in the direction of Darkenhold. After a musing silence, the man asks, "One day when all this is done, when all this trouble and strangeness has subsided into the calm before the next squall... how would you have things to be? How would you have them be for yourself?" An earnest question. There was no moral to be taught here, no teacher's wisdom behind his wondering -- he wanted to talk about the future a while, a simpler future than the one immediately before them. He wanted to be distracted by fair potential.

[Rance]

Days from this moment, she would learn the power of words--

--in making someone for whom she cared for so deeply despise her.

She considered his question for some time, as long as it took her to scrape through her satchel with muddy palms and find a small sprig of mint-leaf. She pinched it out of a tiny fold of parchment and mashed it against her back teeth, chewing in earnest. Caliir's unsteady gait often played tricks with her stomach, making it hard for her eyes to focus on a horizon without his jerking and bobbing about.

What would she have for the future? What would she.

"Ariane," she said, "to -- to teach me how I must use my knife. Not to kill or maim or slaughter, but to be a disciple of it. To understand its responsibility and danger. And we would become greater friends. I would read her old Jernoan war poetry, and we would both think it fondly ridiculous.

"Cherny would learn his letters and numbers. He would find a very pretty lady, and I would be sure to threaten her substantially--" there was a smile; it was honest, playful, "--so she might learn how very important he is, that -- that his heart was not one to be trifled with. He would become Governor; Glenn Burnie would willingly cede to him. Myrken Wood would become smart and right."

And on she went, stories and words as comfortable as warm quilts, scarcely stuttering for as much as she had dreamed of these possible futures. She illustrated further examples: Mister Catch would be a Constable, his listless and writhing energy put to good work and mitigated by a pure set of laws; Noura would care for the grounds and the creature within her would fade into obsolescence; Elliot would return, to be arrested over and over again -- but for stealing fists of bread and lumps of ash-soap for the poor.

His horse's hooves clattered against the pathstones; Caliir's three-toed feet strode alongside, the dusky beast occasionally having a burst of excitement that caused him to raise his legs in a sloppy high-step as if to say, do you see me or I, too, am very proud.

She looked down to his reins as she said: "For you, ser, there would -- would be a wedding. It would be dull, dark-colored, few flowers to be seen; the Marshall would wear her blade, you would wear a long coat. No ceremony meant to waste time. Very formal. Very informed. And between you and her, nothing would change. Your lives would be quaint, hospitable; we would all wonder why a union between the swordswoman and the architect hadn't happened sooner.

"Me," she added, with simplicity: "I would never work a seam ever again."

They were not futures. They were fantasies. They were wishes she'd never thought to commit to page or phrase. Through the distance of her eyes she imagined them. They all ensured a single, incontrovertible truth: happiness.

"And you?" she asked at his side, as day crept toward evening and the Crawl Moon thrust its silver-coin face higher into the sky. "How would you wish things to be, when the memories are real again?"