the first time I made mincemeat of the standard propositions establishing a so-called moral science

[bouchonne]

WHO: Byerly Rutyer and Wysteria Poppell
WHAT: She's stuck with him for 3 hours
WHEN: Whenever
WHERE: On the road
NOTES: He's a smutmonger??

[ It's not a terrible trip from Kirkwall to Greencliff. Thirty miles along the coast, and a journey decently worth taking: Greencliff is a striking city, with a high copper content in the mineral cliffs giving them a curious greenish tint. Not particularly built-up, not a center of commerce or of war, but quite nice nevertheless. There are a multiple trips by commercial carriage out there per day. So, logically, the odds of running into someone you don't want to run into are relatively small.

Thank the Maker Wysteria isn't a betting woman, because it's clear enough her luck today is rotten.

Because not only does she end up in a carriage with Byerly, Byerly was running late. So that means that it's when she's well and truly settled, and when the wagon is but a few breaths from departing, that he scrambles in. The door closes behind him as he pants, clearly come off a sprint for it; the driver gives a cry; the horses lurch into motion; there's no time for her to escape.

Perhaps a stroke of good luck for the girl, though. By, for once, is so genuinely overcome with the aftereffects of drink that he doesn't even take the time to investigate his surroundings. Instead, he flops over the bench, and throws his arm across his eyes, and groans, all without ever having seen her. ]

Comments

[bouchonne]

Sympathy?

[ The cards are taken up, gathered into a tight deck. He smiles as he shuffles, though the expression is icy-cold. ]

What makes you think I desire sympathy? You knew the truth of my character the moment we spoke. I am a villain of the first order. Surely you're not so addled that you've forgotten that.

[heirring]

[Her face has set in such a way that it's all good temper and smiles as she waits for him to shuffle - porcelain with flowers painted onto it, fixed in such a way that the only change that could happen would be to shatter it completely. Stupid, she thinks all at once, to have ever thought she might be gentle or kind to him. He isn't wrong. Maybe she is addled.]

Of course. You'll have to forgive me; the dark in this carriage is terribly disorienting.

[bouchonne]

I believe I've won a truth, have I not?

[ His hard smile remains even as he continues to shuffle. ]

[heirring]

[She takes a breath, tempers something, and wills that smile to remain in place.]

I'm afraid you've asked quite a few questions and lost me entirely, Messere. You'll have to take pity on me and specify which one I'm meant to answer truthfully.

[bouchonne]

Oh, I haven't asked the question I want you to respond to truthfully yet.

[ Another shuffle. ]

My question is this. If your enemies come for you - and do not demur, Miss Poppell, for you have enemies, even if you don't yet know their faces - who do you think will watch your back?

[heirring]

[If he's meaning to ruffle her feathers, it's clear by the faint easing of tension in her that he's missed the mark. Rather, she settles there on her side of the carriage and lets the rumble of the springs jostle her faintly against the cushions.]

Is that really what you want to know? How frightened I am about being alone in a strange place with no friends or countrymen or common sense to my name.

[bouchonne]

[ He'd had questions in the back of his head that were - crueler. Somehow, they hadn't ended up coming to his lips. He rather hates the fact that they didn't. He wants to make her regret her false sympathy, the facile glibness of her indifference - But somehow, he can't cough up anything properly hateful. ]

No. This question is not rhetorical. I could not possibly give less of a shit about your fear. I want you to list out every individual you anticipate would come to your aid at the cost of their own safety or lives.

[heirring]

[Later, marching angrily about the hills surrounding Greencliff, Wysteria will hate this. How arch and mean she becomes. How she had been determined to be decebmnt and how quickly he drives her to want to stab something with a hairpin. But that's regret that doesn't touch her here.]

There isn't anyone. [She says it and knows it's true and wills it to be some weapon instead of a disappointment. Her smile persists.] But then you don't know Kalvad and have no way of knowing how ordinary a thing that is.

[Ralston would be so pleased to hear her say it. And to hear the callous, clinical examination that follows:]

But in an effort to make you happy, I'll say that in the short time I've been here that Lady de la Fontaine and her sister have been good friends to me. Failing being allowed to hide in one of dear Alexandrie's fabulous dressing cabinets, I think I might next try my luck with Mademoiselle Baudin or dear Baroness Durfort-Lacapalette.

[bouchonne]

[ Dryly, he replies: ] Kalvad, my dear, matters as much to your life here as the dream you had last night.

[ Then - ] The Baroness' concern is not in the protection of young ladies. She plays the Game, and as such, cannot be trusted, let alone relied upon. Mademoiselle Baudin is disgraced and unaccustomed to such a state of being - a reckless woman, unwilling to guard her mouth even if her own life depended upon it, seemingly assuming that her old privileges will defend her. And Lady de la Fontaine -

[ He surprises himself by faltering here, his eyes narrowing with pain. He turns his face away to hide it. ]

She is no more than a middling player in the grand scheme of things. She will not even have the power to protect herself from the consequences of the company she chooses, when the reckoning comes. Let alone you.

[heirring]

The reckoning. Spirits, Messere, you really must be well acquainted with empty bottles.

[Kalvad matters. If it didn't, she might not recognize that flutter of hesitation in him and feel the inexplicable urge to strike at it.]

[bouchonne]

[ His smile is flat. ]

If you believe that I'm delusional when I say that, then your cruel little Kalvad taught you nothing. If you get so flustered and hot when I call you a naive fool, dear child, then why do you continue playing the naive fool?

[heirring]

[In this exact moment, she doesn't know what she believes. So let him get nothing from her but what he expects. There is a mean spirited pleasure in it - being exactly what you're understood to be.]

Oh Mr Rutyer, you really musn't say such terrible things. [He wouldn't know it, but she is doing an excellent impression of her stupidest cousin.] Particularly when you should be dealing cards. Honestly, I will think that I've somehow offended you all over and how dreadful that would be for the reparation of our friendship. And here I was, thinking we'd made such progress.

[bouchonne]

[ He presses his lips together. ]

Miss Poppell, you are a viper. [ But that's not an insult; instead, he tells her: ] So be a damned viper.

[heirring]

[She laughs. It's loud in the carriage, overlapping the reverberation of the wheels and the crunch of the dirt roadway and the clap of the horses' hooves.]

You've certainly made quick habit of telling me what to do, haven't you?

[bouchonne]

[ He gives a little grimace as it cuts into his hungover head. That's part of the problem, he supposes. The hangover is making him less cautious. ]

Only because you make a habit of playing the helpless ninny. I'll stop when you do.

[heirring]

[She spies that grimace. As sweetly as she can manage, which is cloying:]

Are you certain?

[bouchonne]

My word upon it. My oath as a Rutyer.

[ He starts dealing again, doling out the requisite cards to her. ]

[heirring]

[Which she collects into a stack and hands right back to him.]

Then I think I'd like to get back to my book.

[But first, Wysteria collects her hat from where it sits beside her. She hands that to him as well.] Best to put that on. Mind the ribbon, please; it's just been pressed.

[Without waiting for him to put its broad brim to good use, she yanks back the curtain.]

[bouchonne]

[ Ugh. He flinches back from the curtain, eyes narrowing in pain, an involuntary hiss escaping from him. But, after a moment of hating her, he says: ]

Better. But still not sufficient.

[heirring]

I'm sorry to hear it, but I have no desire to indulge your masochism any further.

[She doesn't much care to look at him either; the drab light of the carraige's interior really had been doing the wan look he's suffering through quite the kindness, hadn't it? Instead she has her heavy book back in hand and is shifting closer to the window so the light might fall as fully on the page as possible. Now, where had that corner she'd dog-eared gone--]

It really is rather a good hat, Mr Rutyer. I recommend putting it to good use.

[bouchonne]

My masochism? My dear girl.

[ He places her hat on top of her book, blocking her view. ]

I'm simply trying to help you.

[heirring]

Then I suppose the real question, Messere, [she says, shifting the hat from the page,] is why in the devil's name you'd want to do that.

[There's her place. With a flick of the wrist and a definitive angling of her body toward the window that says she has no interest at all in the answer, she turns all her attention to the book and wills him to disappear.]

[bouchonne]

[ Why indeed? Honestly, he'd like to pretend that the answer doesn't come to him immediately, but, well - it comes to him immediately. Because a young woman, of some vivaciousness and some intelligence and a dearth of common sense, alone in a world that has proven to be very, very, very cruel, is likely to get hurt. She is likely to have that spark snuffed out. And how many times has Byerly seen that happen? He watched his sister turn hard, in spite of his best efforts to conceal her from the world and conceal the world from her. He watched Alexandrie, back when they were both so much younger, smiling coldly at him as she humiliated him in the same way that she had been humiliated - bringing the cruelty she had suffered around to tear Byerly to pieces. He had watched so many women suffer, good women, strong women, who were good for the world; he had watched them suffer and been able to do nothing.

The Rutyer family, they say, is cursed. Madness lies upon them like the taint, passed down through blood, through proximity. Byerly has that curse, no question of it; there is madness in his future and madness in his present. In the future, that madness will be of a terribly conventional sort; he'll turn shambling and ranting, like his aunt and his grandmother and his great-uncle, or violent like his uncle and his cousins and his grandfather. But in the present day, the curse has a rather more conventionally tragic manifestation. He is cursed to possess the will to save people but to lack the wits and the strength.

Poor Byerly. Poor, poor Byerly. Poor, poor everyone in Byerly's orbit.

And how can he say that? Especially to this girl who looks at him and sees a villain. How can he explain to her that he's a pathetic drunken fop with aspirations of knightliness, the town fool who's too foolish for this world? How can he explain to her - because I want to help you, because I see the humanity in you and I want to defend it? He simply can't. It's simply impossible. She'd laugh at him. Cruelly.

So instead - instead, he says - ]

Let us say - in honor of Lady de la Fontaine.

[heirring]

[It isn't what she expected. But then, she thinks, she doesn't actually expect anything at all from him and so, really, there is nothing to be disappointed or pleased by with what can only be the most obtuse answer ever given to any question. Which is fine. It was entirely rhetorical anyway.]

I'm sure she'd be gratified to hear it.

[This said without a second glance to him, much less a look that might consider any reassessment. Instead, Wysteria steadies the book on her knee and sets her spare hand studiously with thumb to jaw and forefinger to temple - all the better to block him out with. If she reads the same page twice in succession with the effort - well. She can hardly be blamed for it. Eventually, she will have managed to imagine pouring enough hatred ouit onto the page where it then might be eaten away by the sunlight through the carriage window that she will make progress in some peace.

What a singularly unbearable carriage ride this has been. She cannot imagine Greencliff will have anything to make up for it.]