[ CLOSED ] Scarce the blessing from on high

[filotimo]

WHO: Byerly, Flint, Madi, Silver
WHAT: A Princess Returns From The Dead
WHEN: mid-August
WHERE: Kirkwall/The Gallows
NOTES: Bad news from Nascere is followed a week or so later by an unexpected arrival.

Two things, all the world among,
Help the lover to attain
All that doth to Love belong:
E’en desire the good to gain,
Hope that makes the coward strong.
Both within my bosom lay.
No, ‘twas in my stricken soul
That they lurked to take away
My desire to reach the goal.
Hope hath fled and will not stay.

Comments

[filotimo]

It is a distance felt acutely across more than just miles, but across days, weeks, months, years, across heartbeats and breaths.

Anything Madi might have planned to say, might have wished to in this moment, is boiled down to something beyond words as she is drawn (as he is drawn) away from the table. That tether that connects them, an invisible cord that always pulls and never slackens, closes the space between them with a rush of footsteps. Her hands find his face, a face she knows by heart but that wears experiences she cannot guess at in the corners of his eyes and the set of his jaw and the furrow of his brow.

And her love of him is in her touch, in her gaze, tasted upon her lips when she kisses him. They do not need words, no matter what they might have planned. As ever, the language with which they speak need not be voiced to be heard, or to shake the boughs of the sturdiest trees.

[hornswoggle]

Small details stand out, sharpening in his mind. The tip of Flint's head. Madi's expression softening and resolving into action within the span of a breath. Flint's palm pressing down on the table. The whisper of Madi's dress as she turns towards him. When he thinks back later, those minor movements will stick in his mind as much as the moment when Madi's hands lift to his face. He kisses her just inside the doorway. It hardly feels real.

He almost says: I thought I would never see you again.

His hand strays, first to her hip, then to her elbow, then finally to her face as they break apart. For a moment, this is so very simple. She is here, and she is safe, and he's missed her. His fingers skirt her cheek, slip along her jaw.

"You," John says at last, voice achingly fond. There is nothing else to say for a moment. The word vibrates in the air. He is aware of Flint, catches his gaze over her shoulder as his fingers settle over the pulse in Madi's neck.

"I suppose he's told you that we haven't raised two armies?"

A joke as much as an acknowledgement that they had been putting something together before his arrival. He can't convince himself to let go of her long enough to close the door, no matter what he's acknowledging.

[katabasis]

As viewed from across her shoulder, James Flint is a thing suspended in its momentum. There is a fleeting moment where Silver looks to him, and he is hooked by it. And then the line is judiciously snapped by the purposeful diversion of his attention elsewhere.

They are such a fine thing in combination, and he can wait.

[filotimo]

You.

"Not in so many words," she answers, loathe to look away from his face just yet. As if she might read what she's missed written on his skin. (Or drink it from the sea of eyes so blue.)

"Though I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find a Commander here, instead of a Captain."

[hornswoggle]

John's eyes lift again, studying Flint's profile before he leans in to kiss Madi again. Softer, more promise than reunion. Later, it says. What a luxury, to be able to break from her and know she will be close at hand.

His hand lingers for a moment before he half-turns, enough to catch hold of the door and close it behind him against alert listeners. Each place her fingers touched still burn with the sensation. Looking directly at her is like turning his face towards the sun. (If there is some dissonance in seeing her stood in the middle of this office, it will pass.) His hand finds her as he turns back, two fingers at the inside of her elbow before catching her hand, moving towards the table.

"He's prospered," John says, but there's some quieter, bitter note that keeps the statement from being mistaken as a joke. The elevation to Division head was not a boon. "Have you already discussed what occurred?"

Some prickle of frustration works through his expression, recalling the long slog of time between Flint's message and his appearance here.

[katabasis]

"In part."

Turning by that half degree, Flint quietly reorients himself back from whatever distant place he'd removed himself in favor of the table and the work scattered there. He shifts the chart book under his hand higher to share the view of it. Nascere looks so unremarkable as an island and a map it shares with a scattershot of a half dozen others and some edge of the Seheron coastline.

"As is evidenced by our present company, the Orsola knew at best a half truth. The force on Nascere has been broken—by dividing it. Her losses," he says, nodding to Madi. "Have been nowhere near as catastrophic as we were led to believe. But with no word from Billy or his men, holding their position on the island was untenable and so she's drawn back the bulk of the force. It's entirely possible that Billy found himself doing the same somewhere else."

Or they might be all dead, is unspoken. Unless they find themselves playing host to another unexpected guest, they likely have no way of knowing. There are other, equally pressing points to discuss before they begin turning over the question of how to verify what might remain of lost men.

His attention slides to Madi. Do you want to tell him, or should I?

[filotimo]

Madi accepts the torch passed with canted brow and looks from Flint to the charts to Silver.

"There is an ancient ruin, connected by a network of caves beneath Nascere Town. We suspect—" We, here, meaning Flint and herself. "That the Altus is using Woodes Rogers to focus our attentions away from it. They have no interest in quelling violence on Nascere. If that was their only goal..."

They would have been crushed already, if all they cared about was stopping a rebellion. Even with movements only briefly plotted out on charts and maps and diagrams, there is a clear disconnect between the Governor's maneuvers and the movements of the Venatori. Madi shakes her head, a frown nesting in the furrow between her brows.

"They have a far greater investment in that ruin than they do in the island itself."

[hornswoggle]

"So our efforts were incidental."

John's tone is hard to read. There's something galling about it, having hammered against Tevene forces for so long only to discover that there was some other goal at play none of them had seen.

His fingers brush across the maps, a light mimicry of Flint and Madi's examination.

"What changed?" He asks finally. "If they'd been so content to entertain the fighting this long, why the sudden shift in response?"

The answer is already there, at the tips of his fingers. Whatever they'd been stalling for, they'd accomplished it. It was less a breakthrough, one force triumphing over another, than it was a washing of hands in preparation for the next step in a process. What he should be asking is what they could do about it.

[katabasis]

He takes incidental like some bitter pill, sour in the mouth, and lets it sit there on the tongue rather than swallow it.

("What have you heard from Hightown?" he'd asked Madame de Cedoux.

"Some concern that Tevinter is removing its distractions from the board."

It had seemed like such a half informed conclusion to draw at the time—not a bad guess, but lacking the nuance of years which had all but guaranteed that Rogers' invested in the island had less than total backing from the powers that be either in the Imperium or among the Venatori. For if he had, surely the island would have been lost already.

How irritating it would be to have had it the wrong way around—)

"I think it likely that whatever is happening there has entered a delicate period which requires more focus than they could afford while under siege. That at this stage our efforts there stood to pose a legitimate risk, and given the opportunity might still." To Madi— "Do we have any idea what their aim is?"

[filotimo]

"Not with certainty," she says. "But I think it is safe to say their interest is not archaeological. And the location of the rift in relation to the ruins cannot be mere coincidence."

Madi leans across the table to point to where they've marked the rift's location on a map. "The rift is here, as we know."

Then, she finds the map of the caves, roughly drawn but accurate, and sets it beside the other map. "This space here is where the ruin is located. Directly under the rift."

[hornswoggle]

A prickle of dread settles at the nape of John's neck. Even without any clear picture of what Rogers is angling to do, what Tevinter is trying to grasp, he knows that the end result of whatever course of action they pursue will demand something from John. Blood, bone, or—

"We can still thwart whatever they're planning, now that we know what their aim is," John says instead, ignoring every instinct that says otherwise. It passes. It is subsumed by the familiar patter of conversation, setting a problem between the three of them and pulling it apart.

His gaze lifts to Flint as he says the obvious, "And we're going to have to bring some of our fine fellows with us, especially if we've suffered losses."

And that will be an uphill battle, if they do not frame the problem very carefully. It seems a foregone conclusion to John, just as the instinct kicking at the back of his mind warns against his own participation: this cannot be managed from afar. Madi did not come all this way to say what a messenger could have. They've run out of time.

[katabasis]

Both maps are regarded with an unfeeling look, a closed hand kind of efficiency. Silver is right.

"Safeguarding threats to the Veil is what Riftwatch is meant to do. I'll say as much to the other Division Heads if there is any resistance; pulling a force together to reinforce the effort should be easily accomplished."

If that is an overly optimistic assessment, it doesn't reflect in the severely drawn line of his face. All that may be true, but there will be some cost to this. He's certain of it.