WHO: Miriam & Vanya; Miriam & Joselyn WHAT: Workin' 9 to 5 WHEN: Now WHERE: Somewhere in the Free Marches; The Crossroads NOTES: catch-all; starters in comments. will note cw's in subject lines if necessary.
Save for the drizzling rain stubbornly dogging their progress from out of Kirkwall, it had all been going so well. The pair of mules before the wagon had proved to be both shockingly well behaved and reassuringly sure of foot despite Spring having turned the eastern road along the coastline into a streak of muck. And yes, the wagon may be unsprung but the weather and the cargo (a load dominated by lumber and tools supplemented by some basic foodstuffs in support of the repairs already underway on some long abandoned coastal signal tower) demands that their going be slow enough to not be overly jostled anyway.
How much trouble should anyone really anticipate from such simple work anyway?
"What a stupid mistake."
This is not for whatever optimism either of them might or might not have been nurturing after a morning of collars and hoods turned up against the weather, having indulged in fragmented but not strictly uneasy conversation. Rather, Miriam's remark can only be in refence to the assemblage of brigands who have only just now fled back into the rugged Vinmark foothills. There is one man left in the road, face down in the mud and still enough to suggest he's quite dead, but the rest have successfully retreated to either nurse their wounds or waste away from them.
Breathing hard and mud splattered, Miriam shifts heavy hammer ended staff in her hands and her attention to Vanya. The arcane frost fades from both their weapons.
"All well?"
The mules and the wagon with them have fled the action to a nearby copse of trees.
"I think so." Vanya goes to check the presumed corpse to be sure, habit. As he kneels, he huffs out some air. "...well, he won't trouble us anymore," he concludes after a moment of examination, "but one of them caught me along the leg after all, I think some of this blood is, in fact, mine."
As the adrenaline begins to wear off, it hurts a bit, but it will probably hurt more later. Twisting to look, his first impression is messy but not dangerous, which is something, though Miriam would be forgiven for wondering whether his expression would be significantly different if it were otherwise. He uses his sword to lever himself back up to standing. "I could probably use some help bandaging it before we move, if you don't mind."
There is something broad in the fleeting point of focus, how it casts from him back to the foothills in the direction the bandits had retreated. It's not—skittish, precisely. Merely wary, all keyed up awareness like a head shy horse in halter.
(A moment ago, she'd been perfectly able and levelheaded enough; the adrenaline must be sharpening her.)
"Easy enough," is a bland assessment of the facts.
With a hitch of her staff, the heavy hammer end hooked across her shoulder, Miriam begins to wade through the slop of the road toward the elevated roadside, the wagon, her pack.
Vanya starts to follow her before realizing that it's probably not the best idea. Instead, he finds a relatively dry patch of grass near the road to settle on and starts a cursory examination. It's a long cut, but not a deep one and not near anything vital. It is, however, going to be awkward to heal, inevitably reopening as he walks for the first day or two. Worth a muttered curse under his breath, but more annoyance than pain.
She's quick enough about reaching the cart, pausing a moment to peel the fallen reins out of the mud and loop them unceremoniously over a low hanging branch before scrambling up the side of the wagon to loop her arm through the kit tucked down into the front of the wagon. The trouble is coming down again--she lets herself drop rather than climbing back down to the ground, and the impact and the fading adrenaline combine to jar something hard enough that she stumbles.
It's luck more than dexterity that keeps Miriam from gracelessly eating shit, and her return to where Vanya is sitting is slower, more methodical, and punctuated by her hand supporting her ribs.
The pack is set down first. A dubious assessment of the ground and her proximity to it is eventually answered with—"Help me out here, Orlov."
Between the staff and his shoulder, she settles herself down beside him on the slightly soggy grass.
"I was - oh, alright." He'd made as if to lever himself back up, but she was down before he could catch up to her needing him for leverage rather than criticizing his location.
Once she's steadied, he resettles. "I wasn't sure I was going to make it up an incline before it was seen to, to be perfectly frank with you. Are you alright?" Post stumble. "I don't know if anyone at our destination is going to believe the honest explanation that the bandits are in substantially worse shape."
"A mage and a Templar are traveling east on a wagon when they're attacked by bandits—" Sounds like the start to a bad joke. Miriam shoots him a pointed sidelong look around the edge of her dark curtain of hair as she flips open her satchel and goes digging.
"The one with a club got under my arm and cracked me in the side. Harder than I thought, is all. Can you peel your trouser's leg that far up?"
He makes a game attempt, but somewhere south of the knee gives up. "I think we will have to cut a hole. A wider one, rather, he started it for us." He isn't particularly attached to the trousers, but it's still mildly aggravating. "It is likely my fault, I thought full plate would be impractical for a cargo run." And he wasn't wrong, exactly, but still. "At least the mules are likely grateful I stuck to mail."
"If you'd worn plate, you'd still be climbing down off the wagon and I'd be stuck with ten bastards in the road and likely more trouble than bruised ribs."
Had there been ten? She hadn't been too fussed to count, only to know they'd been outnumbered. That there'd been an archer, making a great deal of her own work seeing the arrows diverted or intercepted. They'd done a fair job, given the numbers and the surprising commitment of the attack.
From the satchel is retrieved a small working knife and a fistful of cloth. Habit, to travel with some rudimentary stock for treating wounds. The knife is passed over to him; the strip of cloth she carefully begins to wind back into a roll.
"There may be elfroot growing in that copse of trees. We're in the right sort of place for it."
He takes the knife and begins methodically cutting the cloth away.
(If ten isn't perfectly accurate, it's close enough; he wasn't counting either.)
"That would be helpful, if so. I don't think it will be a problem to walk on, once it's bandaged properly and it stops bleeding. But I will probably better use if we can take the ache of it off. If not, I will make do."
"My, how noble," she says, bland as a blank page. The last inches of the cloth bandage and wound tight.
"I'll see your leg wrapped now and poke round once we get back to the wagon. You'll need it re-wrapped in an hour once the swelling's come up anyway. We can put the root on it directly then, and you'll make do with chewing in the meantime if it's so bad as all that."
Is brisk no-nonsense, orderly and frank and likely saying nothing he doesn't already know as she digs around in the satchel for something to soak blood and comes up with a sock. Sure. That works. Miriam flicks him a sidelong look.
"And because I don't feel like standing back up again to go ferreting around just yet. Here, trade."
He raised his eyebrows but took the sock and gave up the knife without fuss. "You don't think it's a two-sock wound?" is bone dry in delivery, however.
"I'll put my boot to it and we can find out for certain," is the automatic reply as the knife is set aside, her muddy shoe hefted up—
No. Don't do that.
With a grimace, Miriam returns her heel to the mud.
"Right. Hold it there. No flinching," is a warning more suitable for a child. But she's said it and can't very well take it back and so sets to wrapping the bandage—all sturdy, even pressure—without further preamble.
Remaining stoic is a thing Vanya gives the impression of being practiced in. He holds still, making it as easy for her as he can under the circumstances. Now that it's clear the wound is messier than it is dangerous, it's mainly an inconvenience. (It is a gash in his leg, so presumably it hurts some amount, but even so.)
"I wonder if they actually wanted the supplies or hoped to sell them for cash," he says, absently, not entirely expecting an answer. Thinking aloud.
And Miriam, who is accustomed to stringing along conversation with or without blood under her hands—
"Maybe they're building a fort," is a throwaway comment while the bandage is wrapped.
She's good at it. This nonsense of cloth and pressure and managing the edges of the rear in the trousers, and not tugging too hard or being to precious in the way that anyone who's trudged along in a war's wake probably ought to be. It's an unremarkable skill, faded twice over by the presence of the mage's staff in the mud alongside her and her uselessness with knitting flesh and bone.
He's known too many mages without a knack for healing to be terribly surprised when a given one lacks it. If anything, he's more subtly impressed at her mundane skill, not surprised exactly, but glad for a pair of hands that know what they're doing.
"Enterprising, for a group of bandits. I understand it's more traditional to find someplace large and abandoned to take over." Spoken like a man who'd had to clear a few such places.
As she finishes up, he adds, "Thank you. I'm glad for your sake we didn't need to sew it, that's always an even worse mess."
I was joking, she doesn't say, looping the wrap's end and cinching the knot tight. Half because he must be too. Probably. Maybe. Who bloody knows.
(Speaking of, Miriam wipes her hands on the soggy grass.)
"Speak for yourself. I'm terrific with a needle."
This is the part where she scrapes up to her feet and hauls him to his and they go tottering back toward the wagon like a pair of limping octogenarians. Instead, she lets her legs straighten.
"Maybe you'll have another chance to stab me one day." That one is definitely a joke. Almost certainly.
He can, he finds, get up and move, if more slowly than he'd like. It'll hurt more later than it does now, but with any luck he'll be somewhere with a place to lie down by then. And the well-done bandage job mean at least the odds of humiliatingly passing out from blood loss are low. Small mercies.
"How are the horses, did you have a chance to look earlier?"
She remains put, shifting the contents of the satchel rather than scrape upright to her feet.
"Happier to be eating that grass over there than they were in the road, I think. But I didn't look too closely. You're welcome to try steering them out."
"We'll have to eventually," he says and starts for the trees where the mules, who were definitely mules this whole time and not horses, have settled after their initial fright. He's always been good with animals, perhaps finding them easier to sort out than people, and before he tries steering them anywhere, he goes over them both to make sure they weren't injured in any way that hadn't been immediately obvious. It gives Miriam a breather too, though there's not an indication that this part is something he's doing on purpose.
Of course it's not intentional. If it allows her some leeway in which to open her muddied coat and stick her hand down her shirt to touch her side and carefully test the shape of the tenderness there, then it is all strictly a matter of sensibility.
Were she alone (when has she ever been such a thing?) or the ground less muddy, she might indulge in the impulse to lie on her back and be briefly miserable. So it's good that she isn't; she gets the sense that the effort of sitting back up from a prone position would be unpleasant despite the initial appeal.
"All in one piece?" Miriam calls, doing her coat back up.
"It looks like it," he replies. "They had the sense to get out of the way and stay there. The wagon itself caught an odd hit or two, but nothing structurally important as far as I can see." They might get some grumbles about the divots in the wood when they returned, but under the circumstances Vanya thinks they got off lightly. Or, at least, that if they didn't they didn't face the compounded misery of losing their mode of transport.
Good, is obvious, so she doesn't bother speaking it aloud. Instead she nods and sits for a moment longer, allowing her attention to drift in the interim to the dead man in the road. He's a dark shape in the mud, lying face down and inert. Once they're away from here, she thinks, someone will come creeping back out of those foothills into which the rest of his party fled to recover his body.
It's what she would do, were it her.
"No time like the present," she announces to Vanya, or to the mules, or the road at large, or simply to herself as motivation to stand. It takes some doing (read: leveraging with her staff), but eventually she's upright and hobbling to join him at the cart.
He judges it the wiser part not to offer to help her until she gets there. When she arrives, he says, "We should be able to get it back to the road alright if we're careful. Can you take their reins? I can help from the front, in case the mud's a problem between here and there."
Not that the road is substantially less muddy than the rest of the terrain. Still, it seems prudent one of them stay on the ground until they're back where they're ought to be, as neither of them is going to relish unnecessary trips up and down from the wagon in their present condition.
Climb up into the wagon to steer rather than worry about pushing or pulling on the mules or the wheels or whatever else? Don't mind if she does, thanks, and so it's an easy proposition with which to agree.
In theory. In practice, she weighs the pack in her offhand and the heavy hammer ended staff in the other and makes brisk evaluation of the climb up into the driver's seat before her attention slips back to Vanya.
"Can you throw these up for me?"
These she says, though offers him just the pack first. The staff remains tucked in close against her.
"Of course." Presumably not of course given that she asked, but even so he takes the back and heaves it up. (He's tall enough the heave needn't be violent, at least.) He looks back, though he doesn't reach for the staff unless and until she offers it. He certainly knows better than to make a sudden move for a mage's staff under any circumstances, and that instinct is notably harder to give up than the rank was.
Up goes the pack and around comes the line of Orlov's attention. She tells herself she won't hesitate when it does and then is angry at herself when the joint of her arm sticks, almost involuntary but not quite enough to convince herself it isn't a trained thing.
She forces her elbow to extend, offering the hammer ended staff out to him. She doesn't both with further instruction like Gently, or Mind you don't clatter it around against anything. For one, it doesn't much matter. It's made of rather stern stuff. For two, that would require she may much particular mind to the whole matter and Miriam has already decided she's ignoring it in favor of clambering up into the front of the wagon.
She's pointedly not looking, but she can hear the absence of a clatter as he lays it in the wagon with the businesslike attention he'd have given any other well-made weapon. Once it's secured, along with his own gear, he comes around to take point, ready to grab the mules' bridles if they resist Miriam's direction. "I'm ready when you are," he says; he's mainly trying to focus on the immediate problem solving and not how much he's ready to be somewhere they can clean up and rest properly. They'll arrive when they arrive.
With a rein in each hand (for soon she suspects there will be little difference between her good side and bad side, as being jostled in the front of a wagon for the remaining duration of the trip is likely to turn the whole of her into a walking bruise), Miriam counts for his benefit:
"Three, two, one, walk on you bastards," and cracks the reins encouragingly across the mules' backs.
Happily, no mule stays spooked for long and it seems the pair of them have quite recovered from their ordeal even if their would-be masters haven't. The team bends amenably to the guidance of the reins, and to the encouragement of Vanya's hand, and while extricating both team and wagon from the stand of trees is an operation of five steps forward, two back, three right, five more forward, now ten back-- and so on, both animals are at least not the issue.
When the wagon is at last on even ground and more or less pointed in the direction of returning to the road without obstruction, Miriam wraps the reins around the hook at the wagon's footboard and considers what remains of their predicament.
"If your leg will bear helping me down again, I'll go poking around in those trees and see if there's any elf root to be found."
Eventually, the stripped down and surrealist quality of the Crossroads--its colors all faded like bright things left too long in the sun; drifting structures inaccessible to them, and the flickering shape of spirits at the edge of vision--slips under the skin and begins to irritate. It's like a splinter in the fingertip. The low grade irritation of it can be ignored for hours (minutes? seconds? It's difficult to reckon in the bald light of the space), and then suddenly it will catch against something and she will be reminded by a sting to her nerves.
It reminds her of dreaming. That moment at the edge of lucidity where one only just begins to be aware of the dark things which linger there at the edge of the subconscious, waiting. And no, she isn't a child (and she's seen her fair share of Harrowings), but the hairs at the back of her neck still prickle if they loiter in any one place too long.
So they're making quick work of their survey today. Or were, until the wisps descended and to invade Joselyn's space, little flits of light and sparkling energy keen to interrupt her half of the work.
Miriam, standing on some high outcropping of rock to judge their next move squints back down in her sister's direction.
“Through no fault of my own,” Joselyn gripes, straightening at the interruption (the new, different interruption) and sweeping her staff to ineffectually scatter the spirits clinging to her attention. They play out miniature scenes, indistinct thus far and difficult to precisely make out; walking in pairs, swirling into and out of vision.
She sets her hands on her hips as she looks up, struck not for the first time by how strange it is to see her face with hair so dark as Miriam's is now.
(Maybe if they spent more time together she'd be accustomed to it already, but whose fault is that? She doesn't think about it in case she's moved to give an answer.)
“Other mapmakers don't have to deal with this, I'm certain of it.”
"Imagine you're trudging through a swamp and they're the flies."
Is a horizon-flat kind of good cheer, a practiced deadpan punctuated by a certain widening eyed look. A practiced sort of humor designed to be inoffensively throwaway, so bland and habitual that it barely constitutes as a joke.
“Maybe they like my perfume,” she mimics, maturely, instead of literally anything she might say about a swamp. As if she wouldn't probably prefer a swamp, overall, because most of what she could take home from it would be a little more familiar than the insubstantial qualities of everything in the crossroads.
Two of the spirits are holding hands. Swinging hands, specifically. Joselyn pokes the end of her staff between them, and they reform either side of it, upright but vague figures with their hands on their hips.
From up on her lookout ledge, Miriam sticks her tongue back at her. Like an adult. Naughty spirits aside, they're alone and unobserved which makes it acceptable for severe battlemages with bluntly chopped bangs to debase themselves so—
It's a fine vantage point from which to watch as the figures to either side of Joselyn's staff warp, the arm of one coming away from its hip and stretching out. Stretching around, unnaturally long, and at last looping back around behind Joselyn to grip the crooked arm of its partner. The shape is unpleasant, unnatural.
With a tsk from behind her teeth, Miriam tucks her staff up high across her shoulder and begins to pick her way down.
“They're damned determined,” Joselyn observes, and her displeasure is more bemusement in truth than anything else; strange, alien things. As they seem to have become strange, if not alien, to each other —
It feels a little like the chasm she had been afraid of yawning wide between them as girls, watching Miriam be taken away. Then, she had known immediately what must be done about it and she had resolved to do it at once; now, her feelings are not half so clear as the tolling bell to guide her then, and neither the way forward.
Maybe it would be easier if the unfamiliarity was more pronounced, instead of this half-step, this key change.
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miriam + vanya;
How much trouble should anyone really anticipate from such simple work anyway?
"What a stupid mistake."
This is not for whatever optimism either of them might or might not have been nurturing after a morning of collars and hoods turned up against the weather, having indulged in fragmented but not strictly uneasy conversation. Rather, Miriam's remark can only be in refence to the assemblage of brigands who have only just now fled back into the rugged Vinmark foothills. There is one man left in the road, face down in the mud and still enough to suggest he's quite dead, but the rest have successfully retreated to either nurse their wounds or waste away from them.
Breathing hard and mud splattered, Miriam shifts heavy hammer ended staff in her hands and her attention to Vanya. The arcane frost fades from both their weapons.
"All well?"
The mules and the wagon with them have fled the action to a nearby copse of trees.
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As the adrenaline begins to wear off, it hurts a bit, but it will probably hurt more later. Twisting to look, his first impression is messy but not dangerous, which is something, though Miriam would be forgiven for wondering whether his expression would be significantly different if it were otherwise. He uses his sword to lever himself back up to standing. "I could probably use some help bandaging it before we move, if you don't mind."
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(A moment ago, she'd been perfectly able and levelheaded enough; the adrenaline must be sharpening her.)
"Easy enough," is a bland assessment of the facts.
With a hitch of her staff, the heavy hammer end hooked across her shoulder, Miriam begins to wade through the slop of the road toward the elevated roadside, the wagon, her pack.
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It's luck more than dexterity that keeps Miriam from gracelessly eating shit, and her return to where Vanya is sitting is slower, more methodical, and punctuated by her hand supporting her ribs.
The pack is set down first. A dubious assessment of the ground and her proximity to it is eventually answered with—"Help me out here, Orlov."
Between the staff and his shoulder, she settles herself down beside him on the slightly soggy grass.
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Once she's steadied, he resettles. "I wasn't sure I was going to make it up an incline before it was seen to, to be perfectly frank with you. Are you alright?" Post stumble. "I don't know if anyone at our destination is going to believe the honest explanation that the bandits are in substantially worse shape."
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"A mage and a Templar are traveling east on a wagon when they're attacked by bandits—" Sounds like the start to a bad joke. Miriam shoots him a pointed sidelong look around the edge of her dark curtain of hair as she flips open her satchel and goes digging.
"The one with a club got under my arm and cracked me in the side. Harder than I thought, is all. Can you peel your trouser's leg that far up?"
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Had there been ten? She hadn't been too fussed to count, only to know they'd been outnumbered. That there'd been an archer, making a great deal of her own work seeing the arrows diverted or intercepted. They'd done a fair job, given the numbers and the surprising commitment of the attack.
From the satchel is retrieved a small working knife and a fistful of cloth. Habit, to travel with some rudimentary stock for treating wounds. The knife is passed over to him; the strip of cloth she carefully begins to wind back into a roll.
"There may be elfroot growing in that copse of trees. We're in the right sort of place for it."
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(If ten isn't perfectly accurate, it's close enough; he wasn't counting either.)
"That would be helpful, if so. I don't think it will be a problem to walk on, once it's bandaged properly and it stops bleeding. But I will probably better use if we can take the ache of it off. If not, I will make do."
At least he hasn't offered to rub dirt in it.
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"I'll see your leg wrapped now and poke round once we get back to the wagon. You'll need it re-wrapped in an hour once the swelling's come up anyway. We can put the root on it directly then, and you'll make do with chewing in the meantime if it's so bad as all that."
Is brisk no-nonsense, orderly and frank and likely saying nothing he doesn't already know as she digs around in the satchel for something to soak blood and comes up with a sock. Sure. That works. Miriam flicks him a sidelong look.
"And because I don't feel like standing back up again to go ferreting around just yet. Here, trade."
Sock for knife.
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No. Don't do that.
With a grimace, Miriam returns her heel to the mud.
"Right. Hold it there. No flinching," is a warning more suitable for a child. But she's said it and can't very well take it back and so sets to wrapping the bandage—all sturdy, even pressure—without further preamble.
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"I wonder if they actually wanted the supplies or hoped to sell them for cash," he says, absently, not entirely expecting an answer. Thinking aloud.
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"Maybe they're building a fort," is a throwaway comment while the bandage is wrapped.
She's good at it. This nonsense of cloth and pressure and managing the edges of the rear in the trousers, and not tugging too hard or being to precious in the way that anyone who's trudged along in a war's wake probably ought to be. It's an unremarkable skill, faded twice over by the presence of the mage's staff in the mud alongside her and her uselessness with knitting flesh and bone.
Ah well. Ambitions for another life.
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"Enterprising, for a group of bandits. I understand it's more traditional to find someplace large and abandoned to take over." Spoken like a man who'd had to clear a few such places.
As she finishes up, he adds, "Thank you. I'm glad for your sake we didn't need to sew it, that's always an even worse mess."
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(Speaking of, Miriam wipes her hands on the soggy grass.)
"Speak for yourself. I'm terrific with a needle."
This is the part where she scrapes up to her feet and hauls him to his and they go tottering back toward the wagon like a pair of limping octogenarians. Instead, she lets her legs straighten.
"But you're welcome."
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He can, he finds, get up and move, if more slowly than he'd like. It'll hurt more later than it does now, but with any luck he'll be somewhere with a place to lie down by then. And the well-done bandage job mean at least the odds of humiliatingly passing out from blood loss are low. Small mercies.
"How are the horses, did you have a chance to look earlier?"
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"Happier to be eating that grass over there than they were in the road, I think. But I didn't look too closely. You're welcome to try steering them out."
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Were she alone (when has she ever been such a thing?) or the ground less muddy, she might indulge in the impulse to lie on her back and be briefly miserable. So it's good that she isn't; she gets the sense that the effort of sitting back up from a prone position would be unpleasant despite the initial appeal.
"All in one piece?" Miriam calls, doing her coat back up.
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It's what she would do, were it her.
"No time like the present," she announces to Vanya, or to the mules, or the road at large, or simply to herself as motivation to stand. It takes some doing (read: leveraging with her staff), but eventually she's upright and hobbling to join him at the cart.
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Not that the road is substantially less muddy than the rest of the terrain. Still, it seems prudent one of them stay on the ground until they're back where they're ought to be, as neither of them is going to relish unnecessary trips up and down from the wagon in their present condition.
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Climb up into the wagon to steer rather than worry about pushing or pulling on the mules or the wheels or whatever else? Don't mind if she does, thanks, and so it's an easy proposition with which to agree.
In theory. In practice, she weighs the pack in her offhand and the heavy hammer ended staff in the other and makes brisk evaluation of the climb up into the driver's seat before her attention slips back to Vanya.
"Can you throw these up for me?"
These she says, though offers him just the pack first. The staff remains tucked in close against her.
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She forces her elbow to extend, offering the hammer ended staff out to him. She doesn't both with further instruction like Gently, or Mind you don't clatter it around against anything. For one, it doesn't much matter. It's made of rather stern stuff. For two, that would require she may much particular mind to the whole matter and Miriam has already decided she's ignoring it in favor of clambering up into the front of the wagon.
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"Three, two, one, walk on you bastards," and cracks the reins encouragingly across the mules' backs.
Happily, no mule stays spooked for long and it seems the pair of them have quite recovered from their ordeal even if their would-be masters haven't. The team bends amenably to the guidance of the reins, and to the encouragement of Vanya's hand, and while extricating both team and wagon from the stand of trees is an operation of five steps forward, two back, three right, five more forward, now ten back-- and so on, both animals are at least not the issue.
When the wagon is at last on even ground and more or less pointed in the direction of returning to the road without obstruction, Miriam wraps the reins around the hook at the wagon's footboard and considers what remains of their predicament.
"If your leg will bear helping me down again, I'll go poking around in those trees and see if there's any elf root to be found."
miriam + jos
It reminds her of dreaming. That moment at the edge of lucidity where one only just begins to be aware of the dark things which linger there at the edge of the subconscious, waiting. And no, she isn't a child (and she's seen her fair share of Harrowings), but the hairs at the back of her neck still prickle if they loiter in any one place too long.
So they're making quick work of their survey today. Or were, until the wisps descended and to invade Joselyn's space, little flits of light and sparkling energy keen to interrupt her half of the work.
Miriam, standing on some high outcropping of rock to judge their next move squints back down in her sister's direction.
"Making friends?"
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She sets her hands on her hips as she looks up, struck not for the first time by how strange it is to see her face with hair so dark as Miriam's is now.
(Maybe if they spent more time together she'd be accustomed to it already, but whose fault is that? She doesn't think about it in case she's moved to give an answer.)
“Other mapmakers don't have to deal with this, I'm certain of it.”
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Is a horizon-flat kind of good cheer, a practiced deadpan punctuated by a certain widening eyed look. A practiced sort of humor designed to be inoffensively throwaway, so bland and habitual that it barely constitutes as a joke.
"Maybe they like your perfume."
Now there's the real punchline.
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Two of the spirits are holding hands. Swinging hands, specifically. Joselyn pokes the end of her staff between them, and they reform either side of it, upright but vague figures with their hands on their hips.
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It's a fine vantage point from which to watch as the figures to either side of Joselyn's staff warp, the arm of one coming away from its hip and stretching out. Stretching around, unnaturally long, and at last looping back around behind Joselyn to grip the crooked arm of its partner. The shape is unpleasant, unnatural.
With a tsk from behind her teeth, Miriam tucks her staff up high across her shoulder and begins to pick her way down.
"I'll clear them out."
no subject
It feels a little like the chasm she had been afraid of yawning wide between them as girls, watching Miriam be taken away. Then, she had known immediately what must be done about it and she had resolved to do it at once; now, her feelings are not half so clear as the tolling bell to guide her then, and neither the way forward.
Maybe it would be easier if the unfamiliarity was more pronounced, instead of this half-step, this key change.
“How much longer, do you think?”