Adele Kyteler (finaldefence) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2009-01-06 23:53:00 |
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Current mood: | flirty |
Thursday afternoon, 17 September 1942, on the grounds of the Royal Academy of Wizardry...
After the sixth-form arithmancy lesson was over, Moruith myr’Steren, who had been lost for most of it, despite the fact that she was good at figuring and very good at music, glanced over at Addie Kyteler. Addie liked her—she had figured that out over lunch—and Moruith wanted to get to know her better. “Do you want to go somewhere else and talk for a while?” she asked, leaning over. “Because if you do, we’d better slip out of here before they remember they’re supposed to notice us again.” She glanced up toward the front of the classroom, where some of the students were talking to Professor Rosenthal. Liane was sitting on the edge of the desk listening and nodding along, while Scalara glared at them all.
“Certainly,” Addie said with a smile, and then immediately blushed. The fey, tattooed girl was awfully pretty. “We are supposed to let someone know where we are though, I had better tell my brother or his fiancé.” Unless Endymion was defending himself strongly against Scalara, which was a possibility, he might already know what she was thinking. Along with everything else.
Endymion Dashwood and Hadrian Kyteler were in the group of students up at the front of the room, and Liane was introducing Endymion to her professor with her usual enthusiasm, but Endymion glanced back at Addie over his shoulder and favoured her with an approving grin and a thumbs-up gesture behind his back.
“Ah, he knows,” Addie added and blushed again. She had no idea whether or not Moruith would understand the gesture, and if so, whether she would want explanations about what and how Endymion could have been told.
“Endymion,” Moruith said, and just chuckled. “He knows everything, doesn’t he? I mean, about people.”
“Maybe about everything,” Addie said ruefully. Did Moruith mean that people at the Leffoys knew about Endymion’s gift? She would have to ask him later. She smiled at Moruith. “We could go…I suppose out onto the lawns. It’s a nice day. We don’t always get so much sun up here.”
“Outside is nice.” Moruith didn’t like being indoors all the time. “You’d be safe in the forest, with me, but Princess Liane says it isn’t allowed,” she said a little mournfully. “It’s sad, I should like very much to meet the folk who live there, but I do not know if they are our Lady’s allies. And today I just want to talk with you. Maybe I’ll play my harp for you if there’s time. I didn’t mean to be so quiet at luncheon, but I didn’t know what to say when the princess asked me about the harmonies I showed her. It’s just…you’re not one of us, and he isn’t one of us yet. They’re not hand-fast, not like your brother and the shiny one. Endymion, that is. We call him the shiny one. My brother likes him, but he knows there’s no chance.”
Addie laughed, taking it all in as best she could. “He can, you know, there’s a saying,” she said. She smiled a bit sadly, thinking of Robbie Campion. “He can queue up. And those two, they seem a lot like Hadrian and Endymion. Are they really not even…declared?” She felt her skin prickle a little at discussing someone else’s attraction.
Moruith shook her head. “The princess came to the Manor three days ago,” she said. “The day of the terrible siege. She was heartsick and none of us knew why, and then he sent her a letter telling her to meet him here. She wept from the heart, all joy and relief and delight. She had been sure he was dead! That the Germans had killed him, because of his family’s religion.” She sighed. “That made no sense to me. It’s a stupid reason to kill someone, but the Lady did say, it does happen. And every time a letter came from him, she’d go away and read it, and laugh and smile and cry. But there is no poetry in these letters: no declarations of love, nothing but arithmancy and old stories. I think they’ve loved each other since before she was old enough to know what love was, and they hid it away to wait for her to grow up, only now they’ve forgot where they put it! And apparently people said vile things about them, so they’re so used to defending themselves against stories like that, that they haven’t noticed she’s grown and can have him now.”
Moruith shrugged. She kept watching Addie, wondering what she was thinking, but every time she thought she was finished talking, she thought of something else she should have said! “It would be very romantic, if it weren’t so annoying. Can they not smell each other? It makes me feel dizzy and languid! She is a queen, you know, and everyone around her can feel her heart shake. She’s open like a flower, all honey and nectar, and him…” She rolled her eyes. “But I think they are afraid of it.” She glanced down at the floor as they walked. “I probably shouldn’t even tell you this. But I am so tired of feeling her need when she doesn’t, and I wish I knew how long I was going to have to put up with it.”
Moruith rolled her eyes again. “And that is no reason that you should have to put up with my whining. I knew she had not yet flown when I chose to go into her service. But I am a virgin too. Everyone at the Manor who knows me thinks of me as a child, because I was, not long ago, and they are all afraid of my mother and brother! She has nothing standing in her way except her own recalcitrance.” At that point she blushed, and fell silent. She had caught the scent of attraction coming from the other girl, but she did not know anything about how people in the world of iron discussed these things, except that they were far less frank than the Gentry were.
Addie smiled and tried not to look too embarrassed. She’d certainly become more used to open discussion of sex recently, but not quite as open as this. And she wondered what Moruith could smell of her. “I sometimes wonder if it isn’t the same with my father!” she confessed, trying to focus on the conversation. “You know that he is our…Dux Bellorum. War leader? And everyone in the family is more fierce than me.” She looked back toward the arithmancy classroom. “I can’t think that it would take them too long! I can’t smell things like that, but if I can see it, well, everyone can. And some of them are the type to say something.”
“I have met Dux Kyteler, I think. He would not remember me, I was much smaller then.” Moruith considered this. “Your brother is Hadrian? We all had to listen to Endymion’s plaints, back at the Leffoy estate. They do not like to be apart. Endymion is fierce as well. I would not like to be on the wrong side of either.” Then they were outside, and the sun was shining on Moruith’s face—and on Addie’s hair, which made her smile. “It is so annoying, isn’t it, when everyone is afraid of your family? But my brother is the queen’s knight in Tintagel. Which is not exactly the same as being Dux Bellorum, but my brother enjoys it so much.”
“I don’t know whether my father enjoys it,” Addie said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure he’d know what the question meant though. And he’d remember you, because he remembers everything. My little sister does too, Lavinia Scalara’s daughter. With my family…there’s no escaping everyone knowing everything.” She smiled up at the sky. “It’s nice out here.”
“It is,” Moruith agreed. “There is too much iron in the castle. I worry about the princess in there, but she’s more used to it than I am. She had shoes that had iron in them!” She shrugged. “Do you mind it, being known?” It was an important question; if Addie minded it, she would have to be careful how she spoke of things. “My people know that it’s easy to lie to humans, and easy for humans to lie to each other. For instance, if the princess told her…what is that word she used…ah, mentor, that’s a strange word for it…that she didn’t want him as a man, I think he would believe her, and be hurt, instead of scenting her fear and knowing the words to be veils for that fear. I would not like it if people could tell me they liked me, while all of the time they were wishing me ill. We can still be betrayed, but it does not happen so often. I would be unhappy if my mother did not know what mattered most to me. Or even my brother, although he is a very pestilence!” she said playfully.
Addie smiled softly. “My mother does and doesn’t,” she said. “But I don’t know I think, any more than you, about not being known. My father also.”
“It’s so strange to me,” said Moruith. “But the princess…Liane, she tells me to use her name…is used to it. And from everyone, not just the iron-folk—even her family.”
“It means you can hide for longer,” Addie said, nodding. “From the truth. And what it might do to you. But don’t ask me about it too much, I don’t like hiding much either.”
“She’s afraid she will lose him,” said Moruith guiltily. She felt a bit disloyal, discussing this with the girl Liane had feared as a rival—but Liane refused to discuss it honestly, which was a great vexation, and Moruith knew that Addie and Rosenthal were not even remotely attracted to one another. “She says his friendship matters more to her than the other thing. I don’t understand it, but she seems to believe she has to choose one or the other. Is that common among your people?”
“It seems to me it is more common to lose the friendship by waiting,” Addie said seriously, thinking of her brother, who had nearly lost Endymion that way—but aware of the double meaning of her words. But she had had lunch with this girl, and Rosenthal had bought it for all of them. That didn’t even make them friends. “Or hurt it badly.”
“I’ll tell her that,” said Moruith. “She seems to think it’s not possible to have both. I hope you aren’t like that?” she said with a nervous smile.
“Oh no,” Addie said, with a similar smile. She ran a hand over her hair. “Many of the…lovers I know are also each other’s best friends. Or friends at least.”
“Good,” said Moruith, and smiled at her conspiratorially. “I don’t think I’d like to lie under a greenwood tree with someone who wasn’t a friend…would you?”
“Unless I was trying to make a friend, perhaps,” Addie replied, and grinned at her.
“We could make friends,” Moruith allowed, with a knowing sort of nod. She glanced away, then, unable to hold the eye contact too long. She had gathered that it was the done thing here, and she wanted to, but it was something she just didn’t do; with the wrong kindred, it could be dangerous.
“Well,” Addie said, still looking at her. “If not under the greenwood tree, we could at least sit in the shade. And I can hear your harp. Or sing, if we know any of the same songs.”
“I can teach you the songs,” said Moruith. “It is unlikely that you know most of them.” She smiled a little. “You’re very different from your brother, but then, so am I.”
“All right,” Addie said. “I can teach you the melody of some of mine, perhaps, too. I don’t know where we can go where it wouldn’t be full of…everyone.”
Moruith nodded. “Maybe inside? I like it better outside, but I hear there are more private places inside the castle.” She sighed. “Everything is contrary here, isn’t it?”
“Out here, there’s only the graveyard,” Addie mused. “Inside, well, it depends who you are. I have a room, and my brother does, but most students don’t. It must be hard on…your Miss Leffoy. Liane.”
“There is a graveyard here?” Moruith suppressed her curiosity, although she couldn’t help it quite. Faeries did not mark the resting places of the dead; they had their raths, and their herds, and their stones and forests, but they moved from rath to rath, and the dead trooped on in the Summerlands; whether a body was burnt or buried or left for the birds, the inhabitant was not thought to remain with it. But then she remembered that Addie had commented upon their living situation. “We are staying in Charis’ room,” she said after a moment, her enthusiasm dimmed by the thought of it. She would rather have slept in a tree than under the ground! “The prefects decided we should. I do not think Magistra Chattox likes the princess very much. She spoke to Charis this morning, and Miss Flint and Miss Pritchard…she will not antagonise the family, but she does not think much of the princess. She thinks it is wrong for her to love Rosenthal.”
“We can see it if you like,” Addie said, noting Moruith’s interest; it was certainly likelier to lead to flirtatious conversation than trying to explain why her aunt disapproved of Liane and Rosenthal. “I don’t know if you know any of the names. But there’s shade under the trees.”
“The names?” Moruith nodded. “Shade would be nice.”
“On the graves,” Addie said.
“Oh,” said Moruith. “That’s right…people write names down.” She smiled. “It seems so odd. We don’t do much of that.”
“I suppose it is,” Addie said thoughtfully. “It’s always odd to look at the names and years and think, for some people, that that’s the last bit of them we have. Anyway, it’s over this way.”
“We don’t keep things like that,” said Moruith. “Bodies, or stones over them. The Leffoys do, but…they’re not like the rest of us. They’re half like us and…half like you.”
“What do you keep?” Addie asked, as they walked in the direction of the graveyard. “If I may ask?”
“Things,” said Moruith. “Things that we want our children to have. Harps, weapons, tools. Jewellery. Sometimes a bone, but those become tools. Or weapons.”
“We have some of that too,” Addie said, meaning harps more than bones. “But names often last longer, because we write them in stone.”
“I do not think people who go into the Summerlands want to be called back. Some of the Leffoys don’t ever leave though,” said Moruith with a shrug. “The ones that don’t go all the way into the mists haunt the old house.”
“I suppose not,” Addie said. “This is it.”
Moruith glanced around. There were stones, of course, and she supposed the bodies were in the ground underneath. It was less morbid than the crypt on the Leffoy estate, because at least the bodies returned to the elements under the ground. But how disgusting, to be consumed by worms instead of flames or birds. She did not say this, because she did not want to offend Addie. She was, however, amused that the trees and the grass grew so green where the dead had been planted. “I see what you mean,” she said, looking at the headstones. “Are these students or professors who died here? Or is it older than that?”
“Some students and some professors,” Addie said. “I think Professor Blackwell who was our history teacher here will be buried where his family is, and most families would choose that. But some graves are older than the Academy.”
Moruith nodded. “This school has been here a long time, but it was smaller once. We know the Pennchough was always unhappy that it was put here.”
Addie looked at her. “The great…? Which?” she asked. “Chough is a bird, yes?”
“Yes, the great raven,” said Moruith, smiling. She could never stop doing that—her father had been a trickster, after all—but it did not seem to discomfit Addie, or even Liane, as much as it did her mother and brother.
Addie looked at her slightly uneasily. “We know the legend, mostly,” she said. The Frealaf family had in historical times claimed descent from a king of the north, but the family at school had never claimed much for themselves, or indeed made anything known about their family.
“He wakes, you know,” said Moruith. “Would you like to hear one of the songs?”
“Certainly,” Addie said. “Let’s sit under one of the trees.” She twisted her fingers together a little, watching the other girl.
Moruith walked over to the base of one of the trees and began to check the tuning of her harp.
Addie smiled happily and closed her eyes as she listened to the intervals. She considered reaching a hand out to touch Moruith’s arm, but maybe that was for after the music?
“So, this song is in an older version of the language you speak now,” said Moruith. “Not Latin, and not our language either. Do you think you can understand it?”
Addie shook her head. “Likely only a little,” she said. “I have read works in it, but I’ve never heard it spoken by one who knows how.” She had heard Hadrian fight with it often enough, but she hadn’t taken Runes herself.
“Well, I’m not sure I really know how myself, but I hope that if the Misses Frealaf were still here, they would not laugh too hard at me,” said Moruith, and began to sing the song, which was about how the Pennchough had tricked the Gentry and the Moot into declaring him High King.
“Well, raven is nearly the same word, still,” Addie said when she had finished. “But, no, I don’t understand very much of it. I don’t know that the Misses Frealaf laugh very much at all: do you know them?”
“No,” said Moruith, “but the half-blood princess…Charis…has told us about them. Laughter among our kind is often dangerous, and smiles as well. My own, not as much, because my father was the smiling kind. But my mother and brother…” She shook her head. “When my brother smiles, best to know why. There is usually blood.”
Addie looked at her hands. “If that was true for me…” she said. “People would be scared all the time. Your playing is beautiful!”
“Thank you,” said Moruith. “You are a bright soul, I think. So am I, they say.”
“Not frightening, anyway,” Addie said, but smiled at the thought, and the thought that they were alike. “Can you teach me a song? If you know any in English or French or Italian?”
“Most of the songs that I know are in Cornish,” said Moruith, “or an older language than that. But I can teach you one, anyway, I think.” She smiled. “And you can teach me English songs later, so I can carry them back.”
“The melody will be fine,” Addie explained. “It’s remembering the words later that might be harder. I usually have to write it out if I don’t understand them.”
“So I have to teach you one with simple words,” said Moruith.
“Sure,” Addie agreed readily. “Are your songs for dancing to, or listening to, or both?”
“Mine are for listening to, though sometimes I play at the dancing as well. At the manor on the estate, Yvon and Florian like to play for the dancing,” said Moruith. “They play, and sometimes the Lady sings. The princess sang once.”
“I’ve heard Yvon play at my mother’s,” Addie said, nodding. “I like to dance when I can also, or to sing. So, this time I will sing.” She smiled and resettled herself ready to begin with the song.
“All right, these are the words,” said Moruith, and repeated them slowly for Addie.
Addie repeated them back as they were said to her, nodding slowly. Music was easier to concentrate on than talking. “Can I have the music a phrase at a time?” she asked.
Moruith nodded and played it. She had taught this song to Florian, some years ago. She would rather have taught Addie a courting song, but she was not sure it would not be too forward, and at any rate, most of the ones she knew were complex; faeries loved wordplays.
Addie sang it back to her phrase by phrase. “That’s pretty,” she said. “Before I sing it through though, I want to know what it means!”
“It’s a song for children,” said Moruith. “About how the queen falls from the sky and sleeps and rises again, and the flowers fall and come up again.”
Addie had wondered if the song would somehow be flirtatious, but she gathered not. She hummed a few bars. “All right, I will try and sing it through,” she said.
“That’s very good!” said Moruith. “Maybe you can learn a more interesting one later.”
Addie nodded. “I’m half surprised you haven’t learned more interesting ones here!” she said. “Perhaps not very musical ones though.”
“We’ve been here less than a day,” said Moruith, “and I’ve spent a lot of it being worried.” She sighed. “The princess has a way of stepping right into a fight.”
“Mmm,” Addie said, and frowned. “We heard only a little about it in Caerleon.”
“He’s going to take us away,” said Moruith. “Rosenthal, I mean. I wish you were coming as well. But she can’t stay here. Too many people hate her here. It’s just I wish I had more time. To get to know people. You. And to learn things.”
“Why did you come?” Addie asked, touched. “I mean, it’s been so…interesting to meet her, and I’m glad I did, and you! But. I wouldn’t want to be screamed at by Aurélien Jeannot.”
“I came to see the world. She came because Fortune demanded it, and because he said he would meet her here. She would come to him, whatever hell he called to her from.” Moruith shrugged. “They really haven’t. Yet. I’ll be surprised if it’s still true tomorrow, won’t you?”
“If they could find somewhere!” Addie said, shaking her head in amusement. “There are even fewer places to be alone at night!”
“Don’t they have to let him sleep somewhere?” Moruith laughed.
“I would have thought in town,” Addie replied. “And we can’t go out there. We couldn’t even before one of the pubs burned down, not on most nights.”
“She’s not a student any more,” said Moruith, “and I never was. If she wants to go with him, how can they hold her?”
Addie smiled. “I wish it was that easy more often,” she said. “These days, anyway. Well, all right, you win I think. Not by tomorrow.”
“And certainly not the day after. I don’t have any idea where we will stay in Londinium…” Moruith shrugged. “I suppose wherever he is staying, now. Wherever it is, you will always be welcome to visit us there.”
“I live there too,” Addie told her. “Perhaps you can visit me also.” She wondered, as she said it, how much her mother Priscilla would like that, and felt her heart sink. She’d not thought this about herself.
“I will then,” said Moruith, and then she sighed. “I will have to find some kind of work to do while she works with him, won’t I?”
“I suppose,” Addie said, and thought about it. “If she is…if we are working for Lavinia, she will be among my father’s people. Perhaps there is some work there.”
Moruith smiled. “I am in her service but I cannot reckon the way that they do. The way that you do too.”
“I don’t actually know a lot about it,” Addie said with a shrug; she did not think herself half the genius that Rosenthal and Liane were. “But surely it isn’t all as…as deep as some of this? If you have skill in dreams or similar, maybe you can do useful work too.”
“My brother is the seer, not me,” said Moruith, and then she grinned. “Why do you think he is so ill-tempered?”
“Like being Endymion,” Addie said, laughing a little. “Apparently ignorance is bliss, when it comes to other people. I don’t know that I believe it though.”
“I do,” said Moruith more solemnly. “It’s different for the reckoners; they don’t have to live with the dreams, or the things that are in other people’s minds. They don’t have visions like…Keresek does.”
“That’s true,” Addie allowed. “And the things I do, I don’t even have to live with the implementation. It’s just numbers. As you saw today.” She was still slightly surprised that Liane’s immediate reaction had been to consider whether or not her equations were physically possible.
“It’s not just numbers to her, but she’s used them, you know,” said Moruith. “She says, that they can do horrible things, but she won’t say more. Do you want to go back and see if we’re needed again, or do you suppose they would send for us?”
“I should go back,” Addie said very regretfully. But the thought of what Minerva MacAlister would say if she was found out in the graveyard when she was meant to be patrolling was like cold water. “Not so much because of them, but I have other duties in Caerleon. Has Miss Leffoy, I mean Charis, told you about her Miss MacAlister yet? If she has to come out here and find me when I’m meant to patrol, she will, and she might turn me into something unpleasant. And she’s not even supposed to be on her feet much at the moment.”
“We should go back then,” said Moruith, who was in no way going to allow that. “Maybe I’ll go patrolling with you,” she teased, “if they’re still planning their seminar.”
Addie laughed. “Well, if you like,” she said. “You can learn all about the ways of my people when we’re children. And you’ll never speak to any of us again.”
“I will so,” said Moruith, laughing. “We are not perfect as children ourselves. Perhaps I will tell you some stories. If you know what my brother was like as a child, you will truly believe he is terrible!”
fairlight, hadrian, michelrosenthal, moruith, standingwave and finaldefence