Re: Nick & Wren: Fortunes
The tent was a sell. Like the outfit the songbird wore, it was meant to draw the eye, to draw attention, and Wren knew to sell appearances the way other people told lies, easily and like sugar on sweetened tongue. Et, non, she didn't live there. But there was comfort inside the tent. A chaise, and chairs, and a tea kettle bubbling. It felt like intimacy, and it was a lure on the line that Wren held in sweet fingers. She wasn't a good saleswoman, but people here wandered and looked, and they wanted the thrills and secrets the sideshows promised. There was taboo to be found in this carnival, and it blossomed in tents lit up at night. And the customers were primed, and Eddie's marvels and wonders all sent them scurrying for more things they could tell people at the watercooler in the morning. The carnival, it was things not to be believed, and being a good saleswoman wasn't required.
She didn't barter. She spoke of no price outright. There was no hole to fall into deeply here. The night air was warm and green, and the wind blew a breeze in the tent. The air swirled with something crisp, and she nodded her blonde head at his greeting in French. "Merci, monsieur," and she didn't rise or offer to help with the wheelchair. She knew, oui? That it was best to be patient, to wait, to salvage pride and let a person decide if they needed assistance. Sitting there, hands folded upon the table, she looked as if the world stopped spinning. There was no rush, and there was no hurry. Fate had placed him here, and she would give him as long as fate required.
The woman behind the table was a sinner, a blasphemer, a devout believer. She was contradiction, and she watched him without paying any attention to the wheels that conveyed him forth.
"They tell me," she replied of people and their needs to not hear the truth. It was no answer, but she wasn't a woman made for clarity. Perhaps he could tell now that he was closer. She was a thing not quite human, not quite present. There was something otherworldly about her, and her gaze was a gray thing made of discomfiting. She walked the line between here and there, and one didn't need to believe to sense the oddity in her.
"Je sais qui tu es," she said informally. She knew who he was, and she'd known when she heard his approach, the one without wheels on earth. "People ask for the truth, and they only want it if it's good. I would tell you the truth if it was good, and I would provide a pretty embellishment if it was not. If I'm good at what I do, then you won't be able to tell the difference. You'll wonder, perhaps, if there was something terrible being concealed, but you would focus on the bright bauble I dangled, and you would choose to believe that truth," she told him, tongue against her cheek and a hint of twinkle in her eyes.