[FIN] Inquiries at the Swan II [Ayle and Maeve]

[phoenix kiss]

It is several days after Maeve puts up her posters that people begin to trickle into the Swan, several weeks later that the information begins to percolate down through the streets of Palisade and finally out into the rolling farmland and rural settlements beyond it.

It is a well put-together poster: it means that even those who cannot read, or stumble over their letters, can figure it out. Even those who are normally too lazy to read and simply have no time for sitting in a chair with their noses in books will ultimately feel the pull of this simple poster, with its gallant Chosen and Guardian rearing in triumph.

That the Swan is a whorehouse is not common knowledge to anyone who spends little to no time in Palisade: certainly not to farmhands who have been seized with a curious desire to shuck their work and run through the fields on their Guardians: another sort of gallant figure, to be truthful, made so by long white-blonde hair and tanned skin, just like on the covers of the bodice-ripper romance novels so discreetly fashionable. When Ayle and Siscalus go ranging, disappearing after breakfast and reappearing when the sun touches the horizon, he looks like one of the strapping young men in those books, though he is neither noble-born nor wealthy, and he in no way smells as good.

But the day he finally makes it into Palisade is a good one: cool, the breezes of autumn beginning to blow, and he has taken care with his appearance. If he is going to meet others like him, who have ventured into the Wardwood, he is just vain enough that he refuses to look like the farmhand he is. His hair is pulled back in a careless braid, half-undone by the time he has made it there, his shirt is without holes, and his pants and boots are free of mud. Siscalus himself is a worthy accessory; the dark buck is all flashing eyes and fanned ears. Ayle can feel the tension under his thighs as he rides, and in his gut: not nervous tension, just energy, barely restrained. Siscalus is as excited as Ayle himself is.

The deer carries his Chosen to the Swan, and Ayle will poke his head in the door after dismounting, patting the Guardian on the rump. Siscalus himself gives his Chosen a look equivalent to an audible sigh of longsuffering and step lightly out into the street, looking around.

The Swan -- .. there are many women here, and to someone like Ayle, with his appearance and his finely honed sensibilities about women -- it is a magnet. But what this could possibly have to do with Guardians is beyond him at the moment in the face of a finely turned ankle or a bit of exposed chest.  

[Rejam]

"Yes sir," chirps a girl suddenly, all rosy cheeks--possibly falsely rosy, but maybe Ayle, being a lover of women and a country fellow, will not realize this--and dark lashes.

This is directed at him. She has risen from a plush red chair in the foyer. The Swan is a little dim, with few windows, but it is impeccably clean--a surprise, perhaps, to some, but Maeve has boundaries and exercises them--and it is filled to the brim with lace and tchotchkes and velvet. It smells very strongly of perfume in there. Perfume and tobacco smoke.

She takes him in with a quick glance and looks, bizarrely, relieved. Like she'd been hoping he'd arrive.

Behind her, a girl with a very indiscreet neckline attempts to capture his attention by demurely adjusting it to cover more of her decolletage. Somehow very strangely this has the opposite effect. A leggy blonde next to her takes one look at the visitor and attempts to shield the other from view. It looks very much as though a scuffle might break out.

"Good afternoon. I'm sure--" but she hesitates, and cranes to look around him, out of the crack in the door and into the street. Towards Siscalus.

"Are you here for the flyer?" she asks flatly. There is a sense of the room deflating like a used-up bellows. The girl with the unfortunate neckline returns to what she was doing--namely, reading a surprisingly academic-looking book.  

[phoenix kiss]

Ayle himself looks a touch disappointed -- glances over his shoulder into the street, which has the effect of making his long hair swing down his back -- and then sighs at Siscalus. The deer, his mission perhaps accomplished, tosses his head back, snorts, and disappears out of view with an air of satisfaction. It makes Ayle seem almost mournful, certainly irritated, as he turns back around. The young lady with the impressive decolletage will have to wait. "Yes," he drawls, "Though that won't take all night, will it?"  

[Rejam]

She smiles, a practiced expression. “You,” she says “must not know Maeve very well. She is not easily satisfied. You will be lucky to leave by sun-up, and you will likely be very tired.”

Given the environment it might be easy to interpret that incorrectly, but she’s already brought up the posters, already spotted the deer. There’s really only one way this can go.

“Right this way,” she says, sweeping up towards the staircase. A single window on its landing lets in scant light, and she steps aside to let a man pass as he exits a room above. He has the stoic face of someone who is neither ashamed nor thrilled to be found here in daylight. Middle-aged but hard-worn, his dark eyes shoot appraisingly over Ayle, pausing on the landing, and he delivers a distracted nod.

“Your Guardian is waiting in the back lot, Mr. Thompson” murmurs Ayle’s escort, and the man jerks a nod at her as well and flashes a yellow-toothed, lupine grin.

“If you go with the redhead,” he advises Ayle , and his breath smells like smoke and tooth decay, “be forewarned that she doesn’t like her feet touched.” With hands that shake violently he claps a strange-looking hat to his head and leaves without a backwards glance.  

[phoenix kiss]

He had not been considering the redhead -- Ayle is partial to blondes, which might be a little strange to some -- but gives the man a distracted nod, glances to the escort, and then continues his ascent up the stairs.

It makes for a very strange meeting, in a place that before had seemed like something close to heaven. Ayle is no stranger to women, and he had been intent on .. well, spending more than just the meeting-time here, but if he is to be here until sunup .. he hopes there is coffee.

He pauses for a moment to let the girl lead again. "After you," he says, and his accent rounds out the first word, makes the r disappear. He has wooed women with the accent. It is not working here. It makes him terribly self-conscious about it.  

[Rejam]

The girl actually seems remarkably impervious to his charms. If the greener recruits downstairs had seen him as a sort of prize, she clearly doesn't.

She guides him down the hallways, dim or dark, and when she turns a corner there is, at the end of the corridor, a single door. Outside it stands a coal-black deer, youngish and stout, its stark coat unrelieved by any marking and its eyes angry and flashing.

It stares at Ayle with a canine glare as the girl ignores it to rap on the door, and a voice within acquiesces that they may enter.

She curtsies into the room before closing the door behind him.

The room is small, made to seem smaller by the fact that the windows on the opposite wall are smoked and frosted, allowing only a dim glow that suffuses the air with a sense of perpetual evening, the darkness relieved by two lamps on the walls and a candle on the desk that dominates the room.

It is incredibly neat, and incredibly stuffed. Shelves of books line the walls--most look very old, or very cheap and tawdry; yellow-backed adventure novels share space with hefty academic tomes in what must be a very strange categorization system. There is a large painting in the classical style, far too expensive-looking for this establishment, hung to one side of the room. It depicts a man astride a deer.

Maeve rises to meet him as he enters, and perhaps the girl's double entendres had been meant to get his hopes up. If they had, they are now dashed. Maeve is no young thing, and the best that might be said is that she is handsome, with stern, quick features and a severe hairstyle barely softened by the grey-tinged curls artfully arranged around her temples. Her figure is impossible to appraise in the stifling confines of her old-fashioned, thick gown.

"You have come about the notice," she acknowledges, and she does not curtsy. Instead, she extends a hand across the desk toward him and nods towards a cushioned chair for him. Her own is unadorned wood. It has no arms, and looks uncomfortable.

There is a sculpture on the corner of her desk, among the ledgers and the red and black inkwells. It is carved of wood, and depicts a rearing stag with flowers in his antlers striking out at the body of a crouching, snarling, frankly terrifying-looking wolf.  

[phoenix kiss]

The deer does not alarm or intimidate him: in fact, he is more or less used to looks of a kindred spirit from Siscalus (though his own buck's are less angry and are simply intense). He widens his eyes at it for just a moment before ducking into the room, and some part of him truly is relieved when the door clicks shut behind him.

This has all been very odd. The last thing he expected in coming to the Swan is to be ushered upstairs in all due haste to this sort of room. The scent in the air and the fripperies and lace and velvet were expected. The brisk, businesslike way the girls bundled him upstairs, the deer outside the door, and this woman -- he glances around the room, swallows, and then tosses his head. It is a restless motion. Ayle does not do well with walls -- house of ill repute or no.

He has ever relied on sheer overconfidence when faced with daunting tasks, though he has an inkling that his normal wolfish charm (so to speak) won't work on this -- .. woman. Force of nature.

He sits when he is directed to sit, regards the sculpture on the corner of the desk, thinks of Siscalus, and then nods. "I saw it--" he starts, and then looks around again, "--and yes."  

[Rejam]

"Soon," says Maeve, leaning back in her hard seat and steepling her fingers against her chin in a way one of us might describe as "supervillainesque," "Finnavair will be too big to go up and down the stairs and I shall have to move my office to the ground floor. It is interesting how often minor inconveniences are glossed over in the old story. Tell me of your experience as a Chosen, Mr.--?"  

[phoenix kiss]

"Danforth," he says, and the answer is surprisingly quiet. He drums long fingers on the arm of the chair, fingers calloused by long days of hard work, and then tosses his head restlessly before tucking the offending strand of near-white hair behind one ear. He pauses a moment, to collect his thoughts, and then starts, "It hasn't been good or bad, just -- strange. My whole life has changed. Siscalus," he begins -- and then confides, with an air of near sheepishness (astute judges of character will determine this is not Ayle's typical mode of operation, and it is only the intensity with which Maeve questions him that she gets this answer), "I thought he'd work like a farm horse at first. He didn't."

He sits back in his chair (it creaks under his frame), rolling broad shoulders back, and then smiles; the effect is striking. "Since then I haven't worried about much." There is an air of wildness to both man and Guardian that probably helps round out that answer.  

[Rejam]

"I daresay you haven't," she says drily, examining a piece of paper in front of her to avoid looking at him, perhaps for fear that her disgust will become a palpable force and knock him from her chair.

"Well, Mr. Danforth, you will be interested to know that if you choose to worry about it I am cataloging and collating us. The time may come where you find yourself concerned with the abilities of your Guardian beyond working a field row or attracting the attention of women." A guess, but she has a feeling. She shoves the ledger in front of her towards him, and in it are a long list of names, locations. Some of them are written in the same clear, firm hand as the page numbers in the corners--Maeve's--but most have the eclectic look of a wedding guestbook. The one directly above the blank line she gestures at is written in letters that tremble and shake nearly to illegibility. "Optional, of course. But I suspect you will appreciate your own wisdom in the future."  

[phoenix kiss]

One of the names, directly above the scrawl, is written in a fine aristocratic hand -- noticeable because of that -- William Talbot -- Cesambre, and then an address. Ayle ponders it for a moment, and then looks for the pen he knows is coming. His own handwriting is something less than clear; a kind word for it would be 'serviceable,' but even that is doing him a favor.

"Wolves?" Is the one word he asks; he gestures to the statue on her desk, and then tips his blonde head towards the painting. "I can fight wolves."  

[Rejam]

"One of the few to not dismiss my concerns out of hand," she says, with grudging gratitude despite herself. She hands over the quill. "And perhaps you can, for all that. But can you fight them well, and how many can you fight?"

Her eyes fall on the carving. "There are many who says my fears are unfounded, simply because they have not heard howling themselves. And perhaps they are. That would be a blessing." Her voice indicates that she does not think that it would be a blessing, but that she feels duty-bound by decency to observe that it ought to be.  

[phoenix kiss]

"I've won every fight I've been in. With a sword, at least." He has a natural talent for it. With fists he wins at best two out of three, but most often he draws, or just exhausts his opponent into submission. But with a blade in his hand he has rather more finesse than one's average farmhand. He spreads his hands apart in concession, spots rising on his cheekbones to think of it. It is as close to a flush as might be observed from him, but he realizes what an odd statement this is to make. "And Siscalus is fearless; I think he'd enjoy trampling a wolf."

He adds, after a moment, "Do you think something will happen that soon?"  

[Rejam]

"What place is a woman's to question the movements of the spirits?" she returns. "Perhaps nothing will happen. Perhaps wolves will descend tomorrow. Perhaps our grandchildren will be the first to hear their howls." Abruptly, she rises from her chair and takes a small sketchbook from the corner of her desk. "When you are done making your entry, I have something to show you."  

[phoenix kiss]

He writes his name, quickly, in something lacking Talbot's elegance, but better than the scrawl -- Ayle Danforth -- Siscalus. Writing the Guardian's name brings a wash of something like relief over him. Maybe it is because he knows that the Guardian is waiting outside, and will not leave him. And then he stands, relieved to be moving. The office is becoming cramped. The walls are becoming higher. This relief shows on his face when they are moving again. Ayle is not a creature built for stuffy offices and tall buildings. He needs air and wind and movement and wide, flat sunny fields.

And he has manners enough to at least nod as politely as he can manage (that streak of something wolfish will never be completely hidden): "After you."