((A collaborative effort between Phoenix Kiss and Rejam. Rejam wrote the first post and sent the last sentence to Phoenix, who replied with her own, kept secret except for the last sentence, which she sent back to Rejam, and so on. This is the compiled result of all the secret posts back and forth.))
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Possibly he had recognized her.
Janet crouches in the dark corner between the buildings, her hand heavy on Lily's neck, cursing, not for the first time, the damned tendency of deer to draw so much attention. And what was he doing here, all the way up in Palisade? But it was him. She'd never forget that face. She remembers it contorted in wrath and anguish as the flames licked the bones of his stable, hungry as a wildcat.
She is panting, chest heaving from her run; Lily's coat is hot and foam-flecked under her fingers and her hooves dance nervous circles. There is guilt in the animal's face, as clear as it would have been in a human's. Clearer. Guilt like a dog's.
She tries to master herself. She beats down the rage without knowing whether she is angry at Lily or at the disturbing sighting; fights the rising demon that says: go on. Run out there. Show him your face. Show him who you are. Give him a reason, just one little reason, and put your knife into his ribs. Finish what you started.
Lily's eyes roll white in her head as Janet, with her hands tangled roughly in her hair, rocks back and forth on her heels, shaking her head and fighting.
There'd been a time before, long before, when the beast needing a leash had gotten the lash of a whip instead, a gleeful provocation to further violence. They'd beaten it to broken in the prison, but it had woken up, stirred its paws, with the months of nursing at the Swan. Its bleared eye had opened again in the dank corners of her fearful heart. Its teeth were longer now; it had been fed lean steak and taught to aim at the throat, but it is its shining new chain (a chain that might at any moment be unclipped, against which it strains its frantic lunging) that is its greatest strength.
-*-
It was one of his father's hunting hounds; they had been purchased under the caveat that they were wolf-killers, perhaps part wolf themselves, certainly wild. It had been raised from a gamboling puppy into -- into this. It raised a note of something like fear into Jacob's heart, some sort of instinct first laid when something had crawled out of the sea onto dry land.
He took a step back and nearly jumped out of his skin when he bumped into Ursa's flank. The guardian snorted, flicking an ear towards the straining thing at the end of the chain, and then whuffed a gentle breath into Jacob's ear. The posture in which the doe stands, the planting of her feet and the stretch of her chest and ribs, conveys confidence, as does the bland, mild stare she gives the hound. That confidence, feral nearly in aspect, arises in Jacob's mind as little more than an echo of its former glory.
-*-
"The words 'former glory' are awfully puffed-up," she suggests gently, teasingly.
He tries to remember. Tries to recall the feeling of being capable, of looking at a thing he wanted and feeling that his fingers might close over it at their leisure. Remembers an unremarkable face in the glass with a grin full of white teeth. Not for a long time. Not since Maple, not since fear had tipped into his life in a terrible swell.
"Well, I was different then," he says roughly.
"I hear that from a lot of men."
"I'm sure you do, your line of work."
She says nothing in reproach, just tips his head back to rinse his hair, smoothing her hand over his brow to keep the water from his eyes. Last time she'd whispered in his ear, told him what it was like, in slow langorous syllables, to eat ortolan (Tell me what it's like he'd said into her neck, because I'm not cruel enough to eat it), but last time he hadn't been here for a bath.
So this was his life now. Paying women to wash his back, women who had in another life had the money to trot off to the Continent for forbidden meals, so maybe she wasn't so different from him.
Leave the shirt on and we can scrub it out on your ribs, she'd joked, just like Bird had.
The bitterness of the organs, she'd whispered, comes near the end, the warning that the trial remains. It is not enough to hide your face from God when you eat it. This is where you atone for the sin you feel in your own soul, and how you thank the bird. The last flavor of the ortolan is salt; it is your own blood.
From the bones.
Yes. They slice your tongue; your gums bleed. The bones must be broken before you can swallow them.
I've heard that many don't manage it. They give up.
Do you think I am so gauche? No. I bled for my ortolan. Her eyes had been closed and he knew that any pleasure in her face was in the memory of the fat and brandy on her tongue. Memory of a time when her life had been full of champagne and illicit epicurean escapades. No wonder they'd sent her to him. She had a look on her face when she talked about ortolan that he'd never, himself, managed to procure in a woman.
She lifts his hand with the sexless care of a nurse to spread the soap along his skinny, feeble arm. He thinks of reaching out to touch her hair, but he does not.
He thinks of women in haylofts and the kitchens of tiny restaurants. He thinks of the gold ring he'd pawned off years ago, overseas, and of the small and slender hand he'd once put it on, dotted with freckles, that rested in his own like a bird in a nest.
He is not even thirty-five. But there is no regret. Regret--and the thought has denial on its heels--is a thing for old men.
-*-
He does not regret this now -- in point of fact, some of Jacob's more frivolous or damning transgressions were because he does not regret. His daughter; his reputation in both Palisade and in Oldcastle; his trip out to the Wardwood, done half out of spite and half on a dare. These are all things he has undertaken with no regret.
This is not to say that he does not regret later: he does, and has. But in the moment no such thing exists. He looks at Ursa over his shoulder, frowns, and then takes a step forward, towards the chained thing. If this is a mistake he will regret later, he cannot be sure; his hand shakes only slightly, enough that he frowns, hunches over, and hides the shaking appendage with his body.
-*-
Her hands are shaking as the wrath subsides, swallowed down. She thrusts them into the pockets of her apron to hide them, but it only makes the trembling of her arms the more obvious, and so she removes them, sets them to unbraiding and rebraiding her hair.
Janet slips in through the kitchen door, and the other servant is running out buckets of stale soapy water to the lot and Alice is cutting a loaf of white bread into paper-thin slices and sniffing the butter appraisingly, skeptically. So he's here again. He might have something to say, if he saw her fingers fumbling with her hair, shaking like a nervous dog, but then again he might not. He is, she thinks, afraid of her. The thought is satisfying, but fleeting.
She sinks shaky-kneed to the table, and feels gingerly for Lily's anxieties at the end of the mental tether. They are slipping away, perhaps under the watchful eye of Siscalus or the goading prodding of Finnavair, and she is grateful. She is grateful for them, for Lily, for the influence of a quieter nature over her own. She is grateful for the quiet, hidden kitchen where she can duck away from the streets, for Alice averting her eyes politely from her obvious distress and taking the bread away without a word, for the fire being banked low and gleaming rather than leaping toward the chimney.
She sits at the low coarse table, and rests her hands flat, palm-down on the wood.
She wills them to stillness. She counts, slowly; she breathes deeply. She thinks of Maeve, and Maeve's trust in her. When her fingers cease their trembling she swallows, and she lets Lily feel, for an instant, the triumph of her peace.
-*-
And when it is all over, when he sits and cradles his hand to his chest, looking down at his ruined fingers and broken skin, he feels nothing but a pang of regret -- and some odd sort of peace. The thing is every bit as feral as it appears. Appearances, for once, are what they seem.
