Thank you Jess for the lovely review!
In Her Calipers
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold though I seem tame
In the ruins, she finds a home of a sort. She likes the crumbling walls and the emptiness that others might find eerie. The purity of the silence tells her that she is safe, secure. She is alone here as she was beside the sea that spat her out.
Her nomadic life has taught her how to forage, but in this arid place, food is scarce. Nonetheless, she will not leave it. Too many dangers wait beyond it, men with smiles like the lying moon, hands that want to tangle her like seaweed.
In her solitude and her silence, she is peaceful. She scrabbles through the library when she is bored, plucking inspiration from the pictures there. The rigid lines of words like soldiers mean nothing to her, except that she knows in some innate way that they are dangerous. There can be no lies without words, after all.
So she spends her days in a quiet haze, disturbed only by the grumble of hunger in her stomach. She becomes pared down and slender as a knife, all edges and gleam. Her illusions fill the air as she amuses herself, creating a series of the grotesque and the dazzling.
On the rare occasions that anyone comes near, she sends her creations raging against them, and they are soon gone.
Sometimes, she thrashes in her sleep. Her dreams are full of motion, of anger and fear and the snarl of an ocean in storm-tossed fury. Only occasionally are they broken by something else – a flash of sun-darkened skin, a certain quizzical expression, scarred knuckles and a great stillness beneath golden light. She never remembers them.
So she exists, wordless and fearless, in her sanctuary. Her dreams are nothing more than what she casts upon the air.
It never occurs to her that it cannot last.
X - X - X - X - X
But we must go
Though yet we do not know
Who called, or what marks we shall leave upon the snow
He can feel the world changing, slowly but surely, like water eroding stone. Matthew marks it in the people around him, in how easily they adjust. Rushton assumes leadership like a crown, and if he is somewhat sterner, if he feels the weight of it hard upon his neck, he is fair and capable too.
The others form around him like a court. Roland is savage in his demands, yet twice as gentle with his patients, and most of his vitriol is frustration at being unable to do more (there's a hunger in him to cure the world, and Matthew thinks it might be a little dangerous because he knows what is to want something impossible. His mother and Cameo are fading away, sepia memories that he cannot cling to however hard he tries).
Maryon is enigmatic, icy, sweeping into Guildmerge like the North Wind carrying the future on it. And yet the Futuretelling guild is full of colour – beautiful tapestries that belie their diffident façade.
In Garth, Matthew glimpses something of Elspeth's curiosity, and his own. They get along, swapping theories about the Beforetime laced with romantic interpretations. Under that bulk, Garth is pure idealism.
Gevan is dark and sharp as nettles, although his smiles and his laughter take the sting from his words. But Matthew never forgets that Gevan could make him do anything he wanted (jump off a cliff, bare his neck to a wolf's slavering jaws, kill...), so he cannot help but be a little wary.
And then there is Dameon and Elspeth.
Matthew isn't too blind to see that they are two corners of the triangle where Rushton forms the apex. There is an odd kind of bond between the three, and with a sense of sadness, he realises that the pair of them are drifting further from him.
Elspeth wears no crown, only the tattered cloak of her legend, but she's as proud and stern as Rushton, and their arguments are already becoming explosive. The air fairly crackles anytime the two of them are in a room, and everyone else becomes mere background. The rumour mill grinds on, but very quietly, because no one wants to be confronted by the Farseeker Guildmistress's acerbic tongue, or - worse – Rushton's cool and unflinching request for an explanation.
Only Daemon can calm the pair of them. He is the eye of the storm, a centre of tranquillity in Obernewtyn; people flock to him, love him, and Matthew cannot blame them. Instead, he steps back, recognising that other people need his friend more.
And so in this brave new world, he moves into the shadows. Oh, he's the ward, and he has a dozen routine tasks to do, but even Ceirwan comes between him and Elspeth. The great deeds he dreamed of have not materialised. His loneliness returns, and when the mission to the old library is suggested, he fights for the chance to go.
And he finds himself daydreaming of the Misfit, so strange and so powerful, who he will help find. He will be part of the great discovery; more than humdrum duties and the minutiae of Guildmerge.
That night, he dreams of the girl so still under the moon, and feels the thrill of prophecy.
X - X - X - X - X
Little one, you've kept the heart of poverty in you
The ride to Obernewtyn is long and fascinating. The tall, stern woman who carries herself with such confidence has given her a name: Dragon. It tastes right in her mouth.
When they try to force her into water, she screams and screams. She cannot tell them why: even though there are no lies in the eyes of the elderly woman who scrubs her down, Dragon cannot bring herself to trust the water.
They stare at her when she comes in, and she feels their shock like cold fingers on her skin. It is greatest of all from the boy with the brown eyes who has been so kind, and for a moment when she looks at him, she feels a glimmer of recognition (what would he look like under a burning sun, what will he be when the years have moulded him?)
Then it passes, leaving her confused and fearful. The wonder in their eyes is alien to her: it's close enough to the hunger of those men in the woods, years ago, that she wants to run.
Later, when they show her a girl with long, curling red hair and blue eyes, Dragon gasps and reaches out. When her fingers brush glass, she realises it's her.
She is beautiful. It means nothing to her. Instead, she fills the mirror with illusions so that they will see that she is useful, that they can't abandon her. When they shout and laugh, she knows it was a good decision.
X - X - X - X - X
Love, how often I loved you without seeing,
Without remembering you,
Not recognising your glance
"I cannae get rid of her," he exclaims, rubbing a hand through his hair. "Even my shadow doesnae stick as close to me."
"Your shadow has less need of you," Dameon points out gently. "Dragon is still learning, Matthew. She understands more than she is able to explain, and that frustrates her. You have a knack for understanding her-"
"And she has a knack for irritating me!"
He slumps into a chair opposite his friend, who has an amused smile. "Matthew, you hardly discouraged her."
He cannot tell Dameon about his dream. He dreamed of Cameo too, and she died. He dreamed of Elspeth, who lies in the Healer Guild now, recovering from a knife to the head. If Elspeth isn't dead yet, it's either luck or sorcery, because he's never met anyone else who courts death like a lover.
"She needed looking after," Matthew mutters.
"She still does."
"Then you look after her," he says shortly. "She just sits an' stares at me. I cannae sit down without her bringing me tea or food or trinkets."
Dameon chuckles. "What hardship you endure."
"I need to get away from her," he snaps. "She's a child."
Dameon's blind eyes were upon him, and his face was solemn. "Is that really what you think?"
He glares across the hall, where Dragon is listening to Lina and Zarak, undoubtedly relating some lurid tale of their exploits. She bursts into laughter, the sound fierce and unfettered, and in her abandon he sees a girl who knows nothing of how to hold back, nothing of civility.
"Yes."
She sees him staring: for a long moment, their eyes lock and the room constricts. He breaks the glance, and hurries from the room before she can approach. In his haste, he misses Dameon's soft parting comment:
"Then you're a fool."
X - X - X - X - X
O, cast me from your hand
That I may show my love for you
And throw me to the wind
That I may know my need for you
She has watched him for years. She has idolised him, as others idolise the fantasies she weaves upon the air. But that passed, and she began to see beneath her image of him. The golden façade peeled away like gilt, and slowly, his flaws took shape before her.
She knows Matthew. She cannot form the words to say so, because language is still something she hammers together like a child. Dragon despises lies, and all that flickers in her animal core at the thought (that smile opening like a trap) and so she speaks as simply and as truthfully as possible. Her speech is not ornate or stuffed with needless words.
But that isn't how these people communicate. Inevitably, any attempt she made to explain to him would be clumsy and mistaken, and so it has been: she says love and he hears worship.
He is her language – she could speak him with her hands, if he'd let her. Her heart is fluent in his idiosyncrasies and his cruelties.
She doesn't love him for his kindness or his courage or his valour. She loves him for the way he scowls at paperwork and the sudden tilt of his head when he questions someone's opinion, and the rasp of his Highland accent. She loves him because he is unstoppable in his romantic notions, a veritable force of nature that drives others to exasperation and laughter. He calls to the part of her that thrills at fairytales and myths.
She loves him because she sees the sadness in his eyes sometimes, and he never speaks of it. His complaints are extravagant, but always trivial – the heat of the day, the herbs in the food, mud and rain. Whatever is in Matthew's heart, he keeps it concealed.
He fascinates her. Because she knows how he hates her staring, she has learned the tricks of subterfuge. She glimpses him in the gaps between bodies, in the reflection of a dish or in her peripheral vision. In those rare moments where he looks at her, she looks back and hopes he can see more than the savage plucked from the ruins of a dead world.
He never does.
So desperation drives her to utter words he thinks she cannot comprehend – words like love and need and you – and rejection drives her to tears. It hurts, and she thinks that surely she must be mistaken, that this can't be love, this thorny, complex thing.
But it is. It does not pass. It does not fade. And it does not blind her.
In his anger, she sees fragments of his ghosts. She cannot puzzle out the whole of it, but his grief swamps her sometimes, breaking on her like the ocean, rousing an echo of something fleeting (mother?) and quickly forgotten.
His prejudice is tiresome. Time and again, she tries to push past it, as she does with everyone. He isn't the only one, just the most important one.
With many, she failed. But sometimes, she succeeded. Back at Obernewtyn, Lina would hug her and whisper secrets: she at least, knew that Dragon understood more than she could express. In the quiet refuge of Dameon's rooms, Dragon could speak to him in emotions as well as her awkward words, and he answered in the same, so they conversed heart to heart.
"Give him time," he said gently. "He has lost so much that I think he fears to lose again."
She wanted to say that Matthew was close to losing her too, but it wasn't true. Hope still spurred her on.
"Dragon love Matthew," she whispered back, and sent with it a wave of emotion. "Matthew too stupid to love Dragon."
His laughter was soft. "They are blinder than me, these people who don't know love when they see it," he agreed, and she felt his own sorrow.
She thinks on those words when she follows Matthew to Sutrium. She clings hard to them when he turns upon, vicious, and knifes her once again with his words and his cruelty.
She weeps, and she hates him for a little while - this blind stupid man who romanticises everyone except her.
X - X - X - X - X
Thanks for reading! Comments and criticism adored.
Author's Notes: The quotes at the start of each segment are taken from the following:
Whoso List To Hunt - Thomas Wyatt
The Call - Charlotte Mew
Sonnet XXIX - Pablo Neruda
Sonnet XXII - Pablo Neruda
The Falcon To The Falconer - Jonathan Steffen