closed | road trip

[dissolving]

WHO: Cedric & Gwen & a skull sippy cup
WHAT: Road trip!
WHEN: Vaguely after Satinalia
WHERE: Cumberland
NOTES: I'll edit as appropriate.

The Abbey's an ugly scene.

Thick walls, massed bureaucracy; some clerk dredged up to speak with her in quiet, clipped Orlesian. They cannot make promises for the Spire, but he will pass whatever papers she has brought along if she will just wait here, in the hall,

And no further. Young, robed things watch her sidelong. Older ones watch the doors, shaggy with humped muscle; eyes faded, skin worn hard for sixty. The hours pass. Some shift exchanges, a new man led out by the crook-curved arm. Armored, and not armed. Mouth turned down in dull, unhappy line.

An ugly scene. That was before the door slammed. Glass shatters, a breathless shout: "Carsus — !"

Amazing, the ground he can cover in a skirt. Commotion somewhere behind. The guard starts. Their eyes meet,

He looks like he means to say something. And then they're both out the doors.

Comments

fambly;

[dissolving]

Good thing he sprung for two rooms. The air's thick all afternoon, thunderstorm louring over riverside. There are lanterns, there is art, there's a bleak fucking mood. And eventually, there's a reply: Yes, they'll meet.

Cumberland is beautiful, Cumberland is grand. But it's a city. The buildings tower even as streets narrow, pitted out from cobblestones to rising mud. Ornate facades fall off to patched boards, painted letters; high as some kid might scramble. Chickens run. Rats do. And in the distance, branch lifts above wall,

They don't cross it. They haven't been invited. You hear stories: A jilted lover, debt-collector, con man preying on loss. His name's on the wall. It'd be easy —

So it's a cramped bar they shoulder into. The patrons jumble human, elven, one great horned man by the door. Cedric squints, and folds his sleeves for the seventeenth time. It occurs, finally, that he's got no clue what to look for.

"I'll go ask," Maybe he shouldn't do that alone. Last time he left her to go ask, he smashed a goddamn mirror. It's been half a day. "Y'want a drink?"

[elegiaque]

“We’ll go,” she corrects him, over his question, probably thinking of how much she missed last time he went off on his own and how fast they’d had to leave the Chantry, the ink barely dry on the statements she’d signed her name to as she was hurrying after him out into the Cumberland streets.

Every turn they take down one of these winding roads of his memory lane, something gets broken. It’s not a great harbinger of things to come, but she only pulls her cloak tighter and affixes a suitably stubborn look to her face, the kind that says I’ve leapt off your griffon before and I’ll do it again.

“And by then we might need one.”

[dissolving]

Tomorrow, he'll apologize to Tisiphone. He'll swallow his pride, and go stand in the hall like a scolded kid, and she'll cry into his shoulder; and Cedric will say, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. I'm so grateful –

His chin jerks, as if for a fly. Yeah, alright, they'll both have something.

"Thanks," Mumbled, exchanging mug for coin for Gwen. "Hey, have you –"

He leans over the bar, falls into Nevarran. They're being watched. Even in the bustle of the room, they stick out: Tourists, travelers, and strange ones of it. Gold eye, green hand; the neatly-stitched cuffs of new, unpatched cloth. At length, a tug at her sleeve — the bad side, and the furrow of a brow might be an apology —

Might be worry.

"Excuse me," Thickly-accented. Overly-formal, from a small woman several years their junior; all high bones and wide, intelligent eyes. The resemblance isn't exact: Set a little wider, a little more skeptical. And the ears, of course. It's not exact, it is striking. "Are you lost?"

Her eyes slip past Gwen.

[elegiaque]

The bad side is a bad approach; it’s clear that Gwenaëlle has to stifle a stronger, startled reaction. She’s habitually a little tilted for the sake of centering her vision (an ache that’s harder to roll out at night in unfamiliar spaces, but nothing new any more), and here her head swings first and her shoulders after it, righting herself so she can take in— the resemblance.

It is striking. Her Nevarran lessons haven’t caught her up enough to grasp much of quiet conversational patter in a loud bar, so she’s already more focused on the stranger than on overhearing Cedric, taking in the eyes, the bone structure. The ears.

“No,” she says, and even before she’s said anything else, that’s an Orlesian voice and no mistake. “We’re waiting for Carsus’s relations. Is that you?”

It doesn’t seem like an absolutely wild leap.

[dissolving]

She's not a good liar — or it's not a good lie — confirmation flinting like a chisel through stone. But from that coil of hesitation, she hasn't quite decided whether truth's in the giving.

(She chose the bad side, and the Orlesian swung in the particular way of someone who knows where and how to move. I am a soldier is one thing to hear from your dead kid cousin, and another to see written in a stranger's battle scars.)

"Afira," she offers. Carsus hasn't been her name in six years. Cedric's caught his own by now, staring dumb over his shoulder, "I have a table."

Already making her way for it, in the back of the room; a little like someone running. The reedy blonde man already perched there starts to stand, but she pushes a hand down on his shoulder: Easy,

Backup, evidently.

[elegiaque]

In return for Afira, she returns: “Gwenaëlle,” perceptibly lowering the hackles raised by Afira’s strategic approach in a way that seems conscious and purposeful. (It’s been long enough since those pamphlets were in circulation that she’s not especially worried about being unexpectedly famous in Nevarra; Lady Vauquelin feels a lifetime ago, and the girl in the drawing had two eyes.)

“Hello,” she says, the very soul of courtesy, to the sitting blonde man as they join him.