No Surrender

[Ava Weaver]

After Hours, 32nd Hamis, 2719
Woven Delights, The Painted Ladies

Ava looked at Tom, and wondered at that little smile on his face as he spoke of reincarnation. She wondered if he wished he were, even now, a fisherman in Plugit or an imbali bookseller in Thul Ka. She wondered if she wished she were. The hand on her chest lowered back to the book, black capped nails nearly the same color as his ink. Ava studied the contrast for a long few moments.

Most of all, Ava thought, she wondered if she really ever had been someone else. It was impossible to imagine. Ava thought of her aunt; she remembered getting a scolding for something or other when her aunt had been pregnant with Archie, remembered being told that the baby’s soul was there even now, and that if she upset her aunt and her aunt got angry, it might ruin everything for the baby to come. Ava remembered, wryly, how unfair she had found that.

Ava wanted to lie to Tom and pretend that she understood; she wanted to let him stop there, to feel like he didn’t have to drag any more out of himself today. She wasn’t the only one opened bare inside this little silken room, Ava thought; Tom was too.

“No, Mr. Cooke,” Ava said, gently, sorrowfully. “I wish I could give that to you.” Proof of something. Proof he wasn’t some moony old galdor? Proof he wasn’t really Anatole? He had said it earlier, and she had let it slide past. Was that what he meant now?

Or proof of something more, and terrifying proof at that? A raen a century old, who have lived more lives than they could count on their fingers. And Tom? He would keep living on, then, in new bodies - or at least he hadn’t argued with her characterization of it that way. But, she thought, he wouldn’t forget.

Ava shivered, faintly, unable to help it. She would. She would be born again, and she would forget. She might be anything - a fisherman in Plugit, an imbali bookseller in Thul Ka. A galdor.

Ava’s jaw tightened, and she held herself still through the wave of revulsion. “And if we’re wrong about the circle?” She asked, aware that it was utterly blasphemous, tempering her own disbelief with that if, as if she could pretend it was a purely academic sort of thought. “Maybe the rest of us just fade to nothing, but you - you hold together a little longer. And if they are right - if when we die the soul is washed clean of everything we have suffered and reborn to suffer again -“ too bitter, Ava thought, the words like a bite of unripe fruit, “why do you remember?”

It was too personal. Ava wanted to draw back into the academics of it, but she wasn’t just over her head; she was drowning in a sea of philosophy and finding it deeper than she had ever imagined, so deep she didn’t think she could see the surface above.

But -

“If it’s being him that worries you,” Ava said, quietly, aware that she might have misinterpreted, that she might be responding to a fear that existed only in her mind, “then - whatever it was that made him him - not his body, not his ley lines, but the mind, the soul or something else we’ve no name for - I’ve never felt it in you. I can’t cast any spells to be sure,” not envy, but a faint revulsion, something under the surface of her voice she couldn’t manage to hide, “but I believe I would know. You may not be the Tom Cooke that you were, but you’re not Anatole Vauquelin either.”

That name was heavy and raw in her chest, heavy and raw on her tongue; Ava couldn’t keep the meaning from it, and she didn’t try. She sat next to Tom still - inches between them, and with how close they had been now it almost did feel like feet. She felt the buzzing of his field beneath her skin, something angry and itching; she looked down at his hands, painfully familiar, then looked up at his eyes once more, and didn’t pull back this time, didn’t cry either, eyes clear and dry, as if she could let Tom see the pain and the certainty all together.

Saying the name wouldn’t summon him back to life, Ava thought. Nothing would. The memories were ghosts, and Ava wanted so badly to exorcise them. Did speaking to them keep them alive? Or was it the only way to banish them?

[Tom Cooke]

Woven Delights • The Painted Ladies

during the evening of the 32nd of hamis, 2719

Tom looked back up at her and met her eyes. This time, he didn’t get the feeling she was searching his; he didn’t feel he needed to search hers.

It was funny, he thought, but the kind of poetry eyes had wasn’t in the eyes themselves. It wasn’t some kind of mysticism, and it didn’t have a thing to do with the mona. It was all in the eyelids, the position of the brows, the faint shadows of creases and crow’s feet, the tension of muscles so small and seemingly insignificant he reckoned they didn’t even have names. The way they met yours or didn’t, and if they didn’t, where they went. Over the shoulder, down, at your forehead. To the right or to the left. If the eyes were the windows to the soul, it was because of what the soul did with them.

Ava met his eye, and she didn’t look away. There weren’t any tears at the edges of them, and they didn’t have that glisten or that faint red thread that meant they were on the verge of crying. Neither did his. They stared at each other steadily, and when she said his name and Anatole’s, one after the other, he didn’t look away or brim with tears. They hung in the air, full of their respective meanings. “No,” he said, inclining his head. “No, I’m not. And I trust that more than I’d trust any magic spells. Being honest.”

Finally, he broke eye contact, shifting in his seat and looking out over the room. A faint smile broke out on his face, a sad one – not unlike the one he’d worn when all that talk of the Cycle’d been tumbling out of him, so fast he’d barely stopped to consider what he’d been saying.

“I don’t know which I’d prefer. When I was alive, I never thought about it. Now, I take it for granted.” He took one last sip of water, draining the mug, then leaned forward to set it on the table. “It’d be simpler, if it was that way. If there was a Circle and a Cycle and every soul had a place to go. You know me; I like it when shit’s simple. But the world ain’t half confusing, and maybe that makes more sense: if we just disappear, and some of us take a little longer to go. And the people we are right now, who’ve suffered what we’ve suffered, get our shot, and it doesn’t matter what happens before or after. I don’t know, either.”

Proof, he thought. He glanced around at the walls, covered in their sheaves of silk – walls or doors, he didn’t know. Didn’t know what was behind them, either. Didn’t know that he needed to. She’d said she didn’t understand, but that she wanted to give him that understanding, and she’d given him something else instead, something he reckoned he’d hold fair close to his heart.

He gestured toward the journal, then hesitantly reached out a hand. “May I –” He paused, looking down at the pages, covered in their scrawl of glistening black ink. The dark lacquer of her nails glistened, too, against the paper, as if the writing’d come from them. He glanced up at her face, and his hand fell back to his lap.

“I can’t offer you much in the way of certainty,” he said after a moment. “How much use I’ll be. I don’t know much about my condition, and I don’t know how, or when, it could get in the way. I know just enough to fill up that little book.” He gestured again. “I can leave it with you, for the time being, if you’re interested. It’s nothing but – notes, observations. Bits and pieces. Poetry,” he added, and then a little smile creased his face; he raised a hand. “The arcane kind, of course. I keep all my other poetry under lock and key.”

With a soft laugh and a grunt of effort, he stood up from the sofa, fingers tracing the edge of the table for support. Ambling around to the other couch, he sat again on the seat across from her, sighing deeply.

[Ava Weaver]

After Hours, 32nd Hamis, 2719
Woven Delights, The Painted Ladies

Being honest.

Ava smiled at Tom. He had held her gaze without hesitating; neither of them had flinched. There was honesty between them – and in that moment, trust too, Ava thought, built on a foundation of shared secrets. There were things Tom knew, now that precious few did; pieces of Ava that she would have, perhaps, preferred never to share. Not everything; there were pieces of her she couldn’t bring into the light, not here. Not yet. Not ever? Ava couldn’t have said. There were bits others had that Tom did not; whole, enormous pieces of her that she kept from him.

But – what she had said was honest. Ava had been honest with him from the start, in bits and pieces; she had believed him from that first moment when he had told her he wasn’t Anatole. She had, perhaps, already known – not for long, because even she had seen what she expected in his imperfectly acted part. But from the first slipping of his mask, she had doubted, and the explanation he had offered – well, it had made more sense than any alternatives she could find.

No, Ava thought, it wasn’t honesty that Tom Cooke had needed from her. She could see in his face, hear in the certainty of his tone, that what she had said meant something. But she didn’t think it was that her words had been honest; she thought it was that they had been direct. Poor Tom; she could hardly think of anything less direct than a soul – or whatever he was – trapped in the body of another man. Not another man – not just any other man – a galdor like Anatole Vauquelin. It wasn’t a new thought for her, the sheer horror of it, and Ava didn’t let herself fall down that hole, not now.

“I’m not certain which would be simpler,” Ava admitted. She turned to her water as well, cradling the cool mug in her hands, taking a small sip of it. Was it comforting to think of her soul passing on, of it getting another chance? Was it comforting to think of this life as someone else’s other chance? Ava didn’t think so, but – perhaps superstitiously, perhaps childishly, she couldn’t fully bring herself to reject the idea. There was some part of her that clung to it, that thought: the changes I seek to make to this world will be for me too.

“Of course-” Ava looked down at her hand on the page of the journal, and shifted, starting to close it. She paused when Tom did, holding it half-open and half between them. When he began to speak again, she lowered it back to her lap, closing it without thinking of it.

The offer to loan her his journal was unexpected, and Ava found her breath caught in her throat. She looked down at it, the small book in her lap, then back up at Tom. She grinned at him, eyes crinkling at the edges, at the joke about his poetry. Was it a joke? Ava wondered what kind of poems Tom would write; she thought she’d like to read them, and then, a moment later, she reconsidered. There were things that – once seen, once known – you couldn’t take back. There were things that changed you, that left you weak in places you needed to be strong.

“Thank you,” Ava said, quiet and serious, after a moment. She wouldn’t demean the gift – it was a gift, wasn’t it? An act of trust. She had offered him her directness, and he had returned it with an action; how apt.

“Have you read Ezeudo yet?” Ava asked, smiling, once Tom had settled back into his seat, and the silence had stretched between them a few moments and become stillness once more. “If you like Saqqaf, you might enjoy him. The work is mostly focused on perception, and when he discusses clairvoyant casting he sounds a bit like someone indulging himself in a beloved hobby. But he references another caster named Odafe – not her works, but partnering with her for experiments in fumimancy. The descriptions are lovely, although I found them oddly revealing.”

Ava shifted the journal to the cushion next to her, and set the cup back down onto the table. She relaxed back into the couch a little more and curled her hands into her lap, easy and comfortable. She If Tom wanted to go, Ava thought, she would understand, and she thought that she could, now, stand being alone, but she hoped he would stay and talk a little while longer. She hoped they could find that comfort between them again, that he would want to talk a little more of these academic things neither fully understood, to explore together.

She hoped – no, more than hoped. Ava felt – being direct – that they could be friends.