Gibbous

[Rance]

She performed the math on paper, which was a great feat of mental acrobatics, really; numbers, if they weren’t counting stitches or measuring distance, were a bane to her. Numbers tangled themselves, sometimes flipped their places like clever frogs leaping from one lily pad to another; a 6 was sometimes a 9; a 2 could as quickly disguise itself as a 7. A blink of the eyes and they were gone; a blink, and the elusive characters twisted into other shapes altogether. Words occasionally played the same tricks on her, misaligning as if enchanted; a sometimes maybe could become a maybe sometimes; that dubious habit was budious at best. Spelling altogether fled her. Phonetics, now that was a sure science.

For the numbers—it would have been to Rhaena Olwak’s displeasure, who long struggled to teach the girl math using books fit for tiny children—tallies would suffice.

In the long Razasan days, which were just like any other days, she sat in her room at the inn and awaited correspondence. And that was where she did combat with numbers: putting quill to page like sword to flesh, desperately measuring her budget.

One patch-riddled dress. Old bread for breakfast. No unnecessary expenditures. Frugality had become its own addiction.

A BUJJIT

46 48 FORTNIGHT / JUNIER INQUISITER ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||
24 FORTNIGHT / RELEACE PAY ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||
SAVEING ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||| ||||||
FOR CHILD |||| |||| ||||

* * * *

The fifth day at the inn—she found out only the day before that it was called the Gruelmaster, which was an awfully unappetizing name—a courier who never spoke delivered for her a very formal page sealed by wax. There over a platter of hard cheese and last year's jam she wedged a finger under the wax, peeled it open, and pulled the page up to her eyes to squint at it.

To M. Wynsee,

Many thanks for your succint letter. At this time any counsel from Ruann is not formally recognized by any of our committees. We implore you to seek audience elsewhere, perhaps somewhere more geographically advantageous to you, and to better outline the purposes of your visit in your dispatch.

We have currently provided a copy of your original letter to Small Affairs that they might get in contact with you.

Sincerely,

G. Sartor, Lud.

* * * *

Twelve days in. She had a small purse of coins furiously scalding her thigh through her skirt-pocket. Get up, get out, visit the town proper, be something other than an insect hiding in the wall, she told herself. She could wait on Small Affairs all she wanted, but what would that do?

In the morning, when the Glass Sun hadn't yet burnt through the blanket of springtime fog and the mist lay across the Razasan streets like a tattered blanket, she wandered the streets until she found a tailor with two candles alight in the window. She used the palm of her hand to open the door and stepped into a world full of colorful drapery, embroidery, and fabric. The language of clothiers was a universal one: a stitch was always a stitch was always a stitch; a good stitch spoke a thousand languages, and a bad one cursed in twice as many.

One dress in particular spoke to her: a full-bodied bounty with a stiff waist and an ankleskirt, and around its hem were all the cycles of the moon—the Crawl Moon, Jernos called it—and she swore she lost months of her life staring at the perfect little circles, running her thumb over them. For a never-ending moment she was twelve, big-eyed and ready to punch another girl's teeth out for stealing her sewing, and she found herself both enamored and in awe of the delicate needlework, getting almost breathless and simultaneously driven to emotion and impulse by, what, a bit of embroidery?

"I want to buy this dress," she told the tailor, trudging through the Standard in hopes that he too spoke the same language.

"You can't afford it," he said over his ledger, never looking up.

How pedestrian; you never cared in your whole life about something as simple as a fucking dress, Glour'eya.

Stung, she said, "Who are you to say I can't afford it?"

"You can't afford it."

She frowned.

"I love it," she said, choking on those foolish, idiotic words, that weakling's admission of obsession: because how laughable, really, that she should find herself in a foreign land, wholly disconnected from everything she'd come to know, thumbing through ladies' clothes in a corner store just to pass the time, and it would hit her like this, a denial, a refusal, you can't, you can't, you can't, and her body's first reaction wouldn't be to lash out or snarl or curse, but to well up with hot and frustrated upset, that you can't would summon from the trembling edges of her eyes hot, burning liquid, and she'd sputter, "I love it," again, and her nose would run—

So she ran, too, right out of the tailor's shop. Back to the Gruelmaster. And up to the room she rented for but a fraction of her tallies.

On her door, a letter, which she read through bleary eyes.

Dearest M. Wynsee,

We have rec'd your missive addressed originally to [the name was redacted with a blot of ink] and believe it is in our best interest to forward your letter to another department. Small Affairs deals solely with minute land disputes between local livestock farmers and we do not believe ourselves appropriately accountable for matters of a non-domestic sort.

We have provided your original letter to Cultural Affairs, who should reach out to you in writing at the Gruelmaster within the coming week.

May you enjoy the splendors of our city,

Thom F. Garrault

She punched the wall above her bed's headboard until the skin along her knuckles split and smiled red.

For a minute the world, even in Razasan, made a lot of sense.

[Rance]

"You?"

"Me," she said.

"You've got an arm off," he said.

"A hand," she corrected.

"So what you lack in fingers," the squat dwarf said, pursing his lips like sewn leather, "you probably make up for in brains. Or," he corrected, "likely not, if you're still standing here in front of me. But if I can't warn you off, it's not like they give me an extra shilling for trying. It's your face."

"When does it start?"

"Few hours from now," he said, jerking his chin toward the Gruelmaster's foggy, breath-clouded window. "We wait until sundown and slip a few silvers into the nearest patrol-guard's coinpurse. He leaves us alone." When Gloria simply nodded, the dwarf—who'd moreso expected any further conversation to dwindle the girl's resolve—reached out and clasped his burly hand over hers. The motion was neither lascivious nor expectant; it was, even if she never knew his name, a gesture of paternal concern. His touch bore a hundred years of stonebreaking. He leaned forward over his mug. "You need to tell me straight: you're fine with this, you know what it entails, and you know what's expected of you. When you hear the dinner bell chime thrice, meet in the basement."

"I'm fine with this, I know what it entails, and I know what's expected of me. When I hear the dinner bell chime thrice, I'll meet you in the basement."

He blew out a sigh. "Are you mad?"

"Worse," she said. "I'm bored."

* * * *

The dinner bell chimed thrice not long after the streetlamps were brought to life.

Twenty minutes later, she was spitting out blood onto the dirty floor.

Downstairs in the wine-cellar of the Gruelmaster, there were no casks, no kegs, no crates of salt-preserved food. There were no windows, no shelves, no hooks for drying herbs. There was only a floor of tamped sand and scattered thresh. Forty-three bodies filled the space with their hot breath and warm odor pressed shoulder-to-shoulder (she counted them all, not as numbers, but as tallies, eight cross-hatched nests of four and three standalone pips scrawled on the slate of her mind). Sweltering hot, stinking of fish and booze, they were all one secret mass encricling a bare spot in the middle of the floor where a man with a webwork of scars on his back pummeled an opponent bent down underneath him.

The rules were simple. No boots, no belts, no chokes.

His fist was iron. It hooked down and snapped into her jaw. A flood of copper fluid filled her mouth.

His dirty fingernails scraped into her scalp as he snared up a handful of her hair and lifted her face enough to look at him. His shoulder cocked. His fist raised.

She spit a mouthful of blood in his face.

A stagger, a stumble. That was all she needed. Even if the world spun and careened around her, she could still take his balance. Her loose blouse had been ripped by the struggle and her patchwork skirt hung like a half-affixed drapery from her waist. Arms outstretched, she surged up from the floor at him, not following him so much as the blur she thought was him. They collided. His spit sprayed in her face, even spattered into her mouth. A runnel of snot gleamed in the divot of his upper lip. It was this she aimed for when she swung her lone hand, driving more with her wrist than her open palm.

Would Ariane be proud of you, she wondered.

His head snapped back like a fruit on a branch in the middle of a windstorm. A minor persuasion, it came out to be: he responded with a knee driven up into her ribs, enough to blow out a gutful of air that almost blew her nose apart with its force. Her ribs bent in, strained against her pulsing lungs, and a flicker of darkness began to waver at the edge of her vision. Panic.

Forcefully, like a contagion, it spread across her perceptions. Blackness. Not unconsciousness, but this suffocating, compressing darkness, a consuming claustrophobia that sprang alive from within. Her heartbeat sped to a wild and uncontrollable pace. Saliva began to pool in her mouth. Lungs locked tight. Muscles refused to obey.

I can't breathe. I can't breathe.

The Black Oil tucked away in one of her broken teeth refused to budge.

I can't breathe. What is happening to—

Seeing his advantage, the scarred man snorted, grabbed Gloria by the lapel of her blouse, and crashed his knuckles right into her nose.

* * * *

What she didn't remember was how they dragged her out of the pit like a lifeless slug while the forty-three onlookers exchanged notes and shillings, most in complacent satisfaction: only a few—very foolish—bettors had dared put their offerings on the fat girl with the one hand. Risks sometimes paid off quite well. This one hadn't. They drowned their disappointment in ale and forgot about her not long after they'd deposited her unconscious in her room.

The next day, peering through the purple walnut of a bruised eye and breathing shallowly to comfort a tender series of ribs, she found two separate notes sticking out like a tongue from under the breadth of her door.

The first:

M. Wynsee,

After conferring with both Small Affairs and Cultural Affairs, it has come to my attention that you provided a brief request for assistance as a representative of Ruann. Because Ruann is neither a recognized ally nor an official trade-affiliate hamlet of Razasan, your request has been and will be continuously denied.

I implore you to write again should you have more pressing and political needs to discuss.

Sincerely,

H. Shuall
Domestic Affairs

And the second:

Never seed sumone get their ass beet like that so congrachalations

maybe there is sumthing in that tho come see me agen if mayby you wanna make sum shillings

Raf

[Rance]

She and the dwarf sat near a window and ate fried porkskin. She squinted against the light filtering in through the window of the Gruelmaster and tried to silence the nauseating drum echoing just behind her eyes.

"Name's Raf," he said, strumming greasy fingers through his beard. "Raffidus, if you want. Clan Ironback from years back—" he jabbed a finger toward the east, a motion that dininished centuries of history into a simple over there, "—and got displaced when some dark elves saw it fit to come in and ruin our mines. We killed lots of them. They killed lots more of us." He drummed his fingers on the table, his knuckles thick as stones. "Fighting's in my blood. Dying's in there somewhere, too.

"But I don't think it's in yours, Wynsee, and that's why I think we need to talk."

Dying? Maybe not. Fighting?

Clearing her throat, she told him, "I like getting into fights."

"Why?"

"It makes perfect sense."

"How?"

"It's simple," she said. "There are rules, but they aren't suffocating. Not like everyting else. I'm tired of being confused by things, being misled by people or their intentions, and ultimately deconstructed by my own. I'm neither bright nor prescient, nor am I satisfied with presuming I ought to settle for such a life."

"So get married off," he said, squeezing his bulbous nose.

"It's not so simple. I'm built neither to be a wife nor to fuck a man into gullibility. There..." Pause. She peeled up her upper lip, pressed her finger onto her gumline, and wiggled a brown tooth. Knocked loose. "There was a boy, though. Edmund."

"Did he treat you right?"

"Like in a storybook. He didn't even mind if I smiled with my whole mouth. I wanted to be a lady around him."

"Did you?"

She stared at a divot in the table, picked and dug out by a finger that may have been miles upon miles away.

"I miss him," Gloria said.

Raf cleared his throat. "Had to have been other boys thought you were a catch, though."

"Tennant. There is Tennant," the girl added, suddenly bending her elbows and smoothing down her wrinkled skirts with a series of deliberate strokes that helped wring out a sudden vulnerability. "There was Tennant. I was a moth and he was a little beacon of light and I just wanted to flutter around him. So I did. I flitted and fawned; I drank wine with him and danced and I stared like a hypnotized child into his eyes. I met him when I was fourteen," she said. "And a year later, when I was fifteen, I was still fourteen around him. And the next year, and the next. And — and it never changed.

"There were other girls," she said. "Better girls. Smarter and more promising girls."

"So that was that," Raf said.

"So that was that." Gloria swallowed the rock that had been lodged in her throat. "I miss him."

And who else had there been? Dej, who she'd found so dark and smart and brooding, a reminder of the hot sands of home; she loved to touch him to feel the warmth in his skin. Before him, there'd been—

No, Gloria. Don't justify it. He had no choice. What you did, he had no choice. He did not love you that way. He was afraid of you. He called you staal'vak. He always did. What she didn't realize was that her lone hand had started grinding down, down into the scarred wood of the table, and her knuckles went from dark to blanched white as she squeezed the straining fist into the grain.

His calloused hand called her back to the moment, to the now, to Razaasn, to the Gruelmaster. The dwarf touched the back of her wrist.

"Why do you like fighting?"

"Because I've always fought."

"Yeah? And what have you fought?"

Unsure eyes, swollen and gray, lifted and stared at him. Never once, she realized, had she actually looked at him. Now, with her jaw suddenly locked like stone, she was a different girl: older, somehow, and radiant, and behind the wings of her filthy bonnet, she remembered she was the possessor of a heartbeat. "Men," she said. "Women. Girls who stole my sewing. I fought them until they learned to stay down. The creatures that lived in Threepoints Marsh. A Red Devil in the woods, and I stared into its eyes.

"And the Black Smoke, even when it wanted to tear me apart.

"Ariane," she whispered, "when she became someone else.

"The Black Man and the Storyteller, and with one knife I killed them both.

"Golben.

"Rhaena Olwak and her cruel and pretty government."

She sucked in a breath. Realized her stomach was roiling, her foot was jittering, her teeth were grinding. All of that, she realized, and for what — nothing? To claim them as some twisted badges of honor on a shore a few hundred leagues away from the lands where they occurred? She was not proud. Possessive, yes, for they were hers, her tale, her narrative, her formative identifiers; the marrow in her bones, the redness in her blood, hers, hers, the pinkish scars and the violent memories. She remembered neither birthdays nor festival celebrations nor last week's breakfast. But Nameless, she remembered the red, red wax and every grueling, desperate moment of those turmoils, those challenges, those crucibles.

"Why," Raf asked again, "do you like fighting, Gloria Wynsee?"

"I will always fight."

Under his gray beard, a stifled smile. "Then why the hell were you so bad at it last night?"

"What's the use in fighting," Gloria asked, "when you know you aren't going to die?"

[Rance]

Rules were rules, yes, but standards could be changed and laws, like pieces of soft, green wood, could be flexed and pried apart with enough encouragement.

Raf put his stubby fingers against his brow and squeezed. "Again? So soon?"

"I'm not concerned with time," Gloria told him, though she always looked past him — never at him, never into him, but at a point beyond him.

"It's neither healthy or smart," he said. "It's reckless. And take that for what it's worth: a godsdamned dwarf is telling you it's reckless and absurd to get back in the pit before you're properly healed."

"I have my reasons."

"Like a deathwish?"

"I've made it a habit not to heed careful advice. Living life as the point of a spear has not been fruitful nor advantageous for me, Raf; I've met with much more success being a hammer."

He slapped both of his hands on the table: a gruff and non-verbal admittance to cession. "I won't try to argue with a hammer," he said. "And this — this — is why my Da' always told me to stay away from human women. Dumb as a sack of bricks, twice as stubborn as obsidian, and pretty enough to make you think they're worth half as much."

Gloria's line of a mouth curled up into a smile. "Did you just call me pretty?"

"No, Wynsee," he quickly snapped back. "You're just the ugliest fucking dwarf I've ever met.

* * * *

Two nights later, a spindly stickfigure of a man named Pollick, with a snaggletooth the color of stained porcelain and breath that reeked of licorice and whiskey, managed to slide his elbow through a hole in her defenses and strike her directly in the brow.

She wasn’t afraid; his knuckles rolled off her cheeks, his bare feet drummed into her stomach, his bony limbs landed flurries on her, and she wasn’t afraid. No matter what he did, the world moved with a visible and molasses-like slowness. He projected his motions, like all bad fighters did. That was the word Ariane had used. Projected. When he threw a punch it started in his cheeks, formed a grimace, rolled like liquid stone through the bones in his neck, echoed through his shoulders, crawled along the muscles of his forearms, and formed fists white and rapturously furious, where the strength popped and fizzled and then finally landed.

And every blow hurt. Some glanced off her. Others scraped her skin. Most, though, landed with commitment and dedication, but neither a glimmer nor a wink of that pain gave birth to even a seed of fear. He could strike, bludgeon, blister, or injure her; he could have scraped his nails into her skin and peeled that brown Jernoah off her bones in strips; he could have torn clumps of hair out of her scalp, and yet she discovered herself wholly uninterested in her predicament, lodged somewhere between two fundamental planes of thought:

The first, as Pollick grabbed her by the half-mutilated ear—

These men are neither threats
nor dangers to you; their fists
are parchment and their bones are
fragile honeycomb; they thirst not to kill
or maim
but to satisfy their masculinity
with the safety
of half-drunk brawls;

—and the second, as Pollick snared her lower jaw and tried to pry it open—

The decisions you’ve made and
the people you’ve hurt in your mindless
abandonment of sense
must be repaid; here, then, with fists,
you deserve this and more,
to bleed and be broken to remunerate
others for the extensive pain you’ve caused;
this punishment, then, for crimes and atrocities
against those you cherish—

—only to find his fingers sliding off the greasy, black oil of her sweat. "Scummy whore," he hissed, just as she leaned forward and drove the curve of her shoulder into his chest. He sprawled back into a gaggle of spectators, who laughed and hollared encouragements. Gloria almost forgot that she hadn't any rght hand; she lifted the bare, pinkish stump up to her lips, wiped away spit and blood, and readied herself for the coming onslaught.

And it came. In the form of a stoneware bottle of ale stolen from drunken onlookers, it came.

Pollick flew at her, bottle raised high.

Easy.

Gloria acted quickly: not a step back or away, but rather, a step in. Lady Egris and Edmund had taught her that. Brutes of any type naturally expected fear and avoidance from their opponents, even constructed their long-armed, wide-swinging attacks with the expectation that someone would shrink away. But a step in? A swing could never be shortened with the intent of achieving greater effect.

A step in. A pivot to the side. The bottle swung down, aimless, harmless.

From the side, she pounded her fist once, twice, three, four times into Pollick's ribs. He was thin. The blows nearly split him in half.

In the crowd, a glimmer of gold winked and caught Gloria's eye. While Pollick puked, she squinted through the pipesmoke and tried to capture a glimpse of a silhouette she couldn't, at first, make sense of. Off in the corner of the stuffy room, there was a woman with a slim, fine string of golden coins around her neck. Her black hair, coiffed and decorated with yellow pearls, wasn't a nest of filth and soot. It was clean, well-tended, well-styled. Clasped in her birdlike hands was a leaden goblet. At her side stood two burly figures wearing the stringent lines and angles of military uniforms.

A beauracrat? A royal? Watching the fights? Here?

Gloria thought she heard Raf shout her name—

The stoneware bottle collided with the back of her skull.

Easy.

[Rance]

When she learned how to write, she was nine. At nine years old, she wrote; writing at nine years old, that was a true feat in Jernoah, and an even greater accomplishment for a girl. Innately, she understood the language, its folds and flows and billows, and how to hoist a sail with clever verbs. Mothersister Aubergine, who was born with a cream-colored stain on her black cheek, read her poetry by Jernoah's finest voices, and the words quickly hooked themselves like briars in her brain. She yearned, too, to write. Hers would be a life not of meager seamwork nor of being fucked stupid by men in the birthing pens; no, she'd write beautiful poetry, you see, and it all started with a tiny limerick about her Odos tutor Mothersister Aubergine:

Mothersister Aubergine, fot as con be
eats cunny all day and while don on her knys
then goes back to teeching quik as con be
to teech the girls thar Odos and ones twos and threes
but woodnt you know they soon find her out
and beat her with sticks until she did shout
forgive me for i now love cock and boll
so now she's not hungrey for cunny at all

The beatings that came as a result were historic.

But it taught Gloria Wynsee one thing: she'd a far better head for taking punches than writing verses.

* * * *

—and, shot like a stone from a sling, she was awake; awake, and scrambling across the bloody hay; sucking, sucking in breath, until no more breath could fit, and her lone hand tried to cover her mouth before a glut of vomit exploded out from between her fingers and she was swaying and sick at the side of the fighting pit. Nameless, it stank, stung in her nose, and the half-digested fibers stuck between her teeth made her want to be ill again, but...

...swaying, lifted up, cradled against someone, warm-bodied and suffocating her.

"Don't touch me," she blurted. "Don't fucking touch me, don't touch me," slurring and falling out of her mouth not with a woman's firm determination but a frightened mewling...

Unconsciousness.

* * * *

Blackness. Voices over her head.

"That was a goddamn blow, wasn't it?"

"And fucking illegal, aye."

"Oh, come off it, Raf; Pollick still gets his money."

"He shouldn't. Why should he?"

"Because's a win's a win."

"That could have been a killing blow, and I don't intend to manage a pit where we're dragging bodies out every night."

"You're going soft."

"No, I'm going smart. Fists? Those are fair. Fucking bottles, though? It was a coward's strike, and nothing more to it than that. He was backed into a corner by a one-armed girl who was about to put him down. That whoreson won't fight in my pit again."

"Are you serious? You're serious right now."

"You think Regentress Follox and people like her come to see savagery? Follow this: the royals come for the amusement, maybe to toss a few bets into the hay, but they're not here to be complicit in fucking murder. The rules are there to be observed."

"Fuck off, Raf."

"And you fuck right off, too. You and that Pollick twat. You bring a fighter in that breaks my rules again, and I'll toss your ass in that pit with a bunch of unleashed dogs. You hear me?"

A door slammed. The sound reverberated inside the roundness of her skull.

A twitching in her eyelid. A jitter in a phantom finger.

Wake up.

On the other side of closed eyes, the red, burning blur of scorching sunlight.

Daytime.

Wake up.

But she fell back into the oil of darkness.

[Rance]

"The problem with getting hit with a bottle in the back of the head," Raf said, "is that it'll never help to fix what's wrong with the front."

Four days later she drank a warm tea with honey and pepper in it. He sipped on ale. Froth stuck liberally to his beard. Sometimes a new runnel of blood dripped out of her nose. He ate boar ("I speared it myself," Raf bragged falsely to everyone around him) and she crunched her way through cheaper fare: boiled potatoes and the legs of some peculiar green crustacean. Somtimes they were silent; in Razasan, Gloria realized, there wasn't much to talk about with people you didn't know too well. Except Raf. Raf talked a lot. Raf did all the talking. "You almost had him. That's a marked improvement, at least," he complimented.

"My nose is still bleeding," she said.

"You could have finished him where you had him."

"I was being compassionate."

His white eyebrows flattened.

"I was," she said defensively. "He started throwing up; I didn't want to keep punching a man who was throwing up."

"That's not compassion," Raf said. "That's the furthest fuckin' thing from compassion. Don't sit there—" he jabbed a fork at the air as if pinning his thoughts to an invisible wall between them, "—and try to explain to me what it means to be merciful. How old are you?"

"Almost nineteen."

"Almost nineteen," he wheedled, a high-pitched whine of an imitation. "Faddik's Pits, girl, you act like you've seen so much, like you've lived through every Hell and come crawling back, fixing me with this bleeding thousand-yard stare of yours, the world's treated me so poorly, piss-and-whine, piss-and-whine. The reality is, you don't know the first fuckin' thing about anything. You may have been forced to grow up, but that doesn't mean you're grown up. Everybody's had a shit go of it, princess, but most of them don't complain about it."

"I don't complain. I never complain about it."

"You don't have to complain about it with your voice. Bleeding and fighting losing fights and letting your ass get turned to mush in a brawling pit, that's just as much bellyaching as anything else. Here," Raf said, his black, dinner-plate nostrils flaring with resolve as he slivered off a piece of pink, flaking boarmeat, skewered it on his fork, and reached it across the table to her. "Try this."

She frowned down at her green crab. "I wanted to like him," she said.

"He tastes like saltwater and shit-gutter. Come on, try this."

"Are you sure?"

"Would I offer it if I wasn't?"

She bobbed her head left to right, left to right, then shrugged and reached out to pluck the greasy boar meat off the fork.

The table, the plates, and the pewter candleholder between them rattled as Raf, like a fat arrow shot from a bowmna's recurve, all but leaped over the table, and in one sweeping motion, overcame her: he grabbed her wrist, twisted it brutally, and drove the back of her hand down into the table so that her spine and hip were stretched out across the edge of the table. Her bootheels scraped helplessly at the floor as she tried to unwind herself, sought to take pressure off twisted wrist and shoulder, but to no avail: Raf Ironback had her pinned there, to a table in the middle of a busy Gruelmaster, and in his free hand he poised his greasy fork, still bearing boar, to pierce her eye.

"You ever killed anybody?" he demanded.

"What?"

"Have you ever killed anybody," Raf snarled.

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

"And what do you feel about it?"

"Feel about it?" she grimaced.

"Did it hurt you," he said, "to kill them?"

"It—...It was the worst thing I've ever done."

By this point, some of the patrons of the Gruelmaster had turned to stare at them; Raf, however, never blinked, never turned his furious, seething eyes away from Gloria. Holding the fork, his hand shook, trembled like a piece of sinew stretched to its fullest length. Then, with a sucking breath, he swept the fork down, and she shouted, "Please!" and it was too late; too late, because the fork with its piece of boar meat still had a target and an intent and she jammed shut her eye in final, futile defense and she screamed—

Right past her face, the fork whistled, and then drove itself half-an-inch into the pink, lumpy mass of scar-tissue and once-flesh that was the stump of her other arm.

Meanwhile, Raf grabbed her ear, twisted her head, and forced her to stare at the utensil standing upright out of her arm.

"Compassion and mercy," he said, "are only virtues you can claim when you can truly perform the opposite. When you can kill, when you like to kill, when you want to kill, when you have the power to and know, in the heat of a battle or a conflict that you should, but you still choose to let them live?

"That's compassion. That's mercy. Everything else," he said, "is an excuse to obscure ignorance. You can't be compassionate or merciful, princess, because you just haven't learned how."

He let her go. She crawled up, stared wordlessly at the fork, and then looked at him.

"There's your woe-is-me for tonight," he said, jerking his bearded chin at her arm. "Sleep it off, and come find me when you actually feel like fighting. In the meantime, this came for you." Out of his back pocket, he pulled a folded sliver of paper, and slapped it down on the table.

He marched off to his room. Left her with the tab. Left her, like a dullard, staring at the three steel prongs in her skin.

The Gruelmaster, which had seen its share of violence, gradually forgot she existed.

[Rance]

The script was thin, well-spaced, and matter-of-fact:

Servitor Wynsee,

By this time you have no doubt come to the understanding that to insert oneself into foreign politics is a challenge greater than moving a boulder with one's smallest finger. Your task will prove neither an easy nor a simple one, but its completion is for the benefit of Ruann. We have a great deal to offer this world. You may find yourself distracted by mundane endeavors. You may find conflict and disagreement because you are neither male nor rich nor colored to the preference of society. Do not be dissuaded.

Your fellow Servitor has taken a liking to your child. Servitor Farnie, do you remember her? Under her care your child fares well. Do you know, she has spoken aloud her first word, and it is "Farnie."

Respectfully Under the Anvil,

Derrada Vox

She burned the letter from Three Silver Teeth slowly.

* * * *

Several days later, a furious knock at her door at waist-level. When Gloria wrenched the door open, Raf stood in the hallway, his stubby arms crossed in front of his chest. "Put on some clothes," he blurted. "You have a meeting."

"We aren't talking," Gloria said, thrusting her chin high. She pushed shut the door.

His meaty hand leaped between the edge and the jamb.

"What are you," he growled. "Seven?"

"You stabbed me with a fork."

"You deserved it."

"With a fork."

"Who cares? It's not like you're diddling your fuckin' bean with a stump."

"You're incorrigible, Raf," she said.

"And you're fat."

She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. "Who's seven now?"

Rock, meet stone.

"Just—" Raf started, blowing a hard stream of air from his nose and mouth that made his white beard flutter in front of his lips. "Put something on other than a dressing gown, and maybe try to brush off some of those bruises. Meet me out in the street in less than an hour. Someone wants to have a meeting with you. Some kind of proposition."

"Who?"

Raf looked left, looked right, ensured that the hall was silent and empty save for the candles flickering away on the walls.

"Her name's Regentress Follox," he said. "And the last thing you want to do is ignore her."

[Rance]

One hour later. Dusk. A pink-purple sky. A sinking moon.

A carriage rattled up the avenue. Its wheels jumped and bounced in holes chewed into the dirt by rain and snow. The vehicle was not, at immediate glance, a noble's transport; it was a dilapidated patchwork of old pieces, graying wood, and flaking paint. Joints and bolts of rusted iron squeaked, moaned. One wheel was smaller, less confident. It swayed to a stop in front of the Gruelmaster. Two figures on the outside of the carriage dismounted, one the pilot and the other hanging onto a handle outside the door. They both wore dulled chainmail, unmarked tabards, and leather helmets that obscured their cheeks and nose.

They opened the door, and Regentress Follox stepped out.

From the moment her leather boot touched the mud, she extended dignity into the world around her. She stood, straight-spined, on a street that seemed almost embarassed that it existed in the same city as she. Her pointed chin and her severe eyes were both sharp as knives. She wore a harlot's bodice that desperately misshaped her bosom, a wide, embroidered skirt that bore a thousand fabric roses, and a shawl spun of gilded thread.

She looked at everything else in the world before her eyes fell upon Gloria Wynsee.

"Why," she trilled, "hello, darling."

Two claps. Sla-slap. Never looking away from the seamstress, Follox tilted her chin toward the guard on her right.

"Wine," she said. "I'm parched." One of the guards prouced a leather bladder, and the other, a leaden goblet. It was full and in her upturned palm a moment later. Her dainty nostrils flared. "This place stinks of sadness, as it always does. And shit. It stinks mostly of shit. By Brehemes, girl, you are a sight to behold. I've seen shoes in better condition. But we both know I'm not here to build you up with the pretense of beauty.

"Raffidus — my little Raf, isn't he grand? — has told you all about me, I'm sure. Let's not waste any more time in this cesspool. Inside, then. Comecome," Follox tittered, both words as one, flitting her fin-like hand toward the door of the Gruelmaster.

* * * *

This early, the fighting pit — the musty, smoke-stained basement with a straw-filled circle in the floor — was unoccupied and silent. But now, one of the Gruelmaster's tables stood in the middle, a pewter candleabra its only light. A spread of truffles, meat, cheese, and wine awaited the two women. Upstairs, Raf watched the door, made sure nobody interfered; this, after all, was a dinner between Gloria and the Regentress. Her two guards stood still and statuesque several feet behind. Gloria stared down at her lap, picking impatiently at the hangnail on her thumb. Why all this propriety?

Follox, between sips of wine and mouthfuls of her expensive fare, had droned on and on about herself, a theatrical rodomontade comprised of waving hands, forced laughter, and sweeping gestures that called silently for more wine. "I can't help but proceed with fascination," Follox said. "You'd be hard pressed to find a girl putting herself in the fighting pit the way you've done. Consider me captivated: my father, rest his soul, raised me to think of a lady's role as one of accomplishments — language, music, endeavors of fabric and lace. All of them—" a pheasant leg waving, "—a positive bore."

"I was a seamstress," Gloria said. "And good at it."

"A bore," Follox added. "Suffice it to say, this pit is too often a boy's club. It quite made my day to see a girl like you in here. Have another bit of wine, won't you?"

Sla-slap. More wine.

"Gloria," continued the woman, her words boasting verbal histrionics: long, swooping vowels, rolled trills, sweeping sibilance. "I happen to have my hands in a collection of interests and investments, not many of which have been well-recieved by the authorities here in Razasan."

"They aren't interested in you?"

"They don't much enjoy the means I've employed to come into money and power."

"You're a criminal?"

"I prefer entrepreneuer. You and I are women, dear; we have to function outside the boundaries of law and expectation just to breathe, don't we? Yes the whole world, and rewrite the rules from behind a smile." Suddenly, Regentress Follox's grin was a waxy and silver thing. "I refused to limit myself to the barriers established by my family's name."

"Were you poor?"

"Hardly," Follox said. "But a daughter of a rich earl, always the daughter of a rich earl. I won't settle for living and dying on the tongues of others as mere progeny, or as a swan dyed black for but the offense of being born without a penis. You and I," she said, angling her leaden goblet toward Gloria. "You and I, we're so much alike. Neither of us wilted flowers or objects to be controlled. You can take a punch or two — or ten — and still stand. Raf, he said to me, 'I've got a girl fighting,' and I asked him — I asked, 'Why does that matter,' and he says, 'She's tough as an ox, but there's only one problem.'"

"What did he say was the problem?"

"That you don't win."

Gloria's lips tightened into a disdainful bow. She enlarged her shoulders and chest with a breath. "I'm neither perfect nor trained, Regentress. I don't fight here because I am particularly adept at it, but because it's one of the few avenues open to me. If I lose, it's no skin off my back, no blow to my self-worth," she said, slowing and softening her voice to marshal control over the lilting Jernoan accent still tenaciously weighing on her tongue. "It's just another passed night, perhaps with a few more bruises or a mouth full of blood. I don't keep tallies of losses or victories; I either hurt, or I make others hurt."

Regentress Follox, with her sleek cap of black hair and her lofted wineglass, with her crossed legs and her impatient foot bouncing beneath the edge of her bountiful skirt, bore a look of stately pleasure. As if she'd just had a taste of a smooth and satisfying wine. As if she'd just smelled a pleasant and calming odor.

"You're just an absolute gem," Follox said. "Tell me: Do you like money, darling?"

"I've never had much."

"But you like it, don't you?"

"I'm ambivalent. I'm a Jerno," Gloria said.

"No," Follox reasoned. "You're a Myrkener for going on five years, for going on a quarter of your life. You're a commoner girl with a child for whom you are desperate to be responsible, but afraid to be near." The woman's voice became a sultry murmur in her throat, a quiet purr of sudden, powerful, and nearly prescient wisdom. She leaned forward over her plate of pheasant and cheese. "Don't you dare hide behind that Jernoan identity. Those are a cruel and mutant people. As though calling yourself Ruanno is any better."

Gloria's chin jerked backed, almost taking the rest of her body with her. "How do you know these things?"

"I am an entrepreneuer, darling. I don't engage in a dinner with a mutilated dog unless I have a leash to put around its neck."

The once-seamstress felt instantly dazed and nauseous. Nobody in Razasan had yet truly known but pieces and fragments of her; maybe to one or two people alone she'd mentioned scant details of her being, but never had she mentioned the presence of a child, of her daughter, of her whole purpose for being here—

And, a shark, sensing blood misting in the water, Regentress Follox continued on, her painted face darkening.

"You want something, and I too want something, Gloria Wynsee. I have no investment or interest in Ruann — I could care less about their primitive rites, their self-importance, or the demands of old men and their magical artifacts — but you do, and I can put you in touch with those who might turn an ear to your needs, and Ruann's."

Gloria felt the skin around her throat tightening, constricting. "And what could I possibly offer you, that you should feel it necessary to invest in me?"

Follox burst into laughter, lifted her leaden goblet to her guard, and said—

"Keep pouring, Thurmond. We're going to need more wine."

[Rance]

And more wine was had. Until the night dripped away right between the cracks...

The Glass Sun had almost started to rise when Gloria Wynsee stumbled up from the basement, meandered her way through the silent common room of the Gruelmaster, and ascended upstairs to her bedroom. The hallway swayed and leaned and twisted around her. She thrust her hand out against the wall, hissing, "Stop moving," at the wooden panels.

When she found her door, she dragged the key out of her bodice, scraped it a few times near the keyhole, and then finally landed it home—

Turn. No click. Stubborn tumblers.

Wasn't her room.

The next. That was more successful.

She dragged herself across the beam of light leaking into her room from the hallway as if it was a bridge of light and safety. She found the edge of her bed. With a great, sloppy, faithful leap, she threw herself onto the hay-stuffed mattress, her skirts a twisted mess around her hips and knees, her petticoats hanging out like a white flag. One boot sagged free. When she closed her eyes all sense of up and down fled her and everything wouldn't stop tumbling and twisting...

What is hard to find, darling, is someone who's willing to dedicate themselves to an art. We spend so much of our time perfecting, perfecting, perfecting, that we neither celebrate the necessity that is mediocrity nor arouse interest in its potential. The fact is — Gloria, isn't it? — you are very good at losing, and bettors and gamblers, they hate losers. And they hate women. And I think the charm is that you fit right into the narrative these money-hungry men with full pockets so adore.

Morning hit her like a hammer. Razasani wine took no prisoners.

Keep giving them the story they like.

The sunlight bled onto a package she'd been too drunk to notice the night before: a parchment-wrapped bundle of softness on her nightstand.

So I want you to keep losing. And I want you to keep losing until I tell you to win.

She opened it. And inside was her greatest desired vanity: a dress of a fine, smooth blue, and at equdistant intervals along the hem of the skirt, embroidered representations of the cycle of the moon. Tucked inside the sleeve, a note:

Your bruises will make your daughter rich, and Ruann will be grateful they sent you. Pain is often the quickest way from poverty to ladyhood.

- F