faderift | OPEN

“You do not have to be, chérie,” Bastien says. “You do not have to do anything. I might be wrong—and even if I am right, I think it is only the safest path into someone’s good graces. Not the only one.”

He offers her a hand up.

“Anyway, Byerly is a difficult one. It is part of his charm. Between that and the fragrant perfume of wine and piss—it is no wonder he married so well.” And in case she takes that for mean, he adds, “He is an old friend. I would not tell you to do something I thought would wound him.”

That ship has sailed.

"He did at that," she agrees, taking the offered hand despite being perfectly capable of standing on her own. More or less. She slips on--what is that, frozen coffee? She manages not to fall, but ends up actually needing that hand.

After her recovery, involving a high pitched squeak and some swearing, Athessa looks at her feet, and then at Bastien's shoes. "Do those make it easier to walk on ice at all?"

“I have never walked barefoot on ice to compare,” Bastien says, on the tail end of his quiet, huffy laughter at the squeak. “I enjoy having toes too much.”

Are elves specially immune to frostbite? Possibly. Something to try to read about later.

No more immune than the next person, just more accustomed to weather. Generally speaking, anyway. Athessa hmphs. Perhaps she'll get some shoes and see if there's any difference besides having warmer feet. That...actually might be enough of an incentive, at least in the winter months. These toe-less socks definitely don't help with traction.

A few quiet moments after they're back on course to deliver the bundle of messages, fed up with stewing on what she said to set Byerly off, she braces herself for whatever answer Bastien might give, then asks:

"What did Yseult say when she asked you to train me?"

“That you were a liability,” Bastien says. He isn’t going to start her training by lying to her. But he continues, “That you could be an asset. That you might be good at making people think you are no one they need to worry about,” because he also isn’t going to start it off with the words not very bright. “And that happens to be my speciality.”

She takes a short breath through her teeth, the same sound one makes upon stubbing a toe or something. Liability sounds bad. The rest doesn't sound as bad, but it's going to take time to balance confidence in herself with letting people continue to think she's a dumbass.

"In my defense," she ventures, "I haven't been a liability on any actual missions. Just..."

Yeah. Just the one time she conspired with Colin to steal a thing, then threw both the plan and the thing into the sea because she was unprepared, too high, and panicked. She shrugs and crosses her arms tightly over herself again.

“You do not need a defense,” Bastien says, reaching to pat her opposite shoulder as they walk. If they weren’t in public, in Hightown, he might settle it around her more permanently, but he doesn’t want anyone staring. “We are all liabilities in one way or another.”

He holds his bundle of messages toward her.

“When we get to the Keep, I will fall behind you,” he says. “Watch the guards at the doors while you walk—they always have one on either side. Whichever one you think is going to ask you what you are doing here, hold the letters in that hand. It does not matter that they stop you. I just want to see when you can tell.” A beat. “And you have to walk down the middle. No cheating.”

Edited 2020-01-24 22:03 (UTC)

It comes as some relief when they get to Viscount's Keep that she doesn't even have the time to think about cheating, and that she doesn't recognize either of the guards. When she's within line of sight, the guard on the left doesn't do more than glance at the approaching elf, but the other guard's demeanor hardens. Athessa keeps the bundle in her right hand, where it already was, and keeps walking with the confidence of someone who knows where she's going.

"What's your business here, knife-ears?" Typical. As expected, the guard on the right steps closer to the center and holds an arm out.

"Messages," she answers, gesturing with them.

Edited 2020-01-25 02:28 (UTC)

—okay, maybe he should have told her to keep the messages in both hands until she had an idea. Notes for next time.

The guard's scornful follow-up questions—messages for who, from who—don't get very far before Bastien catches up to her, intervening with a waved hand and she is with me that settles the matter immediately. Human privilege. Between the door and the target of their delivery, he asks a few questions about what she noticed, how she knew, what it means for a demeanor to harden.

But once they're walking away, leaving the Keep behind them, he says, "Do you remember his face?"

"Yeah, but if you're gonna ask me to draw it for you, set your expectations low." She is many things, but an artist she is not. "I'm not gonna be so dramatic as to say I remember the face of everyone who calls me knife-ear, but I definitely remember the guards that do."

They're the ones who pose the biggest threat, after all. Random strangers will rat out other strangers without much thought, but the City Guard are more likely to have benefit of the doubt. Quelling dissidents they might call it, or keeping the peace.

"Good," Bastien says, "because he is our training dummy. When you have time to work on it, I want you to find out everything about him—what he does for fun, whether or not the Guard Captain likes him, what he loves, what he is afraid of, who he is kind to and why. You have a head start on who he is cruel to. You can approach that however you like—"

A deviation, here, from how he was taught.

"—as long as you do not put yourself in danger. If you want to interact with him alone or break into his home or something, let me know, so I can be close."

Athessa makes a face, but agrees to the terms all the same. She even goes so far as to think easy enough but the last time she did any surveillance and intel gathering was nearly three years ago.

"I guess you're gonna give me a deadline, yeah?"

Otherwise what would be the point?

"Give me an update in two weeks." A little puffed-up there, as if relishing his little bit of power, but he's only joking. He shrugs off the air of authority a moment later. "You do not have to be finished then. I assume you have real work to do, ouais? But we can talk about it then."

"This is real work, innit? Other than chores and fieldwork the only orders I have are to take training seriously." Shoulders heaving in a shrug, she puts her hands in her pockets. They're on their way to the market district, a trek she knows well and doesn't pay much heed to this early. Later in the day you'd have to watch out for street urchins, bumping into people and making off with their coin purses, but at this hour it's just merchants and people getting ready for the work day.

“Sure,” Bastien says, “but is not all we are going to do, n’est-ce pas? You have to get me into shape so I can show you how we fight without messing up our hair, and then—the music is part of it, you know, not only a cover story to get us places. We use the songs and stories to lead people’s minds and moods where we want them without making it too obvious that we are trying.”

The sun’s getting higher. It’s not warm, exactly, but it is warmer, like standing outside the window of a room with a fireplace.

“So think of Monsieur Raciste as a long-term project. It is not about learning his itinerary as quick as you can. It is about understanding him.” He’s going to buy her breakfast, now—not any ridiculously-priced coffee, but something. He’s on the lookout. “You can take your time.”

Well, at least understanding a guard should be easier and less teeth-grindingly frustrating than trying to understand Benedict.

"Do I have to learn an instrument? I should tell you, contrary to my outgoing nature, I'm terrible in front of a crowd." Anything even remotely resembling her being on display makes her skin crawl.

“You do not have to learn an instrument,” Bastien says, “but the lute is easy enough to pick up if you would like to. As for crowds—you will have to get over that. Not because you have to perform for crowds, as a rule, but because you are not allowed to be terrible in front of anyone, unless being terrible is useful—ah, here.”

He peels sideways toward a bakery window.

“What do you like? It is on me.”

She looks at the baked goods in the window, the hunger that had been making itself known for the past hour now gone and replaced with a familiar sinking feeling. So she shrugs and shakes her head.

"I'm not picky."

In lieu of saying anything, Bastien leans sideways, one foot lifting off the ground, to tip over against her with his shoulder, like a buoy. A prompting buoy that wants a better answer.

Athessa leans a little with his nudge, but manages to keep her feet enough to lever him back upright. The gesture brings a soft huff of a laugh out into the chill air and a small smile to her face.

"That one," she supplies, pointing at the turtle bread with the craquelin shell.

“Merveilleux,” Bastien says, and shortly afterwards they both have one and he’s trying to decide whether to eat its little legs first or make it quick by biting off the head.

He’s also watching Athessa, intermittently, in his peripheral vision.

“Are you all right?”

Edited 2020-01-30 04:00 (UTC)

She looks up from tapping her fingers on the flat underside of the bread and forces a smile.

"Yeah, fine," The turtle's head is the first bit broken off and bitten into. "How can I get better about being in front of crowds?"

Bastien hums. Stage fright (sans stage) was never a problem for him, or for any of the bards in his cell who were raised to be watched, but it isn’t an entirely alien concept or anything. Just one that he doesn’t know off the top of his head how to train out of someone. “Honestly, I don’t know. I suppose that might depend on what happens when you are in front of one, and why.”

"Oh," That makes sense, but it doesn't make it any better, because that means she has to tell a third person about something she'd really rather forget. She lets out a huff of a laugh. "I'm too sober to get into that right now."

Even thinking about it would be overwhelming without that comfortable haze to dampen the sharp edges of her feelings.

For a moment he’s quiet. Pushing might be the right thing to do. It’s what Réjane would have done with him—and Ines afterwards, despite clear establishment of the fact that she was not the boss of him. Drag things out into the light, label them, learn how to use them or how to break through them.

But, “D’accord,” is what he says, after that pause. “Perhaps another time. You did, ah—those fights that Eshal organized, ouais? Were those all right?”

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sulahnan - 2020-01-30 17:52 (UTC) - Expand