CHAPTER TWO - A LONG-FINGERED MAN

Tanner was fifteen years old. Seen fifteen summers and fifteen winters, seen the sun roll on by on a constant axis on fifteen separate occasions. And she can say, for sure, that she feels fifteen years too young to really deal with strangers. Especially ones with masks. Especially ones who she can't understand at all. She can say, for sure, that none of this is particularly usual in Mahar Jovan, not usual at all, and so she is completely reasonable in feeling very nervous and... no, no, think rationally. She's to be a judge, and a judge thinks all rationally and suchlike, that's what makes them judges. That and the capes. Plus, she was fifteen. Basically an adult. And she was surrounded by other people. Even so, she... dipped her head slightly, almost trying to retreat inside the high collar of her dress, like a snail retreating into a shell. The man with the mask was... tall, though not as tall as Tanner. Tall, and unpleasantly thin. Wrapped up to the point of being almost comical, though - the mask was only visible above the nose, the rest was covered by three different scarves, and his body was shrouded in a waterproof cloak, a heavy overcoat, a jumper underneath, and evidently a few shirts too. A heavy woollen hat shielded his head from view, and even so, he shivered in the wind that played across the river.

Tanner's head slowly came out of her collar. Just a little. But she still wanted to back away.

Something about the man unnerved her. The mask. The incomprehensible language. The fact that she didn't know him, didn't know anything about him. The long, long fingers, wrapped in fine calfskin gloves. The eyes... she wasn't sure if they were black, or if the mask was shading them in just the right way. He stood alone, wafting slightly in the wind like one of the reeds lining the river. He was shorter than her, but seemed to tower above. Was he a madman? Was he here to kill her? No, no, maybe he was a... an escapee from an asylum, maybe he was just very sick, but... she should back away from the edge of the boat, he might shove her into the water, she'd sink like a stone. The world was full of dangerous things, very dangerous things - mama said so. The lodge said so. Was he a witch? Catastrophes flowered behind her eyes, little spots of chilliness developed through her head, and...

Stop it.

No, no, remember what mama said. Be polite. Be very polite to strangers, because you never knew if they were members of the lodge secretly testing her. And, you know, being polite was nice. But also the secret tests. And, well, even if he was a witch, the lodge had promised to protect her from witchcraft - so he'd be unable to do anything. Could push her off a boat, though. That was an option. She quietly wrung her hands together, remembering the right gesture for cultivating luck - two gloves, nice lucky medium, filtering out the bad and leaving on the good. Looked like she was just very nervous and fidgety.

Which she was.

"I'm... sorry, sir, I don't-"

The thin man twitched slightly, and his voice slithered out of the mask, past the layers of scarves, and undulated lazily into the world. It was a voice that made her think of cooking oil seeping out of a bottle.

"Oh, my sincerelest apologise. I distress. Homely language - instinct, yes?"

His accent was thick as tar, and she'd never heard anything like it before. He lilted on every syllable, placed stress on the wrong words and sounds, practically danced across the sentence. Made Tanner more nervous, but... no, no, judges were rational and calm at all times. Mama said so. So... right, right, keep going. She was to be a judge, judges weren't nervous, so she wasn't nervous. No matter what her brain was saying. Just focus on how she could probably beat him in a fight - no, that was a savage thought for a savage. Bad. Stop thinking that. She was sure that this fine gentleman could murder her if he wanted to. There, now they were on equal footing.

Hoorah.

"Oh. Uh. Yes. I understand. Can I help you?"

"You are most big."

Her back immediately hunched, and she retreated into her collar slightly, flushing.

"...yes, sir."

"It impress! Me, I mean. Very impress. My apologise - my name is Mr. Pocket. I am sorry for interruption. Do you go to Fidelizh on business, if I may be so bold as to inquire?"

Ah, he'd asked that one a lot, his accent almost vanished when he got the end. She shivered slightly, and wished she could pick up some item of luggage, clutch it like a shield. She was feeling very raw at the moment, and... no, judges, rational, calm, normal. That was what she was going to become sooner or later, might as well start now. And remember - the gloves were inviting luck into her person, filtering the bad. Plus, the lodge said it would be burning proper incense until she arrived in Fidelizh, and would then keep a good candle burning for her at all times. She'd gone through the proper rite and everything, wore a plain white shift and had a whole mystery play happen in front of her, got dunked in water, drank some liquor in the approved fashion... marked as a wayfarer. As was right and proper. Poor fortune and witchcraft had already been drained from her person, the lodge would keep her safe. Not sure if she believed any of this, but... but just thinking about it helped.

"I'm... going to train to be a judge. Are you on business, Mr. Pocket?"

Her voice was steady. Remember the mystery play. Remember the gloves. Remember the role of being a judge. Remember it all. And she was being courteous.

"Oh, yes, business for me. But also travel. I always wish to travel here, down the river, see Fidelizh. Wonderful to travel, no? And is good for my heart and my many valves, keeps my joints fluid. A friend of mine, a friend from north, he says that travel is how you make everything circulate properly, stops the mind being blocked up, no? And this is good, for I am in need of my fluids being realigned, all my centres are off. When I do not travel, I start to wonder if suicide is really so bad - why, my cousin killed herself seven years ago, and she never travelled, so, is a possibility, yes? You are treated for broken bones with a cast, you are treated for stomach problems with calomel, and I am treated for suicide by travel. Good treatment, no?"

Oh no.

He was oversharing.

This was entirely improper.

"Ah. I'm... sorry about your cousin."

"No, don't be silly, you didn't kill her. No, what killed her was never travelling, and maybe other things, but travelling, that's the cherry on the muffin confectionery, yes? But she was also ugly, face like a monkey. Probably lonely, and travelling might've helped, when you travel you meet more

women or men or whatnot and loneliness concludes, no? We found her in her room with a pile of pills next to her - know how dead bodies smell?"

"I must confess that I don't."

"Like bad fruit and eggs. But maybe she just ate lots of bad fruits and eggs, no? Was quite fat, you perceive."

"I perceive, sir."

A pause. Be courteous. The desire for him to go away and leave her to brood in peace was suppressed by expectation. She had a defined sequence of actions to take in a circumstance like this - and as her discomfort rose, it was a relief to just slip into automatic responses. Like how clothing choices were easier to make when there were only so many lucky fabrics, or how outlook was easy to form when the lodge was so very clear on how she should look at the world... like how going off to become a judge was expected, anticipated, demanded, so she might as well buckle up and get on with it.

Just... treat it like one of the lodge mystery plays.

"I apologise if I am too forward, Mr. Pocket, but... where exactly are you from? I've never seen that sort of mask before."

She didn't want to know the answer.

She didn't want to hear his undulating voice.

But it was expected. The lines were there for her. Politeness was the ritual which imposed control on the chaos of conversation, just like ritual imposed order onto the shapelessness of the universe - the woman with the letter had told her that, and it'd been... rational. She'd seemed to have her life together, after all.

One of those people who gave letters, rather than received them.

Mr. Pocket presumably smiled, impossible to tell under all the layers.

"Oh, from a long distance. My home is far, and warm. So cold here, no? I find it so. Well, you don't - more meat on you, hm? More layers? Me, not so many - must make up. Heat at my home... oh, very great. You would melt. Splash. Puddle."

"Presumably, yes."

She squared her shoulders, and stared out into the river flatly, being polite but not... well, not suggesting a friendship.

"How many summers?"

Wherever Mr. Pocket was from, it clearly had no real idea of decorum. One didn't ask a lady her age. And one never said a lady had 'meat' on her. Ladies didn't have meat, not at all, they had... uh... hm. Well, the term 'meat' was thoroughly inappropriate. As was flesh, matter, or mass. Not sure what was left once you took those terms out of circulation, but presumably there was something.

Aether?

Maybe aether.

"Fifteen, sir."

"Already becoming a judge?"

"Training, sir."

"Young. In my country, fifteen is still a home-age. Youth only comes once, you know? Not good, squandering it with study. I see these judges - good capes, but very serious. Too serious, hm? Do not grow up so fast, good philosophical maxiom."

This advice was neither wanted nor needed.

But it would be impolite to say so.

"Quite, sir."

A pause.

"...it's maxim. Or axiom. Not maxiom."

Mr. Pocket laughed shortly, a little burst of noise that was barely audible through all his layers - manifested more like an earthquake, really. A rumbling, a shaking in this little cloth-clad planetoid.

"Ah, I comprehend. My gratitude. And apologise."

"Quite all right, sir."

"Well, better than all left, no?"

"...quite, sir."

"Joke."

"Yes, sir. It was very funny."

A pause. She forced a smile, couldn't quite manage a laugh.

"Do not squander youth, anyhow. You need to drink, eat, make merry. I misspent my whole youth. Loved every second, even the hangovers, really."

Not really an... option for her, not like she could just abandon her life-route. It'd been chosen, it was expected. No deviating from the course that was set out, not now. The duty of the parent and the lodge was to choose. The duty of the child was to obey. To learn responsibility from the dutiful observances of her superiors. She'd been taught that, drilled into her skull over and over. Not that she was a child, she was basically a grown-up. But still.

"I'll remember that, sir. Don't worry."

"Worry! That's the point - do not worry! Worrying spoils youth. I shall tell you this - you should challenge yourself. Cultivate yourself. Why, big lady like you, should do boxing or wrestling or something pugnacious, you know, no? Judges are all bookish, don't waste your life reading all the time. I barely know how to read, and I've turned out wonderful! I've heard that if you don't challenge yourself, all your humours pool up and stagnate, and then they can ignite. Poof! Spontaneous combustion. So, young lady, go and wrestle people. It'll stop you from exploding."

"I see."

But she didn't want to wrestle people. Didn't want to hurt people at all. Wished she could turn the conversation to eels. She was better on those.

Hold on.

"I think I saw an eel down there, can you see it?"

She was being very cunning. Didn't see any eel, but it could give her a window into-

"Oh. I see nothing."

She braced herself. Time to talk about eels. This should fill up the next few hours.

Before she could, though... Mr. Pocket drummed his fingers over the railing, promptly launching into a half-incomprehensible speech on the pleasures of being young and sprightly. Tanner could barely follow it, and what she heard wasn't cheering her up very much. He seemed to be incapable of going a minute without mentioning his dead relatives - surprised that there were so many of them, felt like at some point he'd have run out of family to lose. His mother was currently paralysed below the waist and confined to her bed, where she spent the days shrieking at servants. His father was dead, taken by a fever which produced endless quantities of rancid sweat, delirium, and a choking breathlessness - plus paranoia, which meant that he kept insulting various groups of people, including half of his doctors. Convinced they were trying to poison him.

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Mr. Pocket wouldn't just stop there, though, he had to describe the feeling of handling a man producing buckets of sweat who was trying to jump out of the nearest window - the slickness, like handling some species of amphibian. Tanner just started thinking of enjoyable points on eels, staring blankly into the water while humming at all the right junctures. When he talked about the way his sister had lost a chunk of her cheek to some awful flesh-eating disease, she simply ran through all the stages of the eel's life cycle, at least, the common Tulavanta eel. Leptocephalus larvae, leaf-shaped, transparent, tiny, drifting passively on the currents while their weak bodies struggle to provide some direction, lasting for years and years... then, metamorphosing into glass eels, still tiny, still transparent, but closer to an eel shape. Then, they darken, swell, grow, become yellow eels. Some eels could remain in this state for as many as ninety years, though ten to fifteen was more common, before turning into silver eels. A last flash of life before the end. Six months of voyaging, fleeing from the Tulavanta and slithering into the vast deep of the ocean...

No idea what happened to them after that. But they never came back. And when confined, they died after six months, starved. Their stomachs literally vanished, only became capable of holding water - years and years of building up reserves, readying for the spawning, and then... a final rush to mate.

And years later, more little flickering leaf and glass eels would return, ready to dwell in the warmth of the Tulavanta. A second river, really - ribbon upon ribbon, hundreds deep, miles and miles long... she remembered seeing the spawning as a child (which she wasn't now, she was fifteen, and thus basically an adult), and dipping her hands into the river and feeling the little shimmering creatures flow by, dancing on the current, brushing against her skin...

She stood there for hours, dress hiked up around her waist so she could wade into the shallows, afraid to blink lest she miss some new, beautiful display.

Oh... ah. Memories. Linked together. Clicking, one after the other, and... Mr. Pocket's relatives kept rushing by, more and more dead ones, and he kept talking about his misspent youth in the strange country he came from, where the sun shone every day and painted the sky red, where the moss-buffalo waded down stagnant rivers and cooled their flanks in rancid pools... his second cousin had been killed by one of those buffalo, trampled when a predator startled a herd of them. His great-aunt became increasingly senile, and wound up wandering beyond the city wall without an escort. Never found the body. His grandfather died of a heart attack after a long, long illness, which meant that... honestly, they didn't notice he'd died for a little while, thought he was just going through another one of his catatonias. They noticed when a spider crawled out of his slack mouth, though, ready to build a cobweb in the eye sockets of his mask. He treated these morbid stories like... well, like they were food for normal conversation. He talked and talked and talked, mouth flapping away behind his mask and scarves, eyes glinting in the reflected sunlight from the river... his fingers were a whole troupe of actors, always gesturing and flickering and snapping when he was struggling to recall a detail.

More dead relatives.

She couldn't bring herself to hate the man. He was having a conversation. Just so happened that what qualified as a 'conversation' for him was very different to how she conceived of them. He laughed lightly, he spoke quickly, he clearly had no great dislike for talking about death and misery. Maybe... no, yes, be rational, maybe this was an outlet for him. Maybe in his home, so many people died that it was considered normal to talk like this. Bottling it all up would be unsustainable.

...she still didn't like it.

Politeness demanded she hum, nod, agree and disagree when appropriate. Politeness would also demand... well, reciprocating. One person mentions a hobby, it's polite to inquire further, and supply one's own experience. Politeness was a form of trade, in which both people entered into a contract where certain things were expected and some things were not. Politeness was the convention which regulated social trade. Another thing the lady with the letter said. But... in this case?

She only really had one story.

And she wasn't going to tell it. Not to Mr. Pocket.

Her glove-clad hands clenched, almost bending the fragile railing of the barge.

And she stared unblinkingly into the dark water below.

Didn't want to tell that story. But she couldn't help but remember it.

* * *

The girl never forgets the day when her father comes back home for good.

She sits on the floor, on a threadbare carpet the colour of the river, like some enormous primitive idol to an unknown deity - still growing into herself, not all her proportions quite right. She reads, devouring whatever books she can find. Books are good - books are slow. Books make her act carefully. The heap of little, broken toys in her bedroom is testament to why she's a bookish person these days. Well. That and the eels. She looks up suddenly, all thoughts of books gone - father's back. She knows the telltale squish-slosh of slightly waterlogged boots. That's good, that's very good, it means father found work today - dry-boot days mean he stayed on the docks and stared sadly at the water. Wet-boot days meant he was mucking around in the damp and the churning current, gutting fish with a long knife, hauling crates from sagging barges, swabbing decks and doing whatever people would pay him to do. Lots of wet-boot days lately, ever since the warships came in. Mutant-hunters, back from patrolling the north banks. Always need work done. Always need spare hands. Even now, she can see billowing smoke from the cleansing of the hull, flaying contamination away with anything the ship could take without breaking.

Father loves talking about it. Proud of working on the thing. Proud of crawling around the dreadnought, even if he has to wear a stifling gas mask, even if he has to wear heavy, heavy clothes to stop contamination seeping in. There's always red marks in his cheeks when he comes back - red from exertion, and red from smiling too much.

The steps come closer...

He's back.

She smiles...

And stops.

Something's wrong.

The steps are too uncertain, and... and she knows what her father's boots sound like, one slightly uneven, a tiny limp in his gait. These boots are staggering and heavy, like something was being carried. She stands slowly, lacing her fingers together, hunching close as her eyes widen. When nervous, she tightens. When nervous, she shrinks. Hysterics were the luxury of the ineffectually small. Wait. Just... wait, maybe he's carrying...

The door slams open with a crash, the whole brittle house shaking like a storm's blown in.

A roar. Loudest voice she's ever heard. Most afraid she's ever heard an adult be.

"Clear a table!"

Mama's moving, and she hisses at Tanner to come and help. Running to the kitchen. Taking the tea things away, stripping the cloth just as a man comes in. One of father's friends. Unrecognisable - his face is purpled with exertion, eyes bulging with panic. His teeth are bared as he strains with the body on his back, his oilskin coat slick with water that drips down in long, long rivulets, like his whole body was crying. The body. The body. The girl is paralysed as a huge body, weighty with its paralysis, is placed down gently on the table. The body's too big, the arms and legs trickle from the edges... unmoving. Father. Something's- her mother is hissing to him, she always hisses when she's panic, clenches her teeth and speaks through them. Tanner wants to hide behind her.

"What happened, what bloody happened to him?"

The man sniffs, his voice thick. He's larger than Tanner, broader, stronger. The thick-thin limbs of a labourer, growing more muscled where he worked, and thinning out where he didn't. He should look more intimidating, and... and she knows him, she knows his name. Clarant. But whenever she's seen him thus far, his moustache has been thick and well-groomed, his hair slicked back with pomade, his coat well-cared for and his mouth split into a smile. Now... now his face is soaked with water and oil, his hair is a tangled wreck, his coat is torn and hangs around him like a funeral shroud, and his mouth keeps quivering like he's about to cry. Tanner backs away instinctually. Afraid of an over-emotional adult, not quite comprehending that adults could be emotional.

"We... we were working on the ships, those... new ones, and... and this..."

He pauses, coughing in that thick, hiccoughy way that children do when wholly distraught. Tanner has never heard an adult produce that sound before. Never. Backs away from Clarant out of instinctual fear. Her eyes move unwillingly over her father's body. She sees the slow rise and fall of his chest and thinks that... that maybe, just maybe, he's completely fine and all is well and... and then she reaches his head.

"...one of their harpoons, the launcher, the wire, it snapped, I... it tore up some stuff from the ship, I could barely see it, and... and..."

Her father's head is like something out of her nightmares. A solid mask of blood, too thick for even the water to remove fully, yet every rivulet trickling down is clogged with clots the size of her thumb. He's faceless. No sight of his eyes, his mouth, anything. Even the contours of his face are stolen by the mask. Sometimes a pair of tiny black eyes open on his face, staring unblinkingly for a few seconds... then she realises that it's only his nostrils, straining to breathe past a sheet of his own matter. He doesn't... he doesn't look like her father. Her mind says that he is, but every other part calls this blood-soaked thing a stranger, a wild thing allowed into the house. Where are his eyes? Where's his smile? Where's all the things which make him her father? And his head... his head...

The blood is coming from a wound along its side. A massive gash. But that's not the part which strikes her as truly awful, it's... it's the dent.

The way his head has caved inwards.

She twists her hands, gripping the fabric of her dress and kneading until she feels it come close to ripping. Her face stiffens. Expression drops. Inside, she's... she's spiralling, has no idea what to do with herself, this is beyond any kind of experience. Half is terrified, another half just wants him to wake back up. And all that chaos manifests as...

Stillness.

Chaos within. And chaos all around her.

And none of it wearing on her face. On her rigid mouth. On her wide eyes, locked on her father.

Unblinking.

* * *

A crack echoed over the river.

Mr. Pocket finally stopped talking, mid-way through a story about some exotic tropical parasite his sister once had embedded in her cheek.

Ah.

She... may have gripped just a bit too hard. Slowly, carefully, she loosened her hands from the rail. Snapped. She'd wrung it out like a wet towel, and the old, repeatedly painted wood had just... given up, exposing raw, pale matter beneath. Her gloves were studded with splinters, marred by flecks of loosened paint. Idiot. Stupid. Brute. Did this constantly, always broke things, idiot. And Mr. Pocket, irritating little squirt that he was, was looking at her cautiously. She struggled to mount a smile. Not his fault, she was just... a complete and utter savage who ought to be restrained at all times. She broke things when she touched them too hard, and... well, she remembered that day her father came home for good. She was young, stupid, brutish, not really capable of understanding it. A few words of insensitivity had chilled things, made everything worse. If she'd just... done what she was meant to do, been nice and comforting and empathetic, everything would've been fine. But no. Idiotic Tanner Magg had to keep asking needling questions with no idea that they were inappropriate. Moron. Complete imbecile. Mental, social restraint was just as important as physical restraint. More so, maybe. Play it safe, don't insult Mr. Pocket, no matter how annoying he was.

"I'm... dreadfully sorry, sir. I think the railing was a bit weak."

Her hands twitched behind her back, where she gripped them nervously. He didn't believe her. Unclench the jaw, now, she looked positively savage. Wanted to comb her hair back, she knew it could get a bit... wild from time to time. No, no, don't twitch for it, just... just endure. Salvage.

"Please. You were talking about your sister?"

The man hummed.

"...ah. Yes. So I was. Though, maybe, hm. Off-colour story, perhaps. Are you feeling well, Miss...?"

She felt a little terrified pulse of embarrassment. A flush entered her cheeks, and she tried to salvage things again.

"Magg. Tanner Magg. I'm quite well. Thank you. I'm sorry for... well, I..."

No way of explaining politely. She forced a nervous smile onto her face.

"The weather is very cold, you were right. Quite cold."

Mr Pocket looked at her strangely. Oh, oh no, he thought she was angry at him, she wasn't, he'd just been waking up some unpleasant memories, and now she couldn't stop thinking about her father, and that awful day, and all the awful days afterwards, and... no, no, she hated the idea of being remembered poorly by him, hated it. He was a complete stranger and she didn't enormously like him, but... oh, crumbs...

"Hm? Oh, yes, it is. Cold."

Curt. Short. Crumbs, crumbs, crumbs...

"It gets quite cold in Mahar Jovan, too. And... I hear it can be quite cold in Fidelizh. So it's just... well, I suppose lots of places are cold at the moment. I hope we don't get rain. Rain's awful, don't you think? I mean, it's just... wretched."

She finished pathetically, pausing for a second.

"...please, you were talking about your sister? She had an odious parasite embedded in her cheek, sir. Won't you finish that story? I found it quite interesting."

Her stomach churned in protest. No, decorum demanded she ask. Oh, crumbs, he was still looking at her strangely, crumbs, crumbs, if she was smaller this wouldn't be a problem. If she was smaller, she'd just be an awkward little creature, easily pitiable. But once you had some mass behind you - pardon the term - you became some sort of... of potential threat. All he could think about was how she'd snapped that railing. She could do worse. Knew she could. Remembered the flush of embarrassment that had consumed her for hours and hours after she crushed a teacup by accident during a lodge meeting, oh, crumbs, she was thinking about it again, thinking about the eyes, about the silence, about the way the tea trickled between her fingers, about the stain on the floor, about the way the sugar in the tea made her fingers sticky for hours, about the aftermath where she only ever got sturdy, disposable cups during meetings, about the muffled laughter she heard and knew was about the incident. Knew no-one forgot it. She didn't, at least, so why not everyone else? Oh, crumbs, stop thinking about it, she was... her face became flat when she was very nervous, and it came across as stoic aggression, oh crumbs...

Mr. Pocket coughed.

"...you are, uh, right. It is very cold. I should be heading interior, I think. Warmth and all. Not long to Fidelizh, I think?"

Tanner hummed affirmatively, even as her skin kept crawling with humiliation.

"Good. Good-good. Yes, I should be attending to warming matters. Lovely to meet you - and best of luck with your, hm, judging business, yes?"

"Thank you, sir. And I hope your travelling goes well."

A hum of appreciation - but the mood had broken. The gabbling had stopped. A few awkward motions later, and he was away, swaying slightly in time with the movements of the barge. Gods, he was thin. And... and her gloves were slightly torn, nuts. Talk about bad omens, and these were good, and... idiot, always breaking things. Brutish clod. Cloddish brute. Bog-dweller. Peat-muncher. Bad daughter. Absolute troglodyte. Ugly, bloated troglodyte, should just jump into the river and get it over with. She gazed out over the water for a moment, getting her mood under control. Failed, but at least she was trying.

Control was important. Control was downright vital. Restraint, that was it, always being restrained. Being unrestrained meant breaking things and hurting people. Meant shattering cups. Meant embarrassing herself. Her back was aching from how tense her muscles had become. A low, tense breath hissed out from between clenched teeth. She'd not changed, not after all these years. Sometimes she had weeks and weeks where she was utterly normal and operated like she was meant to. Then she'd snap a railing like a blundering cretin and probably convince some random man that she was some sort of... violent axe murderess, probably. Or someone mentally unstable. Or a mutant, someone with swollen, mutated glands that made her tall, strong, and perpetually angry. Snap a railing, break a vase, bruise someone's arm, insult them accidentally, come across as standoffish and peculiar, sound like an idiot, sound egotistical or irritating or something. Ask the wrong questions.

...she was thinking about her father again.

That was never a good sign.

Think on the bright side, think on the bright side.

He'd lived. Was still alive, too. Just... not there. The dent in his head, it... made him slow. He could function, he'd chew if food was placed in his mouth, swallow and everything. Drink when water was given. But beyond that... everything had been taken away when that cable snapped and a mechanism slammed into his skull. Took years before he could even walk, and only for brief, stumbling periods, while he was practically dragged along by someone else. And he never talked. Sometimes he made sounds, little vowels mostly, small sighs. That was almost worse. Remembered when she charted all these little exhalations, thinking it meant he was getting better. But the doctors all said the same thing. Gone. Paralysed. Never going to work again. And mama had to go out instead, care for an invalid husband and a daughter who just kept getting larger and stronger and needed bigger and bigger meals. Bad years.

Mama had wanted her to do something delicate with her life. Remembered when she would chastise her father for taking Tanner out to gut fish and whatnot.

After father's accident, it became part of the nightly routine to pick the little bones and scales out from underneath her fingernails. Tanner gutted fish, carried things, only sewing she did was mending nets. Mama had done laundry and cleaning - within a month, her hands were red and scaly where she dunked fabric into boiling water over and over and over. Sewing had stopped being an option around then. Tanner remembered long nights alone while mama finished her work somewhere else. Sitting in a dark house, listening to the soft, soft breathing of her father, staring sightlessly at the ceiling.

Her gloves were straining. Gripping too tightly again.

Just...

Focus.

Imagine being a fly. Imagine being an awful, loud, whining wasp. The sort with a metallic body, a massive stinger... one of those pompilids. Throat-lockers. Something huge and ugly and terrible.

Imagine flying into a spider web and being wrapped up in long, sticky strands. The web is abandoned, there's no spider to eat you, but there's also no way to escape.

Imagine being trapped. And imagine all that awful whining stopping. No more stinging. No more frightening people. Nothing. Just... paralysed, locked in place, harmless as a kitten. And then... then you can appreciate how shiny the chitin is, how pretty those wings are, the elegant construction of legs and so on. Imagine becoming prettier and lovelier because you were trapped without any chance of escaping.

The wasp was her. The web was restraint. Ritual. Politeness. Even this corset she was wearing was another thing like that, it stopped her moving freely, but that meant she had fewer opportunities to hurt things.

Focus on...

...on the lodges. Right. That worked. Her glove was torn, not good for bringing luck. So... the lodge. They had a candle for her, after all. They'd marked her as a dignified wayfarer, deserving of all the ritual protections they could offer. Not even sure if she believed in any of that, but... well, believing cost her nothing, and it might well give her everything. The consequences of being wrong were a hell of a lot higher if she forsook their rites, right? And they'd spun a web to keep her in place, nicely restrained. And right now, she needed that. An anchor could crush someone, or it could keep a ship in place - but if it couldn't do the former, how could it be expected to do the latter? Same for a spider's web. Could strangle. Could secure. Had to have the capacity for both, or it wasn't a very good web. A wasp made prettier by captivity. An eel made better by having a firmly dictated life cycle, a defined sequence of progression from one state to the next, some invisible inner sense of what it was meant to do. Good animals to take lessons from, wasps and eels. Especially the eels. They had things sorted out.

She'd frightened off one man today, and other passengers were still giving her odd looks. Could sense their gazes prickling the back of her neck like mosquito bites. The river flowed by, dark and clean, too far from any city to be choked with detritus. Sometimes she saw the smoke of distant colonies, little outposts of civilisation in the middle of the wilderness. Wondered if there were any eels in the water. She liked other animals, but... well, eels were familiar and comforting. In the list of things which just automatically made her feel more comfortable about the world, there were eels, pork pies with little bits of blood sausage laced throughout, and brightly coloured ribbons. Her ribbons were largely packed away, and might not be becoming of an adult. She had no pie. Could really do with an eel, then.

Get back to what mattered. Ultimately, she wanted to become a judge. She needed to become a judge, it was expected of her. That meant responsibility, that meant being in a position where she could ruin lives by being too clumsy, too stupid. Restraint wasn't just something she needed to function in normal society, it was something that her new role demanded. Right now, a loss of restraint left a bad impression and snapped a railing. Humiliated her. As a judge, a loss of restraint could ruin a life, bring shame on her profession, maybe even get her flung in prison. Or executed. Hung, darwn, quartered. Doused in the acids she knew theurgists used. Put in front of a train. Forced to give grovelling apologies to the people she'd wronged. Having some small girl burst into tears while asking 'why the big lady took daddy away'. No, stop thinking about catastrophe, just... obligation. So... focus on that. Focus on the fact that she needed to be more restrained, couldn't repeat today's little error.

Focus on the lodges. On the webs they'd spun. She was a nasty wasp, and she had a lovely web. Use it.

Fidelizh slid closer and closer, and all she could do was try and stay calm. Ignore the prickling in her neck. Ignore the burning embarrassment from a single botched conversation.

There was a feeling of... of hatred when she thought about leaving bad impressions. It was like... like agency was being stolen. Like some awful duplicate of her, some evil, mutated version, was born inside someone's head. And there it would stay. Unless she got rid of it, that little version of her would linger forever, stealing things from her life, ruining it whenever it could. She was someone who needed to be restrained at all times, and having a bunch of mutated evil versions of herself running around was the opposite of restraint. She was... she was an infected lepress, and she was constantly spreading little particles of disease around herself, so she had to stay sterile. Had to stay clean. For the sake of her own conscience, and the sake of everyone around her.

And she'd just infected some random man with the impression that she was a brutish, angry, passive-aggressive weirdo with a face like a brick wall. Probably mentally unstable. Physically freakish and mentally unsound. What a combination.

She backed away from the railing.

Took a few deep breaths.

And thought of the day that mama took her to Jovan for the first time. To initiate her. To give her more means of restraining herself.

Because she bloody well needed the practice.