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08/03
word count: 3200

The bailey, standing brighter than usual in the wake of fitful rain - everything seeming, as it often does after a brief shower, somehow more saturated - was still an outward reminder of all the ruin of the Garde. All those traced foundations; all that mossy and overgrown tile. But she leaned against the wet rampart and she found her mind wandering over it as it had appeared in her dreams. There, spread with all its little pavilions, it had been a little village of festivity.

There had been tournaments even in Nail’s time. But he had described them, vaguely and abstractly, as purely martial exercises. This did not dovetail with her own romanticized ideas, extracted from years of history that she now knew was not even correct and embellished with gaudy renfaire touches and cinema tropes.

Before him, though. The store-room had its golden rings and pennants. Maybe before him - before the process that had poisoned the entire place against the idea of leisurely pleasure - there had been ladies leaning out of stands to smile at tilting gallants, only to withdraw and laugh among themselves. Maybe some alien knight in some dashing finery had charged sword in hand towards a good-natured foe and been rewarded by a kiss from some visiting dignitary - or perhaps even from the Garde herself, whoever she had been at the time.

She had accepted as fact Nail’s relation that the murals and finery were only there to serve as a grim reminder of what he was meant to sacrifice so that others might have it. But although she still thought of the Garde and the Code as cruel, she was beginning to doubt that this had always been the case. As the place repaired itself, some of those crumbled plaster images were sporting men and women in green and brown as well as scarlet and indigo, and they didn’t seem to be any less engaged in coursing and flirting than anyone else.

She could not blame him anymore. It was what he had been taught, and Nail - unlike herself - was more ready to take an order than give it. He had been little better than a child, despite all the blood on his hands, when he’d been given the running of this place and forced to make himself a master of it. Little wonder that he had given it those things that he had been taught to know best - bloodshed and aloof isolation and cold practicality. Even his music, as he sat on the rampart behind her, had been nothing but the practical means to some end, even if he’d found some way to take pleasure in this small act of sensuous indulgence.

No. She had blamed him once, but it was cruel to keep doing so, when he had made it clear that he blamed the same person. But she wondered, now, if it was just as wrong to blame the Garde.

—

They had not idled in the keep for quite some time. It was cleaner than it had been - the plaster just slightly more intact and the tapestries just a bit less threadbare - and Gouvernail, with the lute in his hands and his eyes turned towards the river, sat on the broad windowsill where they had, early on, spent so much time together. The spider was still there, tossed gently by the damp drafts in the sheltered nook where she had built her web, but Joy, although she pretended to be watching her, was bent on another errand entirely, and a surreptitious one.

Doubtless, if she had asked, he would have willingly submitted to being recorded. But it was much for the fact that he would submit to it as for the fact that she did not want him to be uncomfortable in his playing that she did not tell him. Better to catch him as he was: unaffected, thoughtless.

She had, however, requested the song.



It was done and dispatched when he turned to her again, his playing suspended. “Why do you smile?” he asked.

“Thinking of Grieve,” she answered honestly, and he made one of those rare little Gouvernail faces expressive of incredulity.

“And this makes you smile, does it?” he asked skeptically, and she laughed.

“Always.”

—-

She should ask Myth, she thought absently, about getting a folding screen of some kind - large enough to suit the place; small enough to come with her.

In the absence of this luxury, she would have to make peace with showering in the open. It’s not like there was anyone to watch, she thought, her face growing hot not from the water but from the realization that this was a stubborn denial of the truth. The fact that he always turned his back - as he had when she had gotten ready to swim in the river - with an immediate, obedient politeness - well. She chatted with him as she turned back and forth beneath the spray, his replies addressed to the bailey behind her, mostly to continue to pretend to gripe at him about concealing the fact that the shower existed for so long, although the mildness of his protests in reply told her that he was not fooled, and knew her to have forgiven him.

He was very good at knowing when he was forgiven. He was unfortunately also quite good at knowing when he was not, and being wounded under it even when this was an injustice against him.

She made the excuse afterwards that she wanted to root through the newly-restored chambers to find means of outfitting the little alcove where the shower was - some sort of hook on which to hang her robe and towel; some sort of receptacle for the hotel-sized bottles of shampoo and face wash that were so incongruous with the surroundings. Not any more incongruous, however, than the shower itself.

The truth - it pained her, but must be confronted - was that she wanted to again stand in the room that had once been his, and look out of the windows towards the clouds scudding over the river as he must have often done, and imagine white sails in the distance bearing visitors that would never come again.

Or perhaps not never. She thought of Halle and his almost-offhand comment that such things could happen, with what sounded like both luck and effort. Maybe it would wound him to stand here, and see life in the bailey below as it had once had it - before his time. Festive life; laughter. But she was no longer so afraid of wounding him that she would lay by her own desires to avoid it.

He would prefer to yield to her. She believed this intimately and without asking, and it unsettled her, especially as she considered with an uneasy nausea that he might even find some of that often-denied pleasure in sacrificing his own - not to some imagined ideal, but to her.

This was probably projection. She was superimposing her ideas of - well, the word was romance, wasn’t it? - onto a dead man whose feelings she did not truly know.

She drifted back across the room, to the meager belongings it held, half-ramshackle. She paused before a shelf of dusty things - in contrast to the pristine bed and shining windows - and waited to hear him make some sardonic sound of reprimand or hurt sound of pleading. But he said nothing, stationed still in motionless silence at the threshold with his hand at his side, as if he was unwilling to once again step into that place.

So she began opening little boxes and touching little vessels. Most of his own finery, she supposed, had been dispersed to his brothers or still lay in that box beneath the chapel - besides what she had taken - and there was little here besides bits of debris. But one box, when opened, startled her.

It had been his room. But maybe things had a way of moving around - maybe this had been placed here in the wake of his death by some negligent stranger - there were many reasons. The velvet interior of the box was clean and without the touch of the dust outside, acting as a bed of luxury for the two things within, one ornate and one simple.

She lifted out, first, a comb, its ivory surface carved with birds and flowers, and she ran her finger along the teeth before closing it gently in her hand. It wasn’t a thing he could ever have used - it was a lady’s comb in every detail - and therefore she felt no hesitation in claiming it for her own, to be examined later at her leisure.

The second, however, was another ribbon. What a strange motif of her new and reluctant life those things had been - that simple length of red silk that had cursed her into this and had once been wrapped around his own callused fist; the ornate and perfumed threads clicking away on the magical loom below them.And now this: not silk or velvet or embroidered or fine, but a length of coarse linen tape splashed irregularly with many-colored dyes. It was a rough thing, not in keeping with either the dashing martial quality or the romantic opulence of nearly everything else that the Garde had ever yielded, and it was for that reason that she found herself compelled by it, running it through her fingers and instinctively lifting it to her nose, only to be oddly disappointed when it smelled of nothing.

“There’s a comb,” she said, holding it up without turning around as she continued to rummage. “Do you know anything about it?”

“A little,” he said quietly. “I did not know it still existed. It was one of those little things, but less useful, I think, than the others-”

She had found a great deal of those little things. The bell she now rang when she arrived, so that her first reaction on seeing the Garde was one of pleasure. The bracelet around her wrist; the whistle at her waist. She was eager, then, to see what this one might do.

Her hair was still wet; she had piled it up into a bun at the back of her head and she let it down now, to run the comb through it. The blonde hair pulled through its teeth shifted, with the ease of a shadow passing over a bright place, to a chestnut brown that she recognized as something she had not seen in many years: her natural hair color.

She had, in truth, been secretly longing to see it back on her own head. But that was not atonement for the fact that she needed to be blonde for work, and she made an aghast, horrified sound at this apparent unraveling of hundreds of dollars of investment and meticulous upkeep.

“Oh hell no. Absolutely not,” she said, frantic. “I can’t afford to get that fixed! I mean, I can - but I shouldn’t have to -”

And he was there, having crossed the room to her without her noticing, and he reached out as if to take the comb from her, although of course he could do no such thing. “Does it wound you to lose this bit of artifice?” he asked, almost drily - perhaps with what would have been sarcasm had he not been shaken by his own forgetting, which he did so rarely now and had now done two visits in a row.

“Yes!” she answered defiantly. “I need to be blonde for work - it’s part of the schtick, you know - and it’s expensive -”

But she paused. There had been in that aborted movement of his a kind of gentle reassurance, and she somehow knew that he had been going to take it, and run it through her hair for her.

It would have been cruel to acknowledge it in any way beyond what she did: running the comb through her hair again and half-suspecting to find her hair getting darker with each stroke. To her relief - and in truth, her delight - the blonde returned.

“You should have said something sooner,” she chided him, relaxing a little. “It’s expensive to look like this. I thought I was burning half my next rent check.” But it lacked a sting, given that she was busy watching her hair shimmer back and forth between brown and golden as she gently detangled it.

He said nothing. Some part of her stirred in restlessness, ashamed that she wanted him to say something after all: something about her hair; some comment, perhaps, about the darker suiting her better than the fair.

She hesitated on the last stroke of the comb, and let her hair remain - for the present - in its natural state, looking down at the end of the loose braid she made with a feeling of vague pleasure. She might not be able to get any color but red for her fingernails any time soon, but there was a comfort to this: to this aspect of Misty Lynn that she had sacrificed, not from not wanting it, but from practicality, in her quest to become Elaine Carlisle.

Without thinking she reached for the linen tape to bind up the end of her braid, wrapping it around itself several times, and she was startled when he abruptly reached for her again - not with that gentle offering of help, but with a sudden impulse as if to seize her wrist. She looked up at him, alarmed already and still more so to see an expression of strange intensity there, turned not towards her but towards her braid.

“Where did you find that?” he asked, his voice unlike his own.

“In the box with the comb,” she said, feeling a sudden surge of defiance.

“That is not yours.”

“Everything here is mine,” she shot back. “What business is it of yours if I want a little scrap of fabric and not just fancy jewelry and weapons?”

“Do you want it?”

It was not the question she had expected, but he offered it like a challenge, and so her answer was immediate and aggressive as an acceptance of it. “Yes. It’s mine.”

He was silent for a long moment. “You are right,” he said at last, his voice entirely too level. “Forgive me, for forgetting.”

And he turned to go, then, standing aside at the door. She ought to have rebelled against this little attempt to herd her, but she was too astonished. She did, however, remain where she was.

“Did it belong to someone you knew?” she asked, feeling strangely timid.

“No. It belonged to me. But now, as you observe, it belongs to you.”

A horrible idea had risen in her: the memory of his long, long silence when she had asked him if he had ever kept a place in his heart; his assertion that he would never lie to her ringing in her ears when he had denied it; a little box in the chamber that he had once slept in, with a woman’s comb and this strange memento in it, nested together as if one was destined for the other. And now, at last, that expression almost of anger when he had seen it in her own hair.

He had once held his ghostly arm towards her, to beckon her to tie a beautiful ribbon around it and mark him out for her service, and she had done it as much as his insubstantiality would allow. Even now - in wretched sentimentality which made her hate herself - that same ribbon reposed in subspace, threaded through a golden ring which had also, once, been his, and which she had taken off his long-dead finger with her own hand.

Elaine - Joy - was not a woman who had ever been given to jealousy. It was simply beneath her to care what another woman might have been to anyone, let alone a woman who must be out of the picture by the time that she, in all her majestic technicolor, came in to fill the frame more completely.

Someone else, before her, might have tied a ribbon around that arm of his once, and been able to secure it over flesh and bone. And he, perhaps, had lied to her about that - or if not lied, withheld the whole truth.

“The rain comes on again,” he said quietly, turning his eyes away from the room and towards one of the narrow slits in the staircase walls. “You will have to cross the bailey in it, if you do not go.”

“Yes,” she said, feeling a dreamlike, angry sickness at heart.

But this, too, was not a thing that she could blame him for.

—

When morning came she once again used the comb, this time in dull fascination as she sat on the edge of the bed and watched the color of her hair shifting back and forth in the grey light of the chapel.

She might put her hair up as she generally did, in its hasty clip. She might pile it into a bun or even let it hang to one side in a heavy braid, neatly finished with one of the elastic hair ties she kept in subspace.

But with a sense of defiance that was directed at her own weakness rather than at Gouvernail’s strange feeling - which she had no courage to interrogate - she wove the linen ribbon through it, its many colors splashed brightly through hair that was once again a pale golden blonde.

She joined him on the ramparts, Petitcru under one arm, the other extended towards him to enact their usual farewell. But when he had finished the unfelt kiss to her fingers she did not go, as was her habit. She hesitated, for reasons she could not explain, and after a moment he lifted his hand again, this time as if to touch the braid pulled over her shoulder and the ribbon woven through it. It hurt her - she despised that it hurt her - that he cared more for looking at that little scrap of stained fabric than at her. She, in the same moment, lifted her fingers to his jaw, as if to gently direct his attention away from it and back towards her face. He knew, of course, that she could not. But he murmured something that she knew to be an apology only from its tone, turning his face away as if to avoid her touch.

He reached again for her hand, as if to do over the gesture that had been ruined by his own action and her response to it, but she shook her head, and she gave him a smile that tried to be as brightly cheerful as it generally was.

It had been a long time since those early visits, when she had felt the need to promise him that she would return. He knew it, now, as well as she did. Or at least she thought that he did. Perhaps, today, he was not as sure as usual, given that refusal to let him kiss her hand again.

“Goodbye. I’ll be back in a week. You know?”

“I know,” he said.