By some absurd stroke of luck (or, perhaps, a somewhat outsized number of hours for a respectable young lady to have spent scrambling around various Thedosian foothills), Wysteria had managed to disembark from the ruined ferry lodged above the great turtle's shell. She'd clambered over the rail and made a great leap of it, and had somehow successfully tumbled home to the turtle's shell without either coming into contact with the red lyrium snarling up through the animal's hard plating or sliding off into the harbor's roiling black water.
That second one, she had not so much decided as simply felt very deep in her bones in the way a nervous animal avoids what it is certain will kill her, must be avoided at all costs.
It must be explained that in the great number of times she has crossed the harbor in perfect comfort and even relative discomfort—the weather off the Waking Sea often being quite surly—, Wysteria has never felt herself to be in any particular danger. The ferries are broad and dawdling and the men operating them are often that very reliably breed of surly which time and weather and danger would seem to have little affect on.
But stranded on the back of a red lyrium mad sea turtle, having thus far somehow contrived to miss for herself a more decisive rescue and being witness to the definitive mortality of one such old sea salt of a ferryman, she had found herself very abruptly recalling quite a few horrible stories of young girls drowning in the Rhuvauhn River in their heavy skirts. And, having reflected on this, she had been weighing the possibilities of either dying from the Blight touched lyrium, or dying in the harbor, or suffering the even more terrible third thing.
The lurch of the turtle suddenly straying off course had decided it. Hence why, when Jayce comes falling out of the sky, clipping her on the way down and sending them both sprawling, Wysteria de Foncé her divested of her sleeves and is indeed halfway to unlacing her bodice with the intent of stripping down to her shift in order to make a go of Hopefully Floating.
(The terrible third thing: conceding her dignity.)
"—Aughk!" she squawks on impact, mercifully unconcussed.
B
That second one, she had not so much decided as simply felt very deep in her bones in the way a nervous animal avoids what it is certain will kill her, must be avoided at all costs.
It must be explained that in the great number of times she has crossed the harbor in perfect comfort and even relative discomfort—the weather off the Waking Sea often being quite surly—, Wysteria has never felt herself to be in any particular danger. The ferries are broad and dawdling and the men operating them are often that very reliably breed of surly which time and weather and danger would seem to have little affect on.
But stranded on the back of a red lyrium mad sea turtle, having thus far somehow contrived to miss for herself a more decisive rescue and being witness to the definitive mortality of one such old sea salt of a ferryman, she had found herself very abruptly recalling quite a few horrible stories of young girls drowning in the Rhuvauhn River in their heavy skirts. And, having reflected on this, she had been weighing the possibilities of either dying from the Blight touched lyrium, or dying in the harbor, or suffering the even more terrible third thing.
The lurch of the turtle suddenly straying off course had decided it. Hence why, when Jayce comes falling out of the sky, clipping her on the way down and sending them both sprawling, Wysteria de Foncé her divested of her sleeves and is indeed halfway to unlacing her bodice with the intent of stripping down to her shift in order to make a go of Hopefully Floating.
(The terrible third thing: conceding her dignity.)
"—Aughk!" she squawks on impact, mercifully unconcussed.