The Justice/Just Ice line is from Measure for Measure, which I got to see at the Globe last night.
For the lovely Maddy, who beta-read for me.
After these long years, she longs for freedom. She has spent so much time in this prison that she herself is almost spent, but right now she is red. Red with anger, red with her blood that has spent two decades boiling away. She is red.
She is ready.
She begins with the new guard, whose face is guarded. He has been told not to trust her, but he cannot help himself. He can help her. She retains her looks, the looks from him, for she is no great beauty now, and turns them over in her mind. She finds him most receptive to her smiles, and therefore she smiles at him as she pours her ideas into him.
He pours her water. It soothes her cracked throat, her cracked voice, but not her cracked
fragmented
splintered
mind.
He doesn't mind. Girls usually turn their noses up at this hunch-backed boy, but he has a hunch repulsion itself scorns the lady Delia. He makes many mistakes, ruins all that's at stake at the hands of a ruin.
He had thought hypnotism could only be done by the Gifted. He hadn't thought that a middle-aged corpse's smile could be anything, could bewitch him. He falls
(under her spell)
to the ground after he has passed her the keys. His legs spill out onto the floor, his blood spilt.
She moves past him, she moves at last, past the past.
She reeks.
She wreaks her revenge.
She still retains a drop of poise, a drop of poison.
And her lips curve in a smile as she rounds a curve in the stairs. And she knows, she knows just who to use it on.
Tonight, she will brand her own brand of justice on the world. Tonight, all her wrongs will be righted and her rights will be wronged. And now, her eyes gleam with just ice.
