*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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The voices are murmuring, murmuring around her their small concerns, anxieties. Pre-battle jitters, tittering around in the tense, taut camp air. Buzzing, like flies.
Inside this dark hall, amidst this slow strategy meeting, Allayria stares at the rough board in front of her without seeing it. Her mind is elsewhere, caught up in the news from Keesark that arrived today and the things Ruben said yesterday. Her fingers skim the unread missive, slipped just beneath her sleeve, folded tightly and tied in black string.
Beinsho dead, but Caj and Fae still alive, Keno still in place, as this little letter indicates. Allayria glances up, first to the Chieftainess, then to Jin.
More will be dead before the end of the week.
There's a tap-tap along the unseeable tether, like a rap on a window, a knock on a door, but Allayria does not answer Isati's call. Ruben's words from the previous morning still swirl inside her head, swirl in a spiral of doubts. He is right: this outside link, this tenuous trust, could be built on another lie, another deception.
Vipers in a viper's nest, taught only to care about themselves, taught to kill, to destroy—
"The zeppelins will set down here," Dost says, gesturing to the wide plain at the heart of Vatra's sharp crescent of mountains. Allayria watches without seeing it, her thoughts elsewhere, even if they are still fixed on that same, looming day.
Perhaps it was a foolish dream, she thinks, fingers curling around the letter. That alternate choice. I've made this mistake once before.
"The vanguard will—"
Allayria unfolds the missive carefully, delicately, letting the black string flutter to the ground. The letter is small, the writing cramped—clearly meant as an aside, footnotes to Fae's official missive.
We found bones, it says, in the sewers, when we drove the Cabal out. I can't be sure, the body is so decayed, but the fingers are black and I wonder—
Allayria's hand seizes, crumples the letter in a quick, white-knuckled fist.
I wonder.
"Before Lethinor," Ruben had asked her once on the windy, barren rooftop of Bear's Spear, "did you ever meet a very old man with blackened fingertips? ... He was in charge of guarding the key."
Balder's body lies, moldering, in the bowels of Solveigard City and Allayria suddenly understands how very little the Skill master has told her, how very much will await her when she goes back.
"The Paragon will head out with Chaudri, Baulieu, and Ruben once we have fully engaged."
It's Marron who says it, who's gesturing toward the board, moving a small, red token across the map. And Allayria watches it, twists the tattered remains of the letter in her hand, and decides:
"Finn is coming too."
[I told you it would get easier.]
She's been thinking about it—the zeppelins, the fight. Ben's last words, and all the aftermath they wrought inside of her. She had made a mistake, all that time ago. She had let him in too far, too fast.
That had been the first lesson on top of the cliffs at Lethinor; in the cold, sunlit room when she came back. The events on the zeppelin wing were a reverberation, an echo, reminding her of how much he is still entrenched inside. How easy it has been for someone to slip in and ferment. Ben is a weed growing in her garden—ripped up by the stem, but the roots still entwined, still burrowing in deep, peeling apart the soft, fragile parts of her when exposed.
This, she decides, watching as a sea of shocked faces turn toward her, is the second lesson: the way people stay inside.
In a time, a space before all of this—the ships, the cliff, the library—when she wandered in a sunlit haze, happy and naïve, Ben had held her hand not just to hold it [to burrow in deeper] but to shut out for her that ringing invasion of Skill. It was in Solveigard, and it had been her first time in a city so full of Skill since being a child in Thalassa, the first time since she had come fully into her powers. All that Skilling, all that pushing and pulling, had buffeted around her, through her. Ben had found her, showed her how to ebb the flow.
"You are a Smith-caller," he had mistakenly said, still naïve too, before she taught him his first lesson. "Visualize plates of steel molding themselves to the entrance, creating a door that only you can open. Close the door and hold it close until you don't need to lean against it anymore."
She had failed then, when she tried to build her door, because she had taken his advice for a Smith Skiller. Allayria is building a new door now, and this one will hold. It's a door patched in steel, rock, root, bone, and fur, rippled in disguise, in a projection, a ward. But its not just for the Skill, the rippling, pulsing, muttering Skill.
It's for everyone else trying to crawl inside.
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A/N: Everything is going great. Just great.
Happy Halloween, everyone! May your night be full of mischief and lots and lots of candy corn. Not any other candy, just candy corn. It is the superior candy and I will not hear any arguments to the contrary.
That said, I will also take Skittles. And Reeses cups. And—
Chapter notes: Ruben reveals Balder to be one of the Order of the Quail in Partisan's "Clear Air," while Ben interrogates the dearly departed Balder in Prodigal's "Clever Little Trinkets" and reminds Allayria he told her killing people would get easier in "Breath Across Your Face." He tells her this the first time in Paragon's "Ash and Bone," and he first teaches her to build the mental wall all the way back in "Sensory Creatures," back when he was helpful and, you know, not so murderous.
