Ari’s decision to sew a leather ball earned her a pricked finger until Claribel all but shoved the thimble in her face. Or tried to. Each time, her fingers would slip through the hard, cold metal. Ari watched her companion for a moment longer than she had to, then slipped it over her thu–
~On your forefinger, you saddle-goose.~
~Then you’re not a complete saddle-goose.~
It took as long for her to finish stitching her ball as it did for Sir Dagon to bring the feathered wings of the mythical bird to life, but if he noticed her diminished needlework skills, he did not comment upon it.
Instead, she spoke to a string of unfamiliar faces who’d come to stop and ask whether she’d enjoyed the meal, whether she’d noticed the superior flavour of the salt from the Taurian Sea, near the Rock of Rebirth, now evaporated over briquetage imported from Jumont. She bit back the desire to ask if ‘briquetage’ was a real word or just a fancy way to say ‘brick’.
Their thinly-veiled concern were aimed at the wrong target; not one of them turned to look at Claribel’s spirit, sitting beside her. Not one of them was a person of interest in the search for Miri. Not one of them wanted to mention Tristram or the Church either. Not after glancing at the sorry stitches in her hands.
===Quest: Suspicious Family. Search the Aquilon household.===
What was the point?
Someone had pushed aside the tables and benches on the other side of the Great Hall, and a makeshift dance corner had broken out, led by the chambermaids and the gardening boys.
Lucy and one of the taller boys belted out a soaring tune while the others spun and skipped around them, clapping and stamping along.
‘My love for you
Is not as great
As what Ninus once gave Moracea,
But I can and will brew you beer,
So tell me that I’ll do…
That I’ll do…’
The dancing got jollier at the mention of beer, as if this wasn’t an evening after a remembrance meal.
~That’s the point. We need to remember joy.~
Natty, too, thumped along with the simple tune, laughing as she linked arms with one boy, then the next. Free. Free from the path they’d trodden tens, hundreds, thousands of times, impossible though it was. Sometimes, when Ari closed her eyes, she could see Cain’s towering form aim and shoot at Max, bang-bang-bang, variations to the same melody, echoing for an eternity, shattering the best part of her a million times.
Open your eyes.
Open your eyes.
A spot between her brows throbbed to the beat of the music. A tune she’d heard before. By the City Square, strummed on a lute? No, no, back, back, further back.
OPEN YOUR–
She blinked. The throbbing stopped. The darkness disappeared, leaving only her sorry leather handiwork.
She glared at it. Better than glaring into the abyss.
This would not do.
Lesson number one in staying alive as an assassin: never underestimate your opponent. She thought she had learned that lesson well, but no, she’d underestimated the leather.
Luckily, she was alive to try her luck again.
~I don’t really sew with leather… Those scraps are from years back. I think they might be Mother’s, from when she’d sewn a carrier for Father’s waterskin.~
Never mind. If it wasn’t possible to learn at someone else’s expense, she’d think through it on her own.
The biggest problem was the slippage.
She needed to stitch with the grainy sides facing each other while the coarser sides faced out, so that when she’d finished the blasted thing, she’d turn it inside out and – voilà – a smooth, beautiful deformed object. But there was no grip between the two sides as they twisted and rolled from her, mocking each approach of her needle.
A rummage in the needle case yielded a handful of thicker pins. She picked two, and stabbed them through each end of the circles. Leather immobilised.
The second problem was that her needle couldn’t make its way through both sheets of leather easily, even with some fervent encouragement from her thimble.
Out came a second pin with a flatter bottom end. Shame that Claribel’s sewing kit didn’t contain a hammer.
‘Sir Dagon,’ she said.
‘How can I be of service, my lady?’
‘Can I borrow your bollock knife, if you please?’
He nodded and handed it to her hilt first, no questions asked. Her type of partner.
It had a wider base than her fruit knife: just right to slam into the base of the pin, punching dents into the leather, breaching its defences.
She squinted at her enemy, striking it with a one-two-forward around the edges until a circle of even dots readied the leather for the thread and needle.
‘Thank you.’ She passed the knife back to him with a bow of her head.
‘Always at your service, my lady.’
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This time round, she made easy work of the sewing. This time round, when she’d sealed the stuffing and tied the knot, she held, in her hands, a perfect circular disc, like a slice of bamboo from a katana.
~There’s going to be a next time?~
~You… do know that you were hammering that leather with the pommel of Sir Dagon’s knife in front of my whole household!~
Ari shrugged internally.
There were plenty of things that she had yet to work out in this world, like ‘why could they travel from her world to theirs’, ‘why did open your eyes…
She rubbed the spot between her brows, grasping for a missing… missing… closing single quotation mark.
No, no, no. She gripped onto the fabric of Claribel’s dress. Real. She dragged her fingertips across the grains of the leather disc. Real.
Where was she?
In Claribel’s body.
No, not that.
There were plenty of things… But… But… the one thing she’d worked out was that Claribel would attempt to stop her or come to her aid before she could commit a true blunder, just like she’d done when she’d first met Luna and Sora, just like she’d done at Hesperus’s house. Right now, when Claribel was merely a chiding voice, that voice was safe enough to ignore.
Unlike the growing fog in her head, making it hard to see where she ended, where Claribel began.
She staggered to her feet, just to feel the weight of a body attached to her displaced self.
‘My lady…’
‘I am going to rest,’ she said, feeling Claribel’s voice flow from somewhere within her, clearer and brighter than the one that she was used to, than the one she used to call her own. It was like listening to a recording play from her own lips.
She tucked the two deformed leather balls and a handful of spools next to the box that held Malory and bobbed her head at Sir Dagon.
Lucy broke free from the dance, rushing to take them from her, but Ari shook her head at her; she needed to be alone, and luckily, Claribel had good reason to want a little quiet time too. Lucy nodded back, letting Ari pass undisturbed.
With a jingle of her bells, Natty swung into her path.
‘Are you going up?’ she mouthed, pointing upwards in the middle of her dance.
‘I made a pair of balls,’ said Ari, rushing her words so they’d reach her friends before the dance tore Natty away again. ‘I think I’m done.’
‘Ha! I’ll go up with you after this dance!’
Up she went, alone as she could be, retreading her steps up the staircase with the tapestry that she’d promised not to explore.
Instead of turning back towards the corridor that led to the library, she marched forwards, towards Claribel’s chambers. Her chambers.
One of the chambermaids must have left the candles burning in her solar; the door stood slightly ajar, glowing brighter than the approaching twilight skies outside.
===Task: Temporary resting place. Store Malory’s remains in the solar. [In progress]===
Just one step from crashing onto a mattress that wasn’t as springy as she’d liked. Just one…
Ari stepped through the door.
And froze.
A man sat, statue-still, in her solar. Despite his piercing eyes, it was the colour of his hair that made Ari gasp. It was a most unnatural mix of indigo and azure. In this world of black, brown, blonde and red, it could only mean the arrival of the true main character.
This was ‘Rosalind by Any Other Name’, wasn’t it?
‘Good evening,’ said the blue-haired man.
‘I see that you find my personal chair most comfortable to sit on.’
~Quick! Find a way to summon a guard! I have no idea who he is, but he looks dangerous.~
Claribel was right about the danger, but what good would a mere guard do against… that?
There was a languidness about the man that reminded her of Duke Aquilon. She held her breath, willing his stats screen into view.
Nothing.
His [Strength] and [Dexterity] were most likely worryingly high. The real question was whether his [Endurance] and [Intelligence] would compare. If only she had her own body back, she could at least make it out fast enough to grab a proper weapon before he could catch up, but right here, in Claribel’s too-long dress, running backwards was a trap, and turning to run would be an invitation to pounce.
But he hadn’t killed her yet. Which meant that he liked to toy with his prey. As long as she stayed suitably unthreatening, hand suitably far away from the knife tucked deep in her gown.
‘Oh yes,’ said the man who remained seated, but leaned forwards, ready to slip into a lunge – a rapier user, perhaps? ‘Please give my compliments to the upholsterer. It is far more comfortable than any chair I’m used to.’
‘Then you’re welcome to sit there until your dying days,’ said Ari.
The man furrowed his brows, giving her a moment longer to study his hands. Callused skin peeked from the side of his righthand forefinger, but none on the left, making a surprise lefthanded attack from the unknown enemy less likely.
‘Please allow me to introduce myself–’
‘Should I?’ said Ari, distracting him with the haughtiest laugh she could manage. She found the red spool from her sewing basket out of the corner of her eye, and gently rolled it to the spot where the door lay ajar, nudging it with her foot. She hoped that the gentle thud of the thread would not trigger him into action. After all, she’d shown him no glint of metal.
Soon, Natty would arrive on silent feet, and she’d understand. Red was for danger, red was for send-in-another-Agent, and make it Red; White Agents, do not engage, do not engage.
‘…My lady?’ he said, throwing his words instead of his blade.
‘Oh, so you do know how to address me.’ She raised a hand up to her chest, as if crossing her arms, and sent the other to twirl with her hair. Harmless. But a flash faster to defend her vital points. Should Natty fail to turn up on time, she’d have to fight him herself, knowing nothing about the man. Ari hated going in blind, without a full brief, without the upper hand that knowledge could give her. But she took comfort in the fact that the man knew nothing about her either.
‘Ah.’ If anything, he spread himself out further, draping his arms over the back of Claribel’s chair as if it was his. ‘Do you know why I’m here?’
‘To give compliments to my upholsterer, I believe.’
‘I am here,’ he said, fixing his gaze on Ari’s, ‘because the death of Tristram, who has now shed the title of duke, is a murder. I am here to extract justice on his behalf. Blood for blood. A life for a life.’
So this was the man the culprit was waiting for. A murder. She’d been toying with an idea. It didn’t make sense. Not yet. But that wasn’t important right now. Right now, she wanted to know… What did it have to do with her? She’d only identified the body.
‘My lady, you don’t seem surprised.’
‘Should I be? After all, I have never seen him walk the streets without clothes. It is not surprising to assume that something untoward has happened to him.’
‘Your reaction…’
The man’s eyes flicked to a spot behind Ari’s head, a split-second before Ari sensed them herself.
Her backup.
Let it be Sir Dagon or Sir Beren. Please. Natty. Please.
Or else, she’d have to risk the unknown on her own.
In stepped Sir Beren... Well, he had been Ari’s second choice, so–
…followed by Sir Dagon.
How very like Natty to bring both.
But the one who’d captured the man’s attention was the friend who’d slipped to Ari’s side.
‘Interesting fool you have,’ he said. ‘I don’t think my senses have dulled enough to miss her approach.’
Natty staggered back, giving her jester’s hat an extra jingle. ‘As you can see, good sir, I am just a normal fool. I understand that many ways to earn your keep encourage you to exercise your brawn and leave your brain behind, which is why I am more than happy to supply you with some additional words to consider: dreary, tedious, banal, prosaic, drab, soporific, ship-worn, bromidic, insipid. These are all perfectly serviceable words that can be used to describe a fool or a fool’s performance. I urge, no, beseech you to choose one of your liking and amend your original assessment of myself.’
The man narrowed his eyes. ‘Did you just call me stupid?’
‘How perceptive of you.’
‘I knew it.’ This time, he beamed. ‘You even have an interesting way with words. I have never met anyone quite like you.’
Did he just break into Claribel’s house to state the obvious? Of course Natty was one-of-a-kind. Or… had he just weaponised his words? Natty flinched and squirmed under his gaze in a way Ari had seldom seen before.
‘My good mistress, may I learn your name?’ he said, rising to his feet.
Sir Beren and Sir Dagon gripped the hilts of their swords.
‘I don’t exchange pleasantries with intruders,’ said Natty, slipping behind their line of defence. ‘No, you may not learn my name. Not even when you draw your final breath.’
The man gave a sorrowful shake of his head and forced his attention onto the knights. ‘You must be Sir Dagon, so I guess the other is Sir Beren. What an honour it is to meet you both. I had hoped to make your acquaintance in the tournament, but alas, I shall not be taking part.’
‘Are you not going to introduce yourself either?’ said Sir Beren.
‘My lady didn’t exactly want me to, so before that, I’d like to introduce you to my sword.’