Yet another note from Your Friendly Neighborhood Geist:
Ladies and gentlemen welcome to what is easily our longest chapter yet! There's one, possibly two more chapters in this section, and then (though trust me, I have direction for the story) I'm thinking of taking a slight break. What I'd like to offer as compensation for your patience is an interlude of sorts that would wrap up a few loose ends (because we know the Inquisition likes to do that) and introduce a character who'll become important later. Out of necessity (violence, gore, sex, profanity, etc), it would be rated M, so let me know if that's something you'd have an interest in seeing!
On with the show, -Geist
Part 2 – The Black Brand
Chapter 8 – Pride
After breakfast he had led her to an unpretentious study down the hall. There, he sat her in a straight-backed chair before a small table, and reached into a cleverly concealed pocket in the mantle attached to the shoulders of his armor. From it, he drew a single feather, gray with some mottling, and held it up; against his hand, it seemed a miniscule, insignificant thing. Setting it before her, he met her eye, and without preamble set her task. "Willingly move this." He then went to a chair set some two meters away, and sat, watching.
The girl took a breath, inclining her head towards her task so slightly, sitting without slouch or hunch, and placed a hand to either side of the feather. It was then that her tiny body stilled preternaturally, as if it had locked in place and every joule of energy not facilitating the soft, steady rise and fall of her thin chest and the intermittent blinking of her dark eyes was bent upon that single object.
She did not move for a long, long time.
After perhaps an hour, the Lord Inquisitor rose with an utterance of, "Enough," and left the room. It was entirely possible she hadn't even heard him.
She didn't know how long she sat, motionless, before her task; perhaps five times as long as her Master had waited, perhaps ten, or even twenty. It was without warning, though, without so much as a twitch from the object of her scrutiny, that her inclined head straightened, and she looked to the chair in which he originally had seated himself. Upon seeing it empty, she half-turned in her seat, facing the door, and waited with her hands folded in her lap for his return.
When the door finally slid open, he paused at the threshold, immediately taking note of her adjusted position, and raised one brow in prompt. She remained immobile, but on the table beside her, the soft vanes of the feather rippled in smooth waves as it fluidly gained altitude, rising perhaps a quarter meter from the surface of the desk. It pitched until it stood vertical midair, slipping to one side and then another, and then spun gracefully, first about its own rachis, and then with bowed barbs around some external point.
Its movement followed a peculiar, lilting rhythm until it became apparent that it was dancing. It followed a complex course, floating and weaving an intricate pattern in the empty air above the desk before it jerked as if it had slipped from her control, and began to drift naturally. Without so much as a change of her expression, the feather froze midair, caught and stilled by some unseen force. It remained immobile for several seconds, and then without warning it whistled through the air, ignoring updrafts that would otherwise cause it to linger aloft, and plummeted until it landed on the desk, acting for all the world as if an invisible hand had slammed it into the wood.
Ellie Reiker gazed up at her Master with enormous, guileless blue eyes, exhibiting no exultation beyond the soft, hopeful quirk that seemed to constantly linger at the corners of her lips, expecting only his adjudication. Her small, elegant hands discreetly wrung themselves as she awaited his verdict.
He stared at her without expression for what felt like a lifetime, and finally closed the door behind himself and took another step towards her. His face… it seemed like there was something more than neutrality there. She wanted it to be more. Perhaps that was why she saw it for a fleeting second: a touch of a self-satisfied smirk at one corner of his mouth, a warming in the unwavering intensity of his gaze, the barest lifting of his chin, all the subtle markers of pride.
He shifted only slightly to look to the feather and then back to her. Whatever she had thought she saw was gone, and his tone was cool in, "Pride is the mask of one's own faults. Take care that it is not your death mask."
She had no idea what he was talking about.
At her little moue of confusion, he elaborated, "I did not ask you to show off like a circusum magician."
Though there was no bite in his timbre, the words themselves caught her like a punch to the gut; caused her to go bright red, shrink in her chair, and hang her head with a stammered, "I- forgive me, Master." Her bottom lip was seized between her teeth, and her nails dug into the skin they grasped.
One of his enormous hands reached toward her without warning, and she flinched and froze before it landed gently on her crown. She dared not breathe. He said nothing, but the temperate twitch of his warm fingers shifting her hair told her he wasn't too terribly displeased. His mouth said one thing and his hands another. She wasn't sure which to listen to.
"Enough for today," he declared after too quick a moment of reassurance, withdrawing himself back up far out of her reach. "You will do something else for me tomorrow."
Swallowing carefully, she replied softly, "Of course, Master."
Supper had ended and she cleared and washed their plates. It had been her responsibility at home after morning and evening meals. She had done so with Doctor Trixie, and her master had said nothing regarding this (neither that it was expected or good, nor that it was unnecessary) and so she presumed that it was in all homes that children cleared dishes. She wasn't sure if this counted as a home, but it was what she had now.
She had never considered the possibility of a life beyond the Lacertus. Her parents and their parents had spent their entire lives on board the battleship; it was her family's home. She would never return there, though, and that family wasn't hers: not anymore; not after they surrendered her with such eagerness to whatever her fate would become.
Her sudden realization on the possibility of homelessness and foundlinghood gave her a queasy, uncertain sort of feeling that was assuaged only by her firm rationalization that an Admiral could ensure that his… whatever-she-was-to-her-new-master would have a place to sleep and not go hungry, and thus a Lord Inquisitor could as well.
When she had finished her chore, he called her back to the table and, at his gesture to do so, she sat immediately with her hands folded in her lap. There was another small bowl at her setting, filled with smooth little white dots. Intrigued, she looked to him for approval and then took a spoonful. It was impossibly cold and sweet, and as it melted in her mouth it became the consistency of thick cream. Cream had never sat well in her belly.
In an attempt to be as inoffensive as possible, she smiled with shy gratitude as she set her spoon down and swallowed, and then quietly asked to be excused from the table. One of his eyebrows lifted as his gaze flicked between her and the bowl, and at last nodded once.
She retreated to her room, bathed, and sat on her bed to comb her hair. Through the door she heard him speaking quietly; from the way he paused, it sounded like half of a conversation; whatever it regarded, he was faintly smug. "She didn't want anything to do with it." There was a pause and then, "Anything else?" After a moment he gave a faint snort and muttered, "I intend to." She had a nagging suspicion that he was talking about her.
He came in a few moments later and, presuming the unspoken directive that it was time for bed, she slid between her sheets. He flicked the switch for the light, leaving the door open, and sat on the edge of her cot in the single, thick beam shining in from the next room. The mattress (and her legs) sank toward him, and he regarded her a moment before the low rumble of his voice began. "I was at the Gates of Corinth during a typhoon, once…" She watched his face as she listened with rapt curiosity; his augmentic eye glowed warmly and his expression somehow gentled in the dimness.
He went on in detail to tell her about the monstrous Hrud he faced there with a squad of Imperial Fists at his back. He had been half blinded by the mud and smashed them left and right, describing the crunching noise of the impact from the gauntlet of his armor into their exoskeletons, and his shouting curses for a good thunder hammer. As he elaborated on grabbing one by its venomous mandibles and tearing them off to use both in stabbing it through the neck, he glanced down. While her face was still turned up to him with a soft, eager smile, her eyes had fallen shut and her breath came with slow, contented depth.
Expression inscrutable, he plucked the comb from her nerveless little fingers and set it aside before he stood and left, closing the door behind him silently.
It was a week later, and she sat before the same desk the feather had occupied. A routine had begun. After she cleared breakfast he would take her to the study, and give her a task: an object to move, a match to light, a six-sided cast die to manipulate. Unlike the first day, these were usually accomplished within a few moments, as if she had smashed down whatever barrier she'd encountered the first day and now needed only fine adjustment to achieve the goals he set.
Today it was a book: a heavy tome he wordlessly placed before her. She considered it, and then it rose some ten centimeters from the desk's surface. Her dark blue gaze then shifted to him for prompt.
"Open," he ordered, and the cover lifted and settled. "Higher." It tripled its height. "Turn ten pages." The only sound in the room was the rustle of the paper as it settled against itself, and then an enormous thud broke the silence as six pages through the task the book dropped, slamming into the wood, and she startled. Recovering quickly and without looking to him (she had learned the second day to fix the mistake as quickly as possible and without excuse), she resumed the exercise, completed it, and then peered up at him through her lashes.
He lifted one brow, canting his head by a matter of degrees, and instructed, "Impress me." Not having expected a need to improvise, she bit her lip. A little mark formed between her brows beneath her fringe. The pages flowed up, spread in a perfect arc, and held their formation for a moment. The book then flipped over, hard casing extended in a horizontal line but pages collecting in a vertical stripe. It bobbed at the binding while the covers beat up and down like wings.
The bird/book slowed its fluttering as if she had been seized by a sudden idea but not sure how to enact it. She paused; perhaps by habit, or reflecting the orderliness of her mind, the book slowly righted itself until it was closed, face up, hovering where she'd originally set it. At last, she closed her eyes in concentration and reached tentatively toward the tome. As her fingers inched forward, their tips grew a milky translucence.
Then they disappeared all together.
The effect spread to her wrist so that her whole hand was invisible; thus it was impossible to tell when it wrapped around the floating object. After a tense moment, the chameleoline effect traveled further up her arm, but it also spread over the book, until it appeared that the girl had nothing below the stump of an elbow extended over the wood of the table.
To confirm that what she had envisioned had come to pass, she opened her eyes and glanced down. Exhibiting visceral shock, she dropped the book, wrenching her hand back. Immediately both hand and book materialized and hit the desk as she panted, wide eyed, and wriggled her fingers to ensure they were still there. Reassured but not quite calmed, she lifted her face, slightly pink from exertion, to him; she exhibited not the triumphant excitement of one who had done well, but genuine humility and hope that this would be enough.
There was no doubt this time: his expression had clearly changed. His left brow had lifted, perhaps not so much as it did when she addressed him to ask a question, but certainly enough to cause a crease along his forehead. The right corner of his mouth had also turned up by a number of degrees, and, unlike the previous twitches she imagined having seen, it remained there for five full seconds.
The realization dawned upon her that this was the expression that paired with the smugness she'd heard in his voice a week previously. This was her new goal, the new driving force for her to not only succeed, but excel. There would be no cuddles; she was sure: no words of praise. This ghost of an expression and these five, transient seconds would be her reward for something he felt was exceptional. If she could coax that smug twist onto his mouth, he would keep her.
There was very little satisfaction in it – in something so muted and mundane for what had been truly hard, clever work; she was sure this, too, meant something. Many years later she would understand that gushing thanks and lauds and commendations were meaningless: the reward for hard, clever work was a continued existence that required it; she couldn't quite fathom that lesson yet. She only knew that it would have to be enough that once in every very long while, when she poured her soul into something and circumstances lined up just perfectly, he would almost smile at her.