[Closed] I Should Care

[Diana Vauquelin]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

T
he firelight caught on her earrings as she moved; Diana watched the smooth fall of her narrow skirts, the shadows that shifted over her face. She knew she might have, perhaps should have, looked away. But Mrs. Ibutatu was looking at her: she hadn’t looked away this entire time. The living and perceptive mona were truly mingling in the air now, though they were still far from merged. There was so much of Mrs. Ibutatu’s that she thought perhaps you could reach deeply enough never to emerge, and silly though the fancy was, it near frightened her.

The younger woman sat beside her, soundless. She found herself setting her teacup and saucer aside.

She was very small. Diana had known this, but she noticed it anew now. She found herself looking over and a little down. Her brows lifted slightly when two small, pale hands extended in her direction. She hesitated; Mrs. Ibutatu kept on looking at her, and, slowly, she gave the other woman one of her hands. The other, the wedding band strangely heavy and cold against the skin, stayed at her side.

It was all Diana could do not to catch her breath. She kept it even, watching, silent. She remembered vividly – and it was a thing she should not have remembered – the brush of her hand at tea three weeks ago.

She should not have done this.

“So we do not feel,” she murmured anyway, grateful for the unexpected evenness of her voice, “with only our minds or our bodies; our bodies are…” A map? Of what? Of the mind? “Connected,” she murmured, “in every part. How wondrous.”

She felt a fool; worse, it felt terribly scandalous a subject, bodies and nerves and touches. She was put in mind of that outlandish man she had met in Tiv, what had his name been… Caltagirone, that was it, Matteo, at one of poor Bertolo’s parties. Going on and on about Galvani and frogs’ legs, about things that seemed to have come from Francoschietto rather than real men of science. It seemed less ghoulish – and less implausible – to her now. There might have been a tiny current in Mrs. Ibutatu’s slim fingers; every movement of them sent a tendon, a muscle, flickering.

She glanced back up, meeting Mrs. Ibutatu’s eye, faintly surprised. The rain still lashed the windows; she should have felt cold – had indeed, a few moments ago – but it was pleasantly warm, now. “I was, perhaps, not so certain. It was my fourth or fifth year, I think. I had planned to study the static conversation, like much of my family.”

Grandfather had not been mad; he had come to them hardened already by that pressed green uniform and whatever he had seen that had made him murmur and moan in his sleep. But she had wondered as a silly girl if such marks could be healed; she had learned how the mind was tender – scarred much more easily than the body – but it had fascinated her all the same, long after he had been buried with his stick.

She looked down at their hands, reluctant to withdraw; her eyes did not linger on the ring, but she saw it all the same, and she could feel the lump rising again in her throat. “The galdor mind,” she murmured, looking up, smiling, “is an altogether fascinating thing. It can create such wonders, Mrs. Ibutatu, such terrors, all to itself, without the slightest manipulation, and then those wonders and terrors can manipulate the body, and we understand so little of it.”

The rain picked up, rattling the glass panes of the atrium doors in a great breathy gust.

She swallowed tightly, staring into Mrs. Ibutatu’s eyes. She shifted; the lump was lodged rather firmly in her throat now. She opened her mouth to go on, but her voice came out strangely cracked.

“Forgive me,” she murmured, shutting her eyes. She swallowed again, but the lump was no less painful. Embarrassed, she glanced swiftly away; there was a prickle of wetness on her lashes.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

Diana’s hand still lay against her, a little larger than her own but slender, delicate and smooth. Niccolette’s palm, beneath it, did not have much weight to support, and she was very aware of the soft press of the other woman’s palm, all the points of contact between them. They were somewhere shy of holding hands; Niccolette did not curl her fingers around Diana’s hand or rest her other hand on the other woman once more, though she made no effort to withdraw.

Wonders and terrors, Diana said, and Niccolette inclined her head in a delicate nod. Self-inflicted, she might have agreed, if not for the sudden silence, which felt not like a pause but like a precipice.

The fire and the rain the background, the flickering light and noise, kept up their dance. Diana’s lips parted, just a little, and then came together. The other woman closed her eyes and looked away; tears gleamed on her eyelashes in the firelight.

“You have done nothing for which you should ask forgiveness,” Niccolette said, not with the courteous grace of one who says such things as a matter of routine, but as if the words were all her own, and nothing at all of courtesy to them.

Forgiveness from me, she might have said, and she did not, for it seemed to her she was not sure, not quite, whose forgiveness Diana wanted, and why. She looked down at their hands once more, Diana still looking away.

“As a living conversationalist, Niccolette said, easily enough, “I should say the mind is an extension of the body,” her fingers curled just a little around the edges of Diana’s hand, though not tight enough to hold; her thumb swept along the side of it, gently, tracing the soft lump of her knuckle and down along the edge of her palm.

“This is how we are taught,” Niccolette went on. “Not that there is no mystery to it, but that the mysteries are those of chemicals, of nerve bundles, of the body.”

Niccolette’s thumb did not quite stop her slow, even motions. She could not have said herself whether she meant only to be comforting. Diana Vauquelin was every bit as lovely up close; this was, Niccolette acknowledged, a line she had not crossed before, from this side.

“As a galdor,” Niccolette went on, “as a woman, if such things can be said to be separate,” she did not quite trail off so much as pause, quiet and thoughtful.

“One should want, I think, to be more than simply reactionary nerves,” Niccolette paused, and shrugged a little; her thumb went still, but she squeezed Diana’s hand, lightly. “Sometimes I am not so sure,” she said, rueful, on the edge of a smile, looking just a little up at the other woman once more.

“You may call me Niccolette, if you like,” Niccolette added, quietly, a moment later. Ibutatu, she might have said, is for strangers and ballrooms; I hold it close to me, still, and would not wish to let go of it, for it is half of my name, and it is the half which I chose, and should never yield. All the same, here, just now, I should rather be Niccolette.

[Diana Vauquelin]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

S
he said it, Diana thought, rather like one might pronounce a diagnosis. Not cold, no, but with nothing of the saccharine about it. Certainly not the way a man might abide and humor a tearful, simpering lady, or in the way any of the ladies in her set might have smiled enduringly at the embarrassing display. Nor was it uite like her cousin Amaryllis’ kind, solid warmth, with that sweetness and openness which Diana hoped Uptown society never closed. It had been a very long time since she had wept in front of Amaryllis, but she did not think that had changed.

All the same, it wasn’t Amaryllis she wanted now. She couldn’t’ve said what she wanted, except that she liked those sharp, matter-of-fact words, with their curling Bastian consonants, very much.

She might have protested, but she couldn’t bear to throw the words back at the other woman. There was a great deal she had to apologize for, and more by the day. For how she had behaved – or how she hadn’t behaved – for what she had done, or hadn’t done, with Anatole’s daughter; she wasn’t sure now if it was that it hadn’t been enough or that it had been too much. In trying to hold it all together, she had perhaps held it too tightly. Perhaps…

She realized belatedly that Mrs. Ibutatu was stroking her thumb over her hand, more gentle than she might have expected. Whatever her expectations for this tea had been, they weren’t this.

It wasn’t forgiveness, not even exoneration, not even in spirit. She thought of shame again; she thought perhaps, whatever else Mrs. Ibutatu might have meant by saying this, she could at least not yield to the shame of shedding tears in front of her. There was nothing of amusement or embarrassment in either of their fields, and nothing patronizing or cruel in the way she went on.

As a living conversationalist, she went on, and it caught Diana; it couldn’t but. She blinked, dabbing a tear from one eye carefully with a fingertip.

“The mind,” she agreed softly, with a hint of a rasp she did not much like, “is indeed subject to the body. Even as a perceptivist, I must admit that.” She blinked again, glancing down and away; she took a deep breath that ached. As a galdor, she went on, then: as a woman…

Diana shut her eyes, a faint smile tugging at her lips and then dissipating. She had found the other woman’s fingers cold, at first; it was Loshis, after all. But they had warmed now with the touch of skin, in the way hands often did: even her ring, a sliver of metal against Diana’s palm, just barely touching, was warm now. Mrs. Ibutatu squeezed her hand, and she was rather helpless this time to the tear that slid down one cheek. There was something strange about the younger woman’s smile, when she looked again; it was almost sad, and perhaps a little wry.

No, this was nothing like what she had expected.

Niccolette, she said. She looked back at her, trying to disentangle it all from that strange Mugrobi name. “Niccolette,” she murmured, instead of anything she might have asked; she inclined her head. “Please call me Diana.”

She smiled.

“I do not know,” she said, voice evening out a little; she squeezed the other woman’s hand back. “It may surprise you, or may not,” and she found it somewhat easier to speak, “that I spent a great deal of time in Tiv as a young woman, and I called my own a rather – different set, then.”

Her smile warmed without her meaning it to. Her hand lingered in Niccolette’s two for a moment more, very reluctant; her fingertips lingered when she drew away finally, and so did her eyes.

She rose halfway, bending to get Niccolette’s teacup and saucer. She was grateful to give some of the weight of her posture to her corset; she had held herself so tense these last weeks, these last – she wasn’t sure how long.

She offered it to her with a smile, and was not shy for once in letting their hands brush. “I knew a man, then, a living conversationalist, who had a near obsession with Galvanism, and with – the spark of life, I suppose. He believed that there was truly nothing more to the mind than chemicals; he believed that every part of it might be discovered, identified. An atheist, of course, in the Tivian fashion.”

The rain had quieted somewhat, though the fire still burned merrily in the grate. “I called him then a disciple of Marianne Coquillon rather than Galvani, but I wonder, sometimes. As a perceptive conversationalist, and as a woman.” Her field – pulsed, almost playfully, against the swell of living mona. “Do you yourself believe in the soul, Niccolette?”

It was bold, she knew, to be so direct. This was not Tiv, not even close. But nor was anything about this usual, and it was growing less and less usual by the minute, she felt.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

Diana,” Niccolette agreed, and she smiled too, more easily this time.

Diana had pressed away one tear with a careful finger; the next slipped her grasp and trickled down her cheek. Niccolette did not look away; she had cried too much, this last year and two months, to feel squeamish at the sight.

Tears, she could have said, are controlled by the lachrymal glands, small organs tucked in and around the eye. The moisture which washes over the eye serves a vital purpose in preventing excessive dryness of the surface, which is terribly delicate, for something so exposed. There are tiny openings – ducts – which discharge moisture and tears both over the surface of the eye.

None of that, Niccolette thought wryly, explained crying.

Diana was smiling, now, and whatever she felt, no more excess moisture had welled at the eyes of her eyes. The other woman squeezed back, gently, and spoke; her fingertips lingered against Niccolette’s skin, a moment longer than all the rest, a lingering in a grasping of hands which, already, had gone well beyond the bounds of what might have been considered proper – perhaps.

Niccolette took the cup and saucer back with a smile; she settled the saucer on the folds of her skirt, and lifted the cup for a small sip. The tea was still warm, though some of the heat had dissipated into the air around them; the tea was a little more bitter for it, though still very much to Niccolette’s taste.

Diana went on, and Niccolette’s eyebrows lifted, curiously.

The soul. Of course, Niccolette might have said, reflexively; if there is no soul, then there is no cycle. If there is no soul –

The question had struck her rather more deeply than she might have expected. Niccolette exhaled a little, carefully, and settled the cup back on the saucer in her lap. She took her time, thinking it over, and lifted her gaze back to Diana.

“I have not, myself, read Francoschietto,” Niccolette said with a little smile. “Some have joked, perhaps, that it should be a requirement for living conversation, but I have never been much fond of novels. My husband read it, some years ago, and, as he liked to do, he read some passages aloud to me.” Niccolette’s shoulders shifted in a little shrug, as if to say: men!

“They believe in the soul, in Mugroba,” Niccolette said, after a moment. Her fingers settled on the handle of the cup, tracing, slowly, the scalloped wave pattern along the edge; one rose to the rim of the cup and traced, slowly, back and forth, feeling the gentle press of the sooth porcelain edge. “They believe that there are two pieces of it, the one which is reincarnated and the one which, I think, is how we here think of the soul – as some intangible thing which holds us together, as the brain holds the nerves. They call it the atúun’tsútaqaq, the holder of truth.”

“I am not sure what I believe,” Niccolette said after a moment, after another sip of the bitter Hoxian tea. She looked at Diana, and smiled, faintly. “In the Cycle, yes – in the Circle – but as for whether it is more…” her hand lifted from the teacup, and settled somewhere in the center of her chest – not quite on her heart, though she could feel its steady beat beneath the edges of her fingertips, through all the layers of fabric.

She lowered her hand, after a moment – back to the saucer, and the teacup, still this time, with no movements in the tips of her fingers. Her gaze did not follow them back down, but held, a little curious, on Diana; the tear track on her cheek was dry now, or very nearly, without even the faintest trace of mascara to show where it had gone.

“Would you like there to be a soul?” Niccolete asked, a little curiously. She pressed, a little further, as Diana had done; as they had each done, she supposed, in turns, these last few minutes. “Something to hold us together,” her lips quirked, her smile wry once more, “when it seems we should come apart.”

[Diana Vauquelin]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

A
gain, Diana found herself with the urge to apologize. She had spoken rather without thinking; or, perhaps, thinking only of herself. She thought through it. It was all speculation, of course, and foolish speculation at that. Of course there was a soul. There was a soul, thought Diana, insofar as there was a Cycle and a Circle. She had known so even in Tiv.

And to speak of this to a widow, no less quite a recent one. She could not claim ignorance, for all it had seemed to her weeks ago that Mrs. Ibutatu – that Niccolette had spoken of him as if he still lived.

She could not imagine what had come over her.

Something stopped her from smoothing it over. Perhaps it was the careful inhale – the evening out of the younger woman’s breath. Perhaps it was that the look of interest had not drained from Niccolette’s face; perhaps it was the thoughtfulness, too, of that look. She would not have dared interrupt, not with the air full of that vivid, strong field, all around them, and hers still mingling in it.

There was a tiny smile on the other woman’s face as she went on, setting her teacup down. Diana reached for her own on the table, though her eyes did not leave Niccolette’s face.

She smiled a little at Niccolette’s shrug. She had, of course, read Francoschietto, and all the rest. It had practically been a requirement in Tiv, and especially on Bertolo’s estate, who had regaled them with all manner of ghost stories on those windy nights and nearly suggested that they have a writing contest of their own.

She had been no Coquillon, regardless of Bertolo’s rather exuberant affections. (Regardless of all their rather exuberant affections.) Required reading, she thought, for the living conversation? She had not much liked Francoschietto; it had seemed to her the whole conflict might have been prevented with a little forethought, and unrealistically so. Even that infamous object of sympathy, the creature, had turned out to be quite as bloody-minded and reprehensible as the rest. She supposed that was the point, but it seemed to her a terribly pointless one.

It was sweet, all the same, to think of that mysterious man – that Ibutatu – reading aloud to his wife. Men, she thought, smiling. Anatole, she thought to say, often read the Heshath classics –

They believe in the soul, in Mugroba, Niccolette went on.

Diana focused on the other woman and nothing else. Her eyes widened slightly. Two pieces to the soul.

“Atuun’tsutaqaq,” she repeated. There was something wry about Niccolette’s smile once more; the rain was a soft patter in the pause that followed. “I… do not know.”

She might have said yes; she thought she would, for a moment, and put it all away. Perhaps it was the Mugrobi, and how it put her in mind of Anatole as he was now. It curled inside her bitterly.

She took a sip, and the cup clicked slightly as she set it back down. “No, that isn’t so.” Her lips pursed, then smoothed out. “I don’t think I would. That must sound rather strange, mustn’t it?” Sometimes, she thought, I should rather not believe in the Cycle or the Circle; sometimes I should like to put all of that aside, in search of a truth much emptier and stranger than any of us would like to speak of.

What Cycle, when a man with the same soul can become someone entirely different even in this life? What Circle, who say and do nothing as cities of its chosen are bombed, as the natural order is violated with every passing day?

She did not go so far. “I could not imagine it, this soul, even if I wanted to. To be reborn, yes; that there are ten gods, yes, and the mona through which their will is exerted – but to be held together… What holds us together if not our own will?”

She was not smiling when she looked back at Niccolette, but she was sitting very straightly. She took a small sip of tea, smokey and heady. “Perhaps you think me bold,” she murmured, brow knitting slightly, “to say so, a politician’s wife.”

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

For all her breath had caught, however briefly, nothing had ever rippled through Niccolette’s field; Diana was mingled deep within it, deep enough to know, for all that the caprision was far from complete, and not the faintest twitch of whatever had flickered over her lips, through her eyes, had made itself felt in her field, not even for a moment.

They had moved past it.

Diana repeated the Mugrobi back to her, lingering, as most Middle Kingdomers did, on the consonants she had heard, and passing too quickly over the rest. Niccolette supposed she had been the same, once.

Diana was looking at her, evenly, unflinching. Niccolette took another sip of her tea as well, and found the cup neatly empty; what little liquid remained swirled in the bottom of the porcelain glass, too deep now for any hint of the firelight, but not so shallow as to reveal the bottom of the glass – not yet. The cup was light in her hand, and touched softly against the saucer, with the faintest click, audible only with the weather outside now little more than a soft whooshing of the wind.

No, Diana said, then, uncertain at first, and then a little more strongly, for all she replaced the single word with something more drawn out.

The other woman went on, and Niccolette smiled. “Words and will,” she said, hand steadying the tea cup on the saucer in her lap, finger finding the curve of the handle once more, and settling against the wave, though not stroking it just yet. “If they are all we have, perhaps they are enough.”

Words, she might have said then, not only of monite, for there were other words, too, which could be made real by one’s own will.

Diana went on, somewhere shy of frowning. Niccolette’s eyebrows lifted, just a little, and she looked back at the other woman. A politician’s wife, she had said, carefully, like the marking of an invisible border around herself, the drawing of certain lines. It was, of course, true; it was true, as it was true that Niccolette was her father’s daughter.

A pilot’s wife, Niccolette thought. A pirate’s wife. A Brother’s wife. No, she had never thought herself so, for she had been a Brother and a pirate in her own right, and a member of the crew. Uzoji’s wife: yes. Uzoji’s widow, now, too; these titles she had claimed for herself, the first hard-won and the second screaming into the sky until she had nothing left of her voice.

A politician’s wife. Perhaps it was that she had known Francoise so very long, long before Aurelien; perhaps it was that she knew Anatole, perhaps, better than he might have wished, and had known him so before she had ever met Diana. But – no; she did not think so.

Perhaps, Niccolette thought, it was that she did not wish to see the other woman so, for all her careful elegance. Perhaps, Niccolette thought, it was that she did not wish Diana to see herself so, not here, not just now.

“If that is how you define yourself,” Niccolette said, after a moment, looking at Diana still. “Then perhaps so, yes.” She did not say it cruelly, nor snidely; she did not say it lingering in the pauses, but went through it, steadily, and waited, this time; she did not reach even to set the tea aside, let alone to take Diana’s hand once more, only said it, and then let herself wait.

[Diana Vauquelin]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

S
he had such lovely hands, Diana thought. It certainly was not the first time she had noticed them; it had been nearly painful to look – she knew it shouldn’t have been – when Niccolette had taken hers, and not simply because it had been kind of the younger woman. One slender thumb was resting now where handle met teacup, and they cast long, deep shadows against the soft lavender of her dress.

She might once have balked at it. Words and will, all? It seemed strange to imagine it, sitting in the midst of the parlor, surrounded by all her carefully-chosen flowers, with their meanings that sometimes it seemed only she knew; with that ghoulish spectre of Naulas up on the mantle, and beside it – perhaps not so strange after all, she thought, unsettled.

The rain was more gentle outside, no longer lashing and rattling the atrium doors; the fire was burning low in the grate, with only the occasional crackle, and no more snapping twigs. Niccolette’s teacup had clicked quietly against the saucer. She felt strangely attentive to everything, now: the slight creak of the chairs, her own breath, the almost soundless rustle of Niccolette’s tea jacket as her posture shifted ever so slightly. The scent of her, she realized suddenly, much less vivid than her field and almost disappearing underneath the heady scent of the dzhkar, but unmistakable this close.

Niccolette had never looked away. Diana felt strangely pinned; she felt as if she wanted to take back what she had only just said, but she couldn’t imagine why. Not for the other woman’s judgment, but because it no longer felt quite correct. It had been precisely what she had meant to say, but they seemed like words for a different place now, a different time.

There was nothing like mockery in Niccolette’s voice, then; there was not a reprimand in her sharp Bastian accent. It was, rather, matter-of-fact. Diana’s frown deepened very slightly. She did not look away immediately.

She wanted to ask, at first, what else she should be, if not that. How else she might define herself, after the last twenty years. This was not Tiv. She knew what she had learned since then, and how she spent her time, and with whom.

Perhaps the problem, she thought, was not with what she had said, but with how she had said it. “Perhaps it is not, after all, such a strange thing for a politician’s wife to say.” She tilted her head slightly. “Perhaps I am rather… selling a politician’s wife short. It is rather an occupation to itself. A politician’s wife is not simply the wife of a politician.”

A small smile tugged at her lip. She paused to set her own teacup aside, folding her hands in her lap.

“It seems to me sometimes,” she began slowly, “that I am caught in a great web of – lines, perhaps, strings. I do not know who draws them, except for the eyes and the words of others. Some of them are called wife, some of them are called mother; many of them I do not even understand.” She looked up suddenly at the mantle, a slight furrow in her brow, tracing the gold cracks through the porcelain.

Words and will. Was it simple, or did it only make everything more complex? At times, it felt like being dangled over a pit, or walking one foot in front of the other on the edge of a cliff with one’s eyes shut. There was a drop, somewhere; if you conceded to one thing, and then another, and then another, and began to slide then down, further and further…

There was something pleasant about holding her own in the midst of Niccolette’s field, ever stable, solid, strong, unshaken even when her breath had caught. It was somehow easier to stay indectal; it was like something to hold onto, not tightly, but enough to steady herself.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

Niccolette supposed for a moment that she had overstepped. There seemed to be very little she could do about it, and she saw no more point in regret than shame. She had said what she wished to say; she had said what she believed. She waited in the silence that the words left behind, looking at Diana, and not away.

Whatever one’s actions, Niccolette knew, it was necessary to own them; she had spoken, and in so doing she had accepted the consequences of her speech. She could not speak now and balk later, no more than she could cast now, and later flinch from backlash – from the steady strange warmth around her – from those consequences which came to all conversationalists in time, with the mona’s strange sense of something like humor, however incomprehensible.

The moment passed, and the feeling like uncertainty with it.

Diana answered her; Niccolette inclined her head in understanding, thinking of the distinction. A politician’s wife, she clarified, not merely the wife of a politician.

Diana went on.

Niccolette looked at her. Diana had been looking at her, and she looked up at the plate. Wife, she had said, and mother, and others, unknown, untitled.

“Which have caught you?” Niccolette asked, curious, finding the edges of the subject and prodding at them with gentle fingers, carefully smoothing them out a little further, pressing a little deeper into the muscles, unsure what she might find. “And which have you chosen?”

She did not expect an answer; she asked the questions out loud, but knew, as she did them, that there might be only silence in response. Such was the price of things; Niccolette did not mind silence.

Widow, Niccolette might have said, now; widow has caught me. I did not know; I never thought. We never thought, either of us, that such a thing could happen; even when the edges of it came upon us, when the danger had passed, I went back to thinking it could not be, or at perhaps refusing to think that it could.

Wife, she thought, then, I chose; still there were times when it caught me, when the weight of it was more than I had expected, when I came to understand something of what it was to be joined, so, to Uzoji. My marriage was nothing like my girlhood expectations, nothing like the marriages I saw amongst our set in Florne. It pulled me, I think, more tightly than such might have done, and I am glad of it.

Niccolette found herself steady, still; there was no telltale heat behind her eyes, nothing trembling in her hands or chest. Whatever she had felt moments ago had gone, passed. She knew better than to think it had left; she knew better than to think it could ever leave her. Does grief pull me? She wanted to ask. Or do I pull it? How do I choose?

“Perhaps they are not lines or strings,” Niccolette said, not so long later, looking at Diana, waiting until the other woman looked at her once more. She smiled, then; not the warm, friendly smiles of earlier, but something sharp and bold, something which matched the strength of her field in the air around them.

“Perhaps,” Niccolette said, evenly, “they are reins.” She lifted her teacup and drank the last of the dzhkar. She set it back down once more, nearly silent, looking at Diana still.

[Diana Vauquelin]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

D
iana found herself wanting very badly to say that it was not so simple, after all. She was not caught in them, not exactly, not like a fish in a net. Or was she? Niccolette’s words – as they always were, she found – were carefully-selected and no less matter-of-fact than they had been. Chosen, she had said, and then caught. She imagined it for a moment, reaching out to take a line in her hand, only to turn and find that two or three more had wrapped themselves around her arms, her waist, her legs, and when she did not know.

She had no answer, not immediately. She did not think Niccolette expected one, exactly; she did not think it was that sort of question. It had drawn her eyes back to meet the younger woman’s, steady and even.

Diana’s hands were still folded in her lap, her ankles still crossed. She regarded Niccolette curiously, wondering if she might speak again.

And which, she rather thought she might ask, emboldened, did you choose? And which caught you?

They both knew what they knew, she thought. At least, Diana knew something, and she thought Niccolette must have known the rumors; there were not many – not here, at least – but one did not move in these circles, a wealthy widow with no occupation but more than a dilettante’s interest in the medical science, without attracting some attention. Especially when one was so very fascinating.

And Diana was beginning to suspect that the worst of her suspicions was, in fact, the truth.

The smile that spread across Niccolette’s face then did not dispel them. It put her in mind of tea three weeks ago, and of the young woman who had admitted in company, as matter-of-factly as anything, to breaking dishes. It put her in mind of the field that was spread around the both of them, bright and strong but with nothing like warmth.

Reins. She bristled. Her brows drew together, wrinkling slightly; she frowned, staring into the other woman’s eyes.

Perhaps there were reins on her; were there not reins on everybody? And your reins, Niccolette Ibutatu, he wanted to say. Have you seized all of them? Who is holding them? She was so young, Diana thought, to speak of such things.

Niccolette set her tea aside. Diana felt she had heard every click; she was conscious of the pull of lavender fabric around her narrow shoulders, and of the way one loose silky strand of hair slipped over, rippling dark in the low light. Her small gold earring glinted in and out of sight, the delicate curve of her ear cast in shadow.

“Reins,” said Diana, sitting very straightly, “can be useful, can they not?” The furrow on her face smoothed out; the smile came back to her, then failed her again.

Whatever one was subject to, one could subdue; she knew that very well. Silly girl that she had been two decades ago, she had thought one gave oneself to love, that one allowed oneself to belong to another. Now, she knew that marriage was a great deal of turning a man’s head where one wanted it to turn, and no amount of love could ever change that.

She did not look away from Niccolette, not now.

“Who –” She swallowed. “I have wondered for weeks now,” she murmured, “what reins you hold.” Her eyes wandered down the soft curve of her jaw, the flickering muscles of her neck. They flicked back up to her eyes. “In fact, I have been thinking a great deal about you, Niccolette.”

She had not meant to say it; her breath nearly caught, but smoothed out after a deep breath. She frowned deeply.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Afternoon, 19 Loshis, 2720
The Vauquelin Parlor

Uzoji had liked to drive.

They had rarely been in the Rose long enough to have their own carriage, and it had not made sense on the island, not yet. Uzoji had talked about it, sometimes; moa or camels, he had said, cheerfully, tracing his hand over the spot at the back of the house where he thought a stable could be built, the Eqe Aqawe hovering above them in the distance.

A handful of times, he had driven a carriage – out of necessity, in the Rose, more than once, and with a sense of fun in the islands. Once, he had coaxed her onto the box next to him, and settled the reins in her hands, his arm wrapped around them, and Niccolette, at his command, had guided the carriage on a slow jaunt along the drive.

She had not much cared for it; the feeling of the wood creaking beneath her had been odd and unsettling, and she had not quite understood the knack of making her will known to the moa. Uzoji had never struggled with it; it seemed to her that at the lightest touch of his hand, they turned this way or that, and never hesitated.

She supposed she did understand that, at least.

Niccolette studied Diana, still; Diana had asked her own question which did not quite need an answer, and silence had seeped in between them once more. Useful, Niccolette thought, thinking of the reins in her hand atop the carriage, the feeling of the leather curled around her fingers, and Uzoji’s arm tucked around her side, if you know how to use them.

Diana was frowning, now, looking at her. Niccolette looked back at the other woman, wondering; she had come close to it, Niccolette supposed, and veered away from a question to a comment, careful and delicate and precise.

Niccolette studied Diana, curious, from the frown carved more deeply than she might have expected into the other woman’s face, down to her elegant hands with their painted nails, through the full sweep of her elegant green skirt, with its flashes of gold, to the carefully tucked ankles, one behind the other, and the hint of shoes peeking out through the folds of fabric. She did not linger there, but could fill in the image without quite needing to look.

Her gaze held mostly on Diana’s face, studying the neat sweep of her hair, the face paints and powders too expertly applied to be visible at such close range, for all there was no mistaking them. Yes, Niccolette thought; she had been thinking of Diana too. She had not thought, quite, it was merely a coincidence that Amaryllis had asked her to the Vauquelins so soon after Clock’s Eve.

“Then ask me,” Niccolette said, leaning in just a little closer, one hand settling delicately on the arm of her chair. Her voice was quiet, but even and steady, audible over the crackling of the fire. Even the last hiss of the rain had gone, for now; there was an unexpected hint of sunlight in the atrium, and traces of damp steam rising from the ground in the lines of it.

What reins she held, she wondered, a little curious. The rumors were there, in Vienda, she knew, if one searched for them, some easier to find than others. She supposed the wife of Anatole Vauquelin would know more than most; and yet, unless she missed her mark entirely, she did not think this Brother’s wife a Brother herself.

She did not make it easy for Diana; she did not want to, and she saw no point in it. Ask, she wanted to say, and ask directly; ask me the question you really want the answer to. She was terribly close to Diana now; not quite close enough to touch, but close enough that it should not take much of a stretch. Stretch, she thought, if you dare.