This chapter was meant to have the title action but alas, for I kept writing and writing and before it was even halfway done it was longer than any of the chapters so far. I could have left it really really long but this way I can update faster.
So instead, this chapter has two sections of our mysterious first person narrative, and I would like to point out that those sections take place at the same time as the last chapter, while everything else happens two weeks later. Out of sheer perversity, I still refuse to say this characters name in script. It will however be spoken at the very end of the next chapter though with all the hints I give I will be amazed and ashamed if you cannot guess who it is if you have even read ITHotG once.
Chapter the Eighth
"Where did he go?"
The cry, not mine, tore out of my own throat, cutting off breath as it forced its way up from the shadowed depths of my stolen soul. Damn it all! Or maybe bless it, I wasn't sure which at the moment. On the one hand, I knew that the reactions to my failure would be harsh and tortuous. On the other hand, if he wanted this done, the world would be better off with my failure.
A sharp pain lancing through my body shocked me out of my reverie. A gentle reminder from my distant master to stay on task. Another, stronger jolt nearly knocked me to my knees, and I decided that the long-term consequences scared me less.
How could one fire-tempered boy cause so much trouble? The streets were silent, all life and color of the marketplace having fled with the last feeble shimmer of sunlight hours before. All except a stray, tattered banner in the royal Conte blue, dragged across the filthy street in an errant breeze.
Bruise-colored shadows shrouded every abandoned stall, far too many to search for a small, Gifted squire. But why would he hide I thought suddenly, I've been careful, he should have no idea anyone's following him. With renewed feelings of both hope and despair, I jogged farther into the depths of the city.
~*~*~
The cacophony that was the essence of the Lower City wound around me, nearly corporeal in its strength and volume. I knew just what it would look like too. Rough as ram's wool, rough as their work-hardened skin. Color same as the common dirt they lived in. They disgusted me.
It was one of the few things that the Duke and I agreed upon. But short of a plague coming through to spirit them all away, they were a thing to be suffered. Besides, who would clean up all of the bodies?
I slipped behind a faded scarlet pillar as a door opened, spreading a brilliant puddle of light across the ground. I concentrated on their faint conversation, distracting myself from the fetid pong that surrounded me.
"Now lass," the first voice said. A ,am
s voice, older than me, but not my much. "You shouldn't stay away so long, I near pined away to nothingness waitin' for you."
A peasant lovers' good-bye, and one that had nothing to do with my elusive noble quarry. I snorted, missing the girl's mumbled reply. Whatever it was, it made the man laugh.
"Ouch, milady. You've wounded me. My heart is bleeding, calling out as I die but four you to fulfill my unrequited love." There was a different laugh and then a muffled "oomph." Presumably as the girl pushed her Player of a lover into a wall, and then light quick footsteps hurried towards me. I quickly scooted around the column. Not that I thought it mattered if some common maid saw me, but there was no such thing as too cautious, and many things that accounted as unnecessary risks.
So I concentrated on the girl's pitter-patter steps, moving around the column in accordance. It was like the carefully rehearsed and choreographed steps of a madman, all centering around the column at my back, with me spinning slowly and close, and her leaping widely around.
And then my shoulder hit a warm barrier of flesh, and I remembered that this had not been a pas de deux but a pas de trois.
"Enjoy the show, lad?" My back was to the light from the open door, concealing my face but giving a fully view of his. Hair above a long forehead a light brown, green-hazel eyes, a distinctive nose to large for his face. A commoner. I'd be able to recognize that face again though, just in case. But as I continued looking, I noticed a sword belted to his hip. And the readiness of his stance and angle of his wrist said that, despite the law, he knew how to use it. "And I thought we'd got rid of you blokes."
Confused, I stuttered out, "I have no idea what you're talking about,"
inwardly wincing at the idiocy of the statement.
"Don't be messin' with me, boy," he warned, his face still genial. "I've got the Sight, so I know you've been standing there the whole time."
I pulled the best of my nobly born arrogance around me and took a step away from the pillar, turning at the same time, to keep him in my sights. As the light hit my face, his eyes widened. "You're the shadower?" he exclaimed, eyes going dark with fury. Before I finished blinking from the new light and his bewildering words. I felt myself fly back into the pillar, jaw numb from the sudden punch. Shaking myself out, I scrabbled at my belt, noting that with a flick of each hand, his own knives were out.
Wrist sheathes the though impinged on my brain I have got to get me some of those. Even as he closed, I found the pouch I was looking for, his left knife scoring my cheek. I pulled my knee up to his groin, throwing the fistful of powder at his face simultaneously. As it connected, I closed my eyes against the flash of orange light and opened them to see him on his back, eyes blank and staring.
Satisfied, I wiped the excess dust off my hands. I glanced up at the sign of the inn, trying to get my bearings. "The Dancing Dove." Eastern side of the city, I thought to myself. I could head west and hit the main road. Turning on my heel, I left the man's motionless body behind.
~*~*~
The next two weeks passed easily for Alanna. Comparatively easy, that is. Between being battered and bruised in the mornings, and still getting up for more, trying not to nod off in the academic classes of the afternoon, squinting over papers late into the night, and extra practice fit in around the extra work details she still accrued.
But nothing out of the ordinary happened; no more fights with Jonathon (at least not beyond who got the last roll at dinner with their friends.) and at the three social functions that the was forcibly dragged to, she had dodged away and hid whenever she caught at glimpse of the emerald-clad figure of Delia of Eldorne.
She hadn't seen George since the day she and Jonathon had made up0. They had arranged to meet the following Thursday at the Dove, but Alanna had been so busy with the extra work assigned in Ethics class that she hadn't been able to make it. Or at least that's what she told herself.
In truth, the homework really shouldn't have taken as long as it did. If she had hurried, she could have dashed down to the Dove only a little late. But she hadn't, and didn't want to analyze why.
Still, it had been a fairly easy time, and she lazily reclined on the couch during the first completely free afternoon that she'd had in a while.
And then Jonathon burst in, a bounciness to his step, excitement making the words he caroled out unintelligible even as his hands shook with an uncharacteristic nervousness. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened again, and shut, as his violent trembling nearly ripped the paper cradled in his hands apart.
"Jonathon what's wrong?" Alanna asked, worried about her friend's strange behavior.
He started having forgotten that she was there in his nervousness. "You're a girl. Aren't you Alanna?" he burst out suddenly.
She blinked. Not what I was expecting. Instead of answering the question, Alanna merely raised her eyebrows and waited. And continued waiting as Jonathon muttered to himself, papers still trembling with the rigid tenseness of his grip. Twice he opened his mouth to speak, the second time a single quivering syllable escaped his lips before he returned to deliberating.
"For Mithros's sake, Jonathon! Spit it out!" she called impatiently.
He jumped to attention. "Poetry." The word him unexpectedly, and they both looked to where it hung in the air between them: Jon with surprise and relief, Alanna with a sudden sense of dismay.
"Poetry, she repeated dumbly, praying to the Goddess that she had heard incorrectly, that he'd mumbled "Party" or "Pantry" or even "Potty" but knowing such hopes were useless.
"Yes, Poetry," he repeated, standing up straighter in a peculiar combination of pride and bashfulness. "For Delia, she's always on my mind, sleeping or waking. And I thought, if I could just tell her..." the fanatic light that had come into his eyes at the mention of his lover dimmed a bit, now the faint orange of slumbering embers.
"But I couldn't, so I tried to find another way, and this morning I sat down at the desk and..." His voice trailed off with pride as he held the somewhat-crumpled paper out to his squire. "And I didn't want to have her thing that it was rubbish and I needed someone to read it first, and I thought..." He didn't even have to tell Alanna what he "thought." She could read it in the hopeful expression on his face and the pitiful entreaty in his voice.
"Fine," she grumbled, wishing that once, just once, she didn't feel compelled to be such a good friend.
My lady Delia,
Your beauty astounds me, amazes me, and is ever so rare
Not even the beauty of a cow heavy with child can compare.
Your gait is so graceful,
Though dancing with you painful
Your emerald eyes are divine
Though they cannot compare with mine
Your mouth is red like a rose
Much better than your toucan nose
Have I ever said
How good you are in bed?
Should you ever leave me
I would be bereaved
I'd rip apart my heart
And watch blood drain from it like a sieve.
Finishing, she put it down slowly and carefully, arranging it needlessly on the desk, working to line the paper up perfectly with the corned as she tried to think of something to say.
"Well?" demanded Jonathon as he ceased his anxious pacing round the Tuisainian rug.
You'd think he was waiting for his first child to be born thought Alanna, then covertly tapped the wooden desk behind her against the thought and its likeliest circumstance. "It was... It was... Wow." His face slid from hope to despair. "It was a very vivid description, there at the end,...with the sieve and everything."
His face crumpled. "You don't like it!" he murmured. "I'm a horrible poet, a bad person, I should've known that I..." his voice trailed off into near silence as he mumbled recriminations to himself.
Alanna hurried over to comfort her dejected knight master, tripping over a stray pillow as blue as the prince's eyes. "Damnit!" she cried as her knee hit the low table as she fell. Jonathon's sobs kicked up a notch in intensity.
"No not you!" she assured, desperately trying to ignore the tears slithering down the prince's pale face. "It's not that you're a bad person, or that it's a horrible poem." She crossed her fingers on the hand not patting Jon's back. "It's only that," she paused, searching for something to say. "Maybe you should find another way to tell Delia about your feelings."
This suggestion was greeted with another wail. "b-but I can't! Delia said last Saturday at five thirty-nine that the truest and only way for a man to express his feelings is through poetry!"
"She did, did she?" Alanna lost her train of thought for a moment as she plotted what to do to the Eldorne girl for reducing her heroic friend to this damp wretch. She'd have a hard time attracting suitors if she had only cauterized stumps for ears. "Well if she truly means it, then she'll certainly be able to tell your feelings from this then, won't she?"
"Really?"
"Really truly." She answered, swearing to hurt the "lady" if she hurt Jonathon. "But I've got to run now, I was supposed to meet Myles for lessons on the Third dynasty of Galla fifteen minutes ago." With that, she patted her now-happy friend on the head and fairly ran out the door.
Congratulations to me! Lucky you! Two chapters up in less than a week! It's a miracle! Now that I have acknowledged this event, I cannot tell you if it will ever happen again. There has been a lot of bookless free time recently and I have typed this as a way to stall on my demi-essay writing. I've got to compare Napoleon's and Hitler's conquests of Great Britain and Russia, and then tell how these three conferences whose names I don't remember affected the Post-WWII world. Joyfulness. But again, Lucky you!
Next chapter has the title action and is all from the point-of-view of our "mystery person." If you can't tell who he is before the end of the chapter, you should be hunted down and beaten with a rubber ducky.
Thanks again to Tenken no Miko for the poem