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Jan. 27th, 2011 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_rose(ETA: Something weird happened with the date and time of this entry, so I deleted and reposted the LJ version.)
Item the first:
This is what I did last week that I didn't mention. It's amazing how unphotogenic I am; this was the best of a bad lot.
And this tells you how much work I've been doping at work this week. because bit by bit, this popped up. These are familiar characters to me, but this particular story isn't goign any further right now, so I might just as well show it here.
(This is not, by the way, a precise match to the text I was writing at work. That was in longhand, and it got revised as I went, as things do when entered into the computer).
Ariosta Lorenzo had been told too many times by her Governess that she should be careful, or she'd prove her bad blood, and she'd been determined never to fulfill that prophecy. She didn't believe that bastardy naturally caused sins, and she wanted very badly to excell and prove the governess -- who had been the source of misery for her pureblooded pupils as well as her left-handed one, and was certainly not the pillar of perfection she styled herself -- wrong in this as in so many other proclamations.
Except that now Ari was slipping her way barefoot through Siama House, to Nikol Jolian's room, and in her satin pouch was a sponge soaked in vinegar and certain essences of dubious origin. Moreover, she'd done it before - though not, as this time, without Nikol's foreknowledge. She didn't think he'd mind, somehow, and he didn't consider what she did wrong; his only concern, through the affair so far, had been that she take sensible precautions, and not let it interfere with her studies.
She did feel a pang of doubt on seeing a light, however dim, under the door of his suite. She laid her hand on the wood of the outside door, and mouthed the words to focus her magic.
Wood picked up echoes of sound; enhancing that and melding it with her own hearing told her there was nobody in the sitting room, but at least two voices in the more private space beyond. But those voices had reached the door through a long enough stretch of wood and space that they echoed themselves into nonsense. She eased the door open.
A candle had been left alight in the entry room, in a mirror-backed vase, with enough water at the base to smother it if it burned too low. And a lamp, such as someone would have used to walk the halls, sat on a wooden chair. She tsked at the carelessness and turned the key to snuff it. The candle alone, particularly mirrored, provided enough light to keep from stumbling over the plush chairs - and too much for her to usefully hide.
She dropped into the last chair by the inner door, and leaned close, again using the hum of the wood under her fingers to enhance the sound; this close to the source, it worked very much better. Itf it was merely his valet, later than usual, she could knock and be brazen. But it would be her luck that this night, aunt Sophonisba would have chosen to visit her foster son for a game of Mores.
The first voice was familiar, though, young and male, irritable and quick-spoken, but in Siama house, that hardly narrowed the field. "- I refuse to accept a plan that assumes Ciano is an idiot."
"I'm not assuming," Nikol said. "If they prove too clumsy, we can abort, or hire more. I have coin enough for five more blades at the rate you negotiated. But even untried blades will help; I hardly think Ciano's men will be well-versed in this sort of defense."
"I suppose not," said the other. She knew him now. Seviamelli - Sel - Dano, the son of Lord Killini's head of guards. Nikol's match for age, but at best hers for status - and, in spite of the plenitude of fostered peers, the person Nikol seemed to trust the most. "How many days? Two months, do you think?"
"Two," said Nikol, slightly mocking. "Seven, at least. And I don't mean to be in the Fey Lands in winter -- which likely means a year."
Sel whistled. "What were you planning to do about Ari?"
Nikol sighed - and by the rustling noise, shifted in his chair. "Ariosta is a problem."
Ari had been considering the risks of getting caught at eavesdropping, and whether she could manage to cast a blurring over herself in time if either door opened. Now, the arrival of Aunt Sophie, or Killini himself, wouldn't move her.
"Just tell her it's done," said Sel, and that hurt. He'd seemed to like her. "You can't explain, and why you'd try-"
"No wonder your affairs are so short," Nikol muttered. "She deserves better. I'd marry her if I could -"
Ari shivered all over, and counted it a miracle that she caught the blurring in the sound - she missed Sel's first words, though not the scoffing tone - and gathered it back up, in time to hear, "- best a mistress. Though she'd beat the hell out of you for suggesting it. And you can't even do that if you're proposing to vanish for months. Unless you can come up with a better lie than I could."
"What I'd like," Nikol grated. "Is to tell her the truth."
"You can't," said Sel, flatly, and it seemed wrong to Ari for him to speak to a lord so commandingly.
"And actually, that's not even what I truly want. I would prefer to invite her in-"
Sel said, "And what use is she? She'd slow us down, and for nothing. Sure, maybe in a year or two, when she's doing something useful with her studies, but right now, she's lighting up baubles."
Ari smothered the temptation to show him better, reminding herself that, even if she did wait until later, when it might not seem connected, Nikol might wonder at her motives.
"And you haven't been with her long enough to relaly know to trust her."
"Damn you, Sel, you like her."
"Like a sister." Sel spoke far too cheerfully. "I'm not telling Rosa, either."
"Of course not. Rosa is a gossip. But Ari is ..."
She chewed her lip. If she was anything, it was wishing he'd finished that sentence.
Sel said, "If you aren't going to drop her, you'll need to say something. Think of it as practice for lying to your wife about her."
Nikol replied, seriously, "But I don't think I can marry anyone else."
"Your father might have something to say about that," said Sel. "I'm told he's already in negotiation with at least three families."
The scrape of a chair on the floor, and the click of boots - though they didn't approach the door at all, Ari began her second spell, fading herself into the chair on which she sat.
Nikol said, "Then it's a good thing that if we succeed, my father will be dead."
#
The next morning, at lessons, Ari asked Aunt Sophonisba, "What do you know about Nikol's birth parents?"
"Rather a lot," said Sophie. "His mother was once my friend. Why?"
Ari focused on her current practice, mostly to avoid the woman's eye. By this time, she could not only drift an egg through the air at a calm pace, without cracking it, she could probably have juggled it, or sent it careening right up to, but never into, any of the walls.
"Oh, dear," said Sophie. "What is it?"
Sophie's face was mild and pleasant and roundish, with an extra chin and deep bags under her eyes; it was easy to miss that the eyes, large and round even now, were quite sharp.
Ari, though, considered her 'aunt' one of the few truly safe people to confide in. There was nobody warmer and softer, and the perceptiveness beneath the warmth meant she didn't have to talk it all out; she only had to say enough to let Sophie put the picture together.
"I just - Nikol said something about his father. something - hard."
"Few people like Scarth Jolian," said Sophie, levelly. "Fewer approve of him. Is this about the marriage negotiations?"
Ari hovered the egg right over Sophie's head. "Sort of."
"Please don't." But Sophie was laughing, so Ari moved it to dangle above her own head.
"He is going to have to marry, isn't he?"
"I'm sure he's quite capable of doing right," Sophie said firmly.
"I'm a bastard," Ari said. "If I even try to dress like a noble, I get arrested. How could he work his way to that?"
"Because he's got wits to spare." Sophie lifted her hand, and the egg whirled into another pattern entirely. Snatching back control without smashing egg bits all over the room was tricky, but they'd done this before, too, and Ari soon had the first egg waltzing with a second, a breath from the ceiling. "Gods know, if Nikol does want to marry you, he can practice being clever and politicking. If he's going to be worth his salt as a lord, he should be good enough to pull that trick."
"But if his father has other plans?" She counted time under her breath as Sophie tried to alter the waltz beat and creep the eggs down the walls.
Sophie yawned and stretched, probably to give herself time to think. "Well, Scarth has the King's ear, and Nikol doesn't. But then again, Nikol didn't badly misplace his own wife."
Ari drew in a breath, long and slow, and kept the waltz count against Sophie's pressure, but the eggs drifted almost a knuckle-length further from the ceiling. "Is that why Nikol hates his father?"
"Nikol seems to me to be very invested in the idea that having power means he has responsibilities. His father tends to think having power means he has privileges."
"That doesn't say what he did."
"A great many things." Sophie let go her gentle tugs on the eggs, so suddenly that Ariosta had to twirl them faster to keep from dropping them - she added a third to prove she wasn't losing control, even now. "He's bribed the kind with jewelled statues to settle disputes his way - or to keep matters away from the judge entire. He lives in a tower that was the rightful property of another lord, and not his to take. And there are those who say he has killed in the king's service. Some tried to tell me he murdered his wife, which I know is not true - Tourmalina is alive and well, if not at all able to tend her poor son."
Ari didn't bother to point out that none of these things, awful as they were, would have made Sophie stall so long in answering. She summoned the eggs back to nestle into her palm.
Sophie sighed. "He also keeps - favourites, let's call them. Though he's never asked them if they wish to be favourites, nor let them go before he's done with them."
Ariosta considered that. But there were no words. She couldn't declare she'd hate him, too; she knew well the difference between hating the idea of a man and the actuality.
Sophie plucked the eggs from her hand, and unwrapped a cluster of sapweed. "I think we're on to the next matter?"
#
In the afternoon, Ariosta took ehr sketchbook to the dissection hall, and perched in the front row, just the other side of the glass. it was good glass, but even so, some parts of it were warped, and she'd long since discovered the exact spot where she could get the most precise image of the body and the organs.
This day, they were cutting out and displaying the tumours that had riddled their old subject. Ari watched more than sketched, and considered how to apply the lessons of fine control to such an operation on a living man. First, she'd have to pinch off any of the blood vessels, as she did with the sapweed stems, or, if large enough, move and rejoin them. Then would be the trick of nudging the organs aside, enough to expose the lump, but gently enough not to harm them or bruise them in the movement. Or disconnect anything unseen. And, of course, if the heart should stop--
-- the dead man's hands jumped at the next incision, and gripped tight on the table edges. One of the scientists doing the dissection swore and jumped back.
The other, more accustomed to this duty, glowered at the watching students, and pointed to one young man. "Stop that."
The dead man's hands rose as if groping for the scientist's throat. Ari mumbled in irritation, and eased the arms back to place, before too much more tissue damage could ensue - and while she was at it, sent a blaze of sparkles to dance in front of the prankster, the break his concentration.
"Thank you, my dear," said the scientist, without looking at her, as if worried about revealing the one who ended the prank. Ariosta had taken advantage of the pause to refine her sketch, and somewhat regretted that she let him resume quite so quickly.
A while later, she felt a warm presence beside her, and dared to give Nikol a distracted smile before pressing on.
"Tell me," she murmured at a point when the scientists were showing the other side of the theatre the newest tumours. "Which would offend you worse? If I eavesdropped, or if I lied to you?"
"Lying is the worse crime," he replied. "But since both assume you did the eavesdropping in the first place, I can't say it matters. One sin against two. Arithmetic alone --"
"Enough." I twas hard to whisper through the urge to laugh. "They're continuing. Wait to the end of the lecture."
"I can't, now," he said, almost in her ear. "I can perfectly imagine the very worst moment you might have been listening in, and knowing my luck, that's when you did."
"It can't be that bad," she replied the same way, and dared to leave a kiss on his lobe. "After all, I learned you really do want to marry me."
"Oh, hell," he said, and clamped his hands on his knees. His grip tended to be strong even when he meant gentleness, but right now, she was half inclined to sketch the tendons in the back of his hands. "Oh, hell. The lamp was out in the sitting room."
But he said no more to the end of the lecture, as if knowing the worst had freed him from worry.
#
Once she had him in reasonable privacy, she described exactly where she came in to the conversation, and where she left.
Nikol only nodded to her words. He'd worried the tie from his hair as she talked, so now the fine black strands shrouded his face.
Finally, he said, "The problem is, Sel's right."
"Is he," Ari said.
"You must have surmised, I'm not the leader of this conspiracy. I joined late, though like you, I'd have joined sooner if I'd known. But Sel had to stake a lot on my usefulness, and he could point to my skill with a blade, and my experience hunting wolves. If you were a full-trained healer, yes-"
"Nikol, do you trust me?" Ari said.
He blinked at her, and she was pleased to see it was the expression he tended to wear when he wondered how she even managed to ask a question like that.
"Then lie down. I want to show you something."
He lay back, obliging enough. His feet dangled onto the carpet, since the chaise he'd chosen wasn't intended for lying down quite so fully.
"Close your eyes," she said. "And recite for me that poem."
"Which one?"
"The long one, with the grand speeches and the bloody axes." She concentrated on the feel of his body, on knowing what lay inside, the shapes and patterns she'd drawn so often, but warm, living, moving. The lungs, swelling and settling. The muscles, trying to settle, but not truly relaxed.
"That doesn't narrow it down," he said.
"True," she agreed. "There are too many epics. The one we both know. With the chorus about the horse and the hawk."
He'd long since admitted he had no great patience at sitting, so she wasn't wholly surprised that he began to swing his legs already only a few slow breaths after she'd spoken. "I can't remember it all," he said.
"I'll help," she said and reached out with her mind, as if invisible, intangible hands crept through him. She cradled his heart as lightly as she had the eggs, let herself feel the pulse of its pumping. And listened to the poem - Nikol was quite good at reciting, but she did have to remind him twice of the next passage, and one scene they both mumbled through - and very softly, began to squeeze with each beat, matching his natural rhythm at first, feeling how the blood moved safely through.
Soon after, his breath had quickened, grown ragged, stammering on the words and all at once, his gently closed eyes grew huge. Coccarini grey eyes, startling pale even in his fair skinned face and his fae-like features. It was a wonder he'd proven utterly empty of magic, with his pedigree. There wasn't a wizard of note in the Jolian line, true, but his mother's family had produced a few.
"What are you doing?" he asked, sounding breathless.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Like I've been running-"
"I sped up your heart," she said. It wouldn't do to let go too quickly, either, and startle the organ into stopping outright.
"You-"
"It did you no harm," she said. "But only because I was careful. If I were careless, or urgent, I could just stop it. Or crush it."
She continued to squeeze in the quadruple pulse, but slower, then slower, until she felt near enough the original pace to slip her hands away, breath-gentle, and let go.
"That's -"
"Useful," she said. "I can do it while talking. I can do it while looking like I'm doing something else entirely. Likewise, I know how to split and reopen larger veins. Not well enough to be sure in surgery, not well enough to use on a live patient. But if I didn't need to be careful-"
"You're not letting me finish a thought,' he said. "Do you think you can do that while swords are in play five feet from your person? While bleeding yourself?"
"I can only try," she said. "Which is the same answer you gave when they first sent you hunting wolves. Now you know I can be useful, and if you can't persuade this conspiracy to let me in, then you're never going to be competent to rule Jolian."
"As you say," he said, and far from looking terrified that she had, quite literally, held his heart in thrall, he looked fierce, and very much as if he had more respect than he'd ever borne her.
She said, "Can you tell me who are you conspiring against, and why?"
(ETA: Had I posted this with a little more time to think, that closing question would be something rather sharper and more precise, either about what required him to be away for months, or why he felt he had to kill his father. The latter is almost certainly the better question, as, it turns out, it wasn't Nikol who decided that. He just agrees with the sentiment.)
Everything is crossposted to DW and LJ until further notice. Post comments here or there. (Comments at DW:
)
Item the first:
This is what I did last week that I didn't mention. It's amazing how unphotogenic I am; this was the best of a bad lot.
And this tells you how much work I've been doping at work this week. because bit by bit, this popped up. These are familiar characters to me, but this particular story isn't goign any further right now, so I might just as well show it here.
(This is not, by the way, a precise match to the text I was writing at work. That was in longhand, and it got revised as I went, as things do when entered into the computer).
Ariosta Lorenzo had been told too many times by her Governess that she should be careful, or she'd prove her bad blood, and she'd been determined never to fulfill that prophecy. She didn't believe that bastardy naturally caused sins, and she wanted very badly to excell and prove the governess -- who had been the source of misery for her pureblooded pupils as well as her left-handed one, and was certainly not the pillar of perfection she styled herself -- wrong in this as in so many other proclamations.
Except that now Ari was slipping her way barefoot through Siama House, to Nikol Jolian's room, and in her satin pouch was a sponge soaked in vinegar and certain essences of dubious origin. Moreover, she'd done it before - though not, as this time, without Nikol's foreknowledge. She didn't think he'd mind, somehow, and he didn't consider what she did wrong; his only concern, through the affair so far, had been that she take sensible precautions, and not let it interfere with her studies.
She did feel a pang of doubt on seeing a light, however dim, under the door of his suite. She laid her hand on the wood of the outside door, and mouthed the words to focus her magic.
Wood picked up echoes of sound; enhancing that and melding it with her own hearing told her there was nobody in the sitting room, but at least two voices in the more private space beyond. But those voices had reached the door through a long enough stretch of wood and space that they echoed themselves into nonsense. She eased the door open.
A candle had been left alight in the entry room, in a mirror-backed vase, with enough water at the base to smother it if it burned too low. And a lamp, such as someone would have used to walk the halls, sat on a wooden chair. She tsked at the carelessness and turned the key to snuff it. The candle alone, particularly mirrored, provided enough light to keep from stumbling over the plush chairs - and too much for her to usefully hide.
She dropped into the last chair by the inner door, and leaned close, again using the hum of the wood under her fingers to enhance the sound; this close to the source, it worked very much better. Itf it was merely his valet, later than usual, she could knock and be brazen. But it would be her luck that this night, aunt Sophonisba would have chosen to visit her foster son for a game of Mores.
The first voice was familiar, though, young and male, irritable and quick-spoken, but in Siama house, that hardly narrowed the field. "- I refuse to accept a plan that assumes Ciano is an idiot."
"I'm not assuming," Nikol said. "If they prove too clumsy, we can abort, or hire more. I have coin enough for five more blades at the rate you negotiated. But even untried blades will help; I hardly think Ciano's men will be well-versed in this sort of defense."
"I suppose not," said the other. She knew him now. Seviamelli - Sel - Dano, the son of Lord Killini's head of guards. Nikol's match for age, but at best hers for status - and, in spite of the plenitude of fostered peers, the person Nikol seemed to trust the most. "How many days? Two months, do you think?"
"Two," said Nikol, slightly mocking. "Seven, at least. And I don't mean to be in the Fey Lands in winter -- which likely means a year."
Sel whistled. "What were you planning to do about Ari?"
Nikol sighed - and by the rustling noise, shifted in his chair. "Ariosta is a problem."
Ari had been considering the risks of getting caught at eavesdropping, and whether she could manage to cast a blurring over herself in time if either door opened. Now, the arrival of Aunt Sophie, or Killini himself, wouldn't move her.
"Just tell her it's done," said Sel, and that hurt. He'd seemed to like her. "You can't explain, and why you'd try-"
"No wonder your affairs are so short," Nikol muttered. "She deserves better. I'd marry her if I could -"
Ari shivered all over, and counted it a miracle that she caught the blurring in the sound - she missed Sel's first words, though not the scoffing tone - and gathered it back up, in time to hear, "- best a mistress. Though she'd beat the hell out of you for suggesting it. And you can't even do that if you're proposing to vanish for months. Unless you can come up with a better lie than I could."
"What I'd like," Nikol grated. "Is to tell her the truth."
"You can't," said Sel, flatly, and it seemed wrong to Ari for him to speak to a lord so commandingly.
"And actually, that's not even what I truly want. I would prefer to invite her in-"
Sel said, "And what use is she? She'd slow us down, and for nothing. Sure, maybe in a year or two, when she's doing something useful with her studies, but right now, she's lighting up baubles."
Ari smothered the temptation to show him better, reminding herself that, even if she did wait until later, when it might not seem connected, Nikol might wonder at her motives.
"And you haven't been with her long enough to relaly know to trust her."
"Damn you, Sel, you like her."
"Like a sister." Sel spoke far too cheerfully. "I'm not telling Rosa, either."
"Of course not. Rosa is a gossip. But Ari is ..."
She chewed her lip. If she was anything, it was wishing he'd finished that sentence.
Sel said, "If you aren't going to drop her, you'll need to say something. Think of it as practice for lying to your wife about her."
Nikol replied, seriously, "But I don't think I can marry anyone else."
"Your father might have something to say about that," said Sel. "I'm told he's already in negotiation with at least three families."
The scrape of a chair on the floor, and the click of boots - though they didn't approach the door at all, Ari began her second spell, fading herself into the chair on which she sat.
Nikol said, "Then it's a good thing that if we succeed, my father will be dead."
#
The next morning, at lessons, Ari asked Aunt Sophonisba, "What do you know about Nikol's birth parents?"
"Rather a lot," said Sophie. "His mother was once my friend. Why?"
Ari focused on her current practice, mostly to avoid the woman's eye. By this time, she could not only drift an egg through the air at a calm pace, without cracking it, she could probably have juggled it, or sent it careening right up to, but never into, any of the walls.
"Oh, dear," said Sophie. "What is it?"
Sophie's face was mild and pleasant and roundish, with an extra chin and deep bags under her eyes; it was easy to miss that the eyes, large and round even now, were quite sharp.
Ari, though, considered her 'aunt' one of the few truly safe people to confide in. There was nobody warmer and softer, and the perceptiveness beneath the warmth meant she didn't have to talk it all out; she only had to say enough to let Sophie put the picture together.
"I just - Nikol said something about his father. something - hard."
"Few people like Scarth Jolian," said Sophie, levelly. "Fewer approve of him. Is this about the marriage negotiations?"
Ari hovered the egg right over Sophie's head. "Sort of."
"Please don't." But Sophie was laughing, so Ari moved it to dangle above her own head.
"He is going to have to marry, isn't he?"
"I'm sure he's quite capable of doing right," Sophie said firmly.
"I'm a bastard," Ari said. "If I even try to dress like a noble, I get arrested. How could he work his way to that?"
"Because he's got wits to spare." Sophie lifted her hand, and the egg whirled into another pattern entirely. Snatching back control without smashing egg bits all over the room was tricky, but they'd done this before, too, and Ari soon had the first egg waltzing with a second, a breath from the ceiling. "Gods know, if Nikol does want to marry you, he can practice being clever and politicking. If he's going to be worth his salt as a lord, he should be good enough to pull that trick."
"But if his father has other plans?" She counted time under her breath as Sophie tried to alter the waltz beat and creep the eggs down the walls.
Sophie yawned and stretched, probably to give herself time to think. "Well, Scarth has the King's ear, and Nikol doesn't. But then again, Nikol didn't badly misplace his own wife."
Ari drew in a breath, long and slow, and kept the waltz count against Sophie's pressure, but the eggs drifted almost a knuckle-length further from the ceiling. "Is that why Nikol hates his father?"
"Nikol seems to me to be very invested in the idea that having power means he has responsibilities. His father tends to think having power means he has privileges."
"That doesn't say what he did."
"A great many things." Sophie let go her gentle tugs on the eggs, so suddenly that Ariosta had to twirl them faster to keep from dropping them - she added a third to prove she wasn't losing control, even now. "He's bribed the kind with jewelled statues to settle disputes his way - or to keep matters away from the judge entire. He lives in a tower that was the rightful property of another lord, and not his to take. And there are those who say he has killed in the king's service. Some tried to tell me he murdered his wife, which I know is not true - Tourmalina is alive and well, if not at all able to tend her poor son."
Ari didn't bother to point out that none of these things, awful as they were, would have made Sophie stall so long in answering. She summoned the eggs back to nestle into her palm.
Sophie sighed. "He also keeps - favourites, let's call them. Though he's never asked them if they wish to be favourites, nor let them go before he's done with them."
Ariosta considered that. But there were no words. She couldn't declare she'd hate him, too; she knew well the difference between hating the idea of a man and the actuality.
Sophie plucked the eggs from her hand, and unwrapped a cluster of sapweed. "I think we're on to the next matter?"
#
In the afternoon, Ariosta took ehr sketchbook to the dissection hall, and perched in the front row, just the other side of the glass. it was good glass, but even so, some parts of it were warped, and she'd long since discovered the exact spot where she could get the most precise image of the body and the organs.
This day, they were cutting out and displaying the tumours that had riddled their old subject. Ari watched more than sketched, and considered how to apply the lessons of fine control to such an operation on a living man. First, she'd have to pinch off any of the blood vessels, as she did with the sapweed stems, or, if large enough, move and rejoin them. Then would be the trick of nudging the organs aside, enough to expose the lump, but gently enough not to harm them or bruise them in the movement. Or disconnect anything unseen. And, of course, if the heart should stop--
-- the dead man's hands jumped at the next incision, and gripped tight on the table edges. One of the scientists doing the dissection swore and jumped back.
The other, more accustomed to this duty, glowered at the watching students, and pointed to one young man. "Stop that."
The dead man's hands rose as if groping for the scientist's throat. Ari mumbled in irritation, and eased the arms back to place, before too much more tissue damage could ensue - and while she was at it, sent a blaze of sparkles to dance in front of the prankster, the break his concentration.
"Thank you, my dear," said the scientist, without looking at her, as if worried about revealing the one who ended the prank. Ariosta had taken advantage of the pause to refine her sketch, and somewhat regretted that she let him resume quite so quickly.
A while later, she felt a warm presence beside her, and dared to give Nikol a distracted smile before pressing on.
"Tell me," she murmured at a point when the scientists were showing the other side of the theatre the newest tumours. "Which would offend you worse? If I eavesdropped, or if I lied to you?"
"Lying is the worse crime," he replied. "But since both assume you did the eavesdropping in the first place, I can't say it matters. One sin against two. Arithmetic alone --"
"Enough." I twas hard to whisper through the urge to laugh. "They're continuing. Wait to the end of the lecture."
"I can't, now," he said, almost in her ear. "I can perfectly imagine the very worst moment you might have been listening in, and knowing my luck, that's when you did."
"It can't be that bad," she replied the same way, and dared to leave a kiss on his lobe. "After all, I learned you really do want to marry me."
"Oh, hell," he said, and clamped his hands on his knees. His grip tended to be strong even when he meant gentleness, but right now, she was half inclined to sketch the tendons in the back of his hands. "Oh, hell. The lamp was out in the sitting room."
But he said no more to the end of the lecture, as if knowing the worst had freed him from worry.
#
Once she had him in reasonable privacy, she described exactly where she came in to the conversation, and where she left.
Nikol only nodded to her words. He'd worried the tie from his hair as she talked, so now the fine black strands shrouded his face.
Finally, he said, "The problem is, Sel's right."
"Is he," Ari said.
"You must have surmised, I'm not the leader of this conspiracy. I joined late, though like you, I'd have joined sooner if I'd known. But Sel had to stake a lot on my usefulness, and he could point to my skill with a blade, and my experience hunting wolves. If you were a full-trained healer, yes-"
"Nikol, do you trust me?" Ari said.
He blinked at her, and she was pleased to see it was the expression he tended to wear when he wondered how she even managed to ask a question like that.
"Then lie down. I want to show you something."
He lay back, obliging enough. His feet dangled onto the carpet, since the chaise he'd chosen wasn't intended for lying down quite so fully.
"Close your eyes," she said. "And recite for me that poem."
"Which one?"
"The long one, with the grand speeches and the bloody axes." She concentrated on the feel of his body, on knowing what lay inside, the shapes and patterns she'd drawn so often, but warm, living, moving. The lungs, swelling and settling. The muscles, trying to settle, but not truly relaxed.
"That doesn't narrow it down," he said.
"True," she agreed. "There are too many epics. The one we both know. With the chorus about the horse and the hawk."
He'd long since admitted he had no great patience at sitting, so she wasn't wholly surprised that he began to swing his legs already only a few slow breaths after she'd spoken. "I can't remember it all," he said.
"I'll help," she said and reached out with her mind, as if invisible, intangible hands crept through him. She cradled his heart as lightly as she had the eggs, let herself feel the pulse of its pumping. And listened to the poem - Nikol was quite good at reciting, but she did have to remind him twice of the next passage, and one scene they both mumbled through - and very softly, began to squeeze with each beat, matching his natural rhythm at first, feeling how the blood moved safely through.
Soon after, his breath had quickened, grown ragged, stammering on the words and all at once, his gently closed eyes grew huge. Coccarini grey eyes, startling pale even in his fair skinned face and his fae-like features. It was a wonder he'd proven utterly empty of magic, with his pedigree. There wasn't a wizard of note in the Jolian line, true, but his mother's family had produced a few.
"What are you doing?" he asked, sounding breathless.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Like I've been running-"
"I sped up your heart," she said. It wouldn't do to let go too quickly, either, and startle the organ into stopping outright.
"You-"
"It did you no harm," she said. "But only because I was careful. If I were careless, or urgent, I could just stop it. Or crush it."
She continued to squeeze in the quadruple pulse, but slower, then slower, until she felt near enough the original pace to slip her hands away, breath-gentle, and let go.
"That's -"
"Useful," she said. "I can do it while talking. I can do it while looking like I'm doing something else entirely. Likewise, I know how to split and reopen larger veins. Not well enough to be sure in surgery, not well enough to use on a live patient. But if I didn't need to be careful-"
"You're not letting me finish a thought,' he said. "Do you think you can do that while swords are in play five feet from your person? While bleeding yourself?"
"I can only try," she said. "Which is the same answer you gave when they first sent you hunting wolves. Now you know I can be useful, and if you can't persuade this conspiracy to let me in, then you're never going to be competent to rule Jolian."
"As you say," he said, and far from looking terrified that she had, quite literally, held his heart in thrall, he looked fierce, and very much as if he had more respect than he'd ever borne her.
She said, "Can you tell me who are you conspiring against, and why?"
(ETA: Had I posted this with a little more time to think, that closing question would be something rather sharper and more precise, either about what required him to be away for months, or why he felt he had to kill his father. The latter is almost certainly the better question, as, it turns out, it wasn't Nikol who decided that. He just agrees with the sentiment.)
Everything is crossposted to DW and LJ until further notice. Post comments here or there. (Comments at DW:
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Lorenzo...
Date: 2011-03-06 01:55 am (UTC)Lorenzo is the first name of a minor miscreant (although he seems quite major in the first book) in the story that I have been working on.
Re: Lorenzo...
Date: 2011-03-06 03:00 am (UTC)I also really want Ariosta to do one other demonstration of her magical skills in the last scene, almost in passing, before she goes on.
The Lorenzo family show up in several works, even one of my published ones (Which happens when Nikol and Ari are in their 60s).
I disagree strongly with those writers who say they never read at all anymore, ever -- because how can you keep up with what's happening in the genre? But I do understand not doing it WHILE writing, and reading mostly while you're doing revisions to a finished story, or taking a break between projects. I've found it rarely affects me one way or the other, these days (I'm good at juggling plotlines and all). But I know people who are really good at imitating other peoples' style, and for some of them, it's hard *not* to do that if you read too much by that person. I also know people who will read only wildly different genres while writing a project, (Only fluffy romances or hard boiled mysteries while writing epic fantasy, for example) because those won't infect them the same way.
Re: Lorenzo...
Date: 2011-03-06 05:38 am (UTC)Re: Lorenzo...
Date: 2011-03-06 06:24 pm (UTC)Besides, dragons are never wholly out of fashion, just as vampires haven't been. They get really obvious upswings, but they also carry on pretty well the rest of the time.