wanna grab the tip of one's ear and be mean to her. i think it would fix me.
They have human warlocks back home.
You can principally tell the difference between the human wizards and human warlocks because they'll both set you on fire, but the wizard is eighty and paranoid and will live, shrivelling, maddened and conspiracy-minded, to twice that; whereas the warlock is twenty, smooth and arrogant, and likely won't see thirty.
They do not have warlocks like Elena hin Barovar van Djen.
Here in the city, in the last while, the humans have hit on the idea of Progress as a force. The elves could have warned them about putting a name to something like that, that the mind inevitably wants to fill in motivation and personality, about the moulds you press into your cultural substrate and the things you consequently find filling them. But it's not as though the elves, really, have ever been any wiser about actually doing it, and once the things are roaming about the semantic aether, of course people will badger them for the ancient magical law of Quid Pro Quo.
And so the city is filled with this new breed, these warlocks who gleam and bustle and don't just have but define respectability. No midnight crossroad bargains smeared in blood, here. Elena hin Barovar van Djen is always spotlessly clean; she smells of expensive laundry suds and, whenever she must dirty herself in the line of duty, patent disinfectant hand cleansers. She wears smart shoes of dove-grey suede, which button up the ankle; long, full skirts of pristine ivory fabric; fashionable blouses whose sleeves puff like a meringue above the elbow; trim corsetry; elegant waistcoats, golem-loom embroidered, pale yellow on white, with tiny flowers. She wears wire-rimmed spectacles, the lenses of which are dark and swim with oil-sheen colours. She carries — well, it might be termed a staff, perhaps, technically, for magical purposes; a trim walking-cane with a silver handle shaped like a duck's head. In emergencies, the handle twists off, revealing itself the pommel of a short, light, rapier-like blade, with which Elena is rigourously proficient.
She is terribly modern, and she is also terribly married, to a paladin of a faith so old it's worn soft and shapeless as a favourite shirt. Most gods who care to take paladins have ideas about the world, and their paladins are assertions about imposing those ideas; but Elena's wife Girona is of a faith that sincerely and simply believes in Good Things, and just wants more of them. Warm hearths, warm hearts, happy people. She wears simple clothing; dark boots, dark trousers, simple white workman's shirts, and a long black coat that accentuates her tallness and uprightness, embroidered with the interlocking hands that are the symbol of her church.
Cawden has spent long years of her own honing her skills and plying her trade, but the city makes her feel new and foolish and parochial, alight as it is with Progress in a way that so perfectly matches and energises the human spirit, and leaves behind the long, slow pace of the elf. It burns, like the clean, smokeless, unconsumed lanterns of Progress themselves, and within it the people likewise burn, and Elena and her wife are so, so bright that Cawden may as well be a rot-hollowed turnip fallen off a country wagon.
She does her best, nonetheless, to be useful. And only look respectfully, when she can't help herself from looking at all.
If only they weren't quite so fiercely illuminated.
The city is crowded with festival-goers, street celebrations and private parties; even here, the ancient cadence of the harvest season is inescapable, the riotous, enthusiastic burst of singing, supping and swiving, and Cawden is feeling — if not at at home, then as if, for a fleeting window, the city has changed itself to be more like home. She sits on the iron railing outside the hin Barovar van Djen ladies' townhouse, alongside a gaggle of rowdy urchins, and shares out a paper bag of festival treats; twists of delicate sugared pastry with a rosewater-flavoured filling. She calms any qualms they might have about sharing with an elf by somewhat implying she stole the entire bag.
The elven reputation is, sometimes, double-edged.
Elena approaches through the crowd, a smile on her lips and colour in her cheeks; a single button at her throat undone. The work, Cawden thinks, of the small tin cups of spiced wine so freely circulating in the streets around the Grand Plexus railway terminus; and pretends not to have seen Elena's approach until the warlock strolls out of the throng and greets her brightly.
"Merry harvest, Cawden."
"Merry harvest, Miss hin Barovar van Djen," Cawden says, tugging her forelock as if she's one of the railing urchins herself, and offers her the last pastry in the bag as she hops down, definitely not watching Elena's mouth as she takes neat bites of it, definitely not watching as she sucks the dusting of powdered sugar from her fingertips.
Elena mounts the steps of the townhouse, unlocks the front door, and leads Cawden inside. "Miss hin Barovar van Djen, really," she says in amusement, putting her cane in the umbrella stand and shrugging out of her coat.
"I was sharing their railing," Cawden says, smiling. "I might as well share their manners."
"Oh, goodness, Cawden, if we have to go through the process of convincing you it's fine to call us by our names again—"
Sometime the reputation is double-edged, but largely, Cawden finds it single-edged, and life in the city an endless process of dodging its endless cuts. Elena thinks it costs nothing, to call them familiarly; but Elena has sufficient social standing, and no interest in furthering it, to ignore the faint patina her reputation acquires by association. The social strictures Cawden must navigate are complicated by it.
She does not regret their friendship, either of the ladies hin Barovar van Djen, but they are a complication. Several complications.
"Elena," she says, and drops a tiny self-mocking curtsey, but instead of a laugh or an eye-rolling pantomime sigh, Elena takes off her dark spectacles and looks at her, eyes pale blue and gleaming.
"Cawden," she says, and the elf finds herself on the receiving end of a mild, innocuous tone generally reserved for their investigations, deployed on the confident scions of high society: oh, just one more thing, sir— and Cawden freezes in alarm, because that light tone, that predatory mimicry of harmlessness, is inevitably followed by the crashing boot of Elena's intellect kicking in the door of someone's alibi and thoroughly ruining their day. "I do know, you know."
"I'm witness to the fact that you know a prodigious number of things," Cawden says, trying for lightness.
"I know that there are members of the investigatory faculty whom, having known you as long as I, as aware of your character and deeds as I, if you and I and Girona were sitting one day in the garden of a public-house and they witnessed me saying oh dear, where have I mislaid my pocketwatch? would without hesitation think you'd stolen it," Elena says with dread precision. "I know you live in the necessity of their expectations. I know you could have an easier time of it if you didn't persist in our line of work."
The long-honed ability to read a space, the intent which which it has been arranged and disarranged, its psychoarchitecture and the traces that people leave in it and how those speak to their character, movement and meaning — these are the uses Cawden has, here. To human eyes, what she does is lift the lid on the grimy mind and methods of thievery.
"I'm flattered by your unusual and generous mindfulness," Cawden says, taking a step back to give Elena a shallow bow, rather stiffer and rather more genuine than the curtsey. All this sincerity feels pricklingly dangerous. She feels for the correctly courteous way to take her leave.
"Don't run," Elena says. The spectacular irony of the particular phrase, in Elena's particular commanding tone, detonates in Cawden's chest in overlapping flavours of panic. Her feet, unbidden, continue to step neatly back and back, but Elena surges forward, indomitable.
Cawden's back meets the wall, and Elena is close, so close, caging Cawden with her own body, so easy but impossible to fling aside; with a sudden bloom of the ever-present underlying murmur of fear of what happens to elves at human hands and its weft of miserable shame at so closely, hotly watching the married women.
And this close, there's a scent clinging to the warlock, in the hints of wine and spice: complex green notes, the kind of herbal decoction frowned on by the city for its availability to the working classes, for its marked lowering of inhibition, for the resulting supposed moral rot. Not uncommon for it to coil its way through the crowds of a city celebration; far enough from the warlock's experience that she wouldn't know the tinge of it in a freely handed warm spiced cup.
There's as much of a person in the things they could do but don't as there is in the things they do. To say this isn't Elena wouldn't be exactly right, but it's the exactly wrong parts.
"Elena," Cawden says, flinching in the approach of Elena's hand, as if to touch her face; and then things unravel as instead, Elena deliberately presses the pad of her thumb to the tip of Cawden's ear, pinning her head to the wall.
Cawden makes an awful noise in her throat, a crushing humiliation of sound, of need.
"Goodness," Elena murmurs, entirely devoid of surprise, smiling sweetly like a knife. She raises her other hand, slow and dreadful, and takes away any vestige of Cawden's sense by likewise pinning her other ear, immobilising her head.
"Look at you," Elena says. "Robbed of words and shaking like a leaf, and still you have your arms at your sides, fists clenched, as if you'd have your bones flindered before you'd reach for what you want."
Cawden closes her eyes.
"No," Elena says. "Open those immediately," and it's instant and simultaneous, both that Cawden does, and that tears fall down her cheeks from them.
"I once saw a sailor elf," Elena says, gently and musing now, their eyes locked together. "With the most curious of bodily decoration — ears pierced, not through the lobes, but multiple times through the shell of it, in a line up toward the tip." A curled fingertip strokes the edge of one of Cawden's, and she writhes as if jabbed in the ribs, ears tugged against Elena's unrelenting hold. "And they were not simple studs or rings, but entire metal eyelets, as if a shoemaker had set about him." Elena puts her head a little on one side, lips pursing. "I couldn't help but imagine them, laced through with ribbon like a dancing shoe," she adds. "And once I had, of course, I couldn't help but imagine you so laced, trussed immobile to some post or bench by it, and with your limbs likewise restrained, and quite. Quite. Naked."
Cawden makes another terrible, involuntary noise, and Elena leans into her, lips brushing Cawden's skin until the warlock parts them, closes her mouth again around the line of Cawden's jaw, and sucks bruisingly hard.
That's how it is when the front door opens and admits the paladin.
Finally Cawden's limbs and mind obey, and she shoves the warlock away, hard enough to stumble her.
"Girona hin Barovar van Djen," she says, in a voice that's a strangled ruin.
"Cawden," Girona says, and glances between them, and her brow begins to slowly crease in a kind of concern. "Are you all right?" and in response to whatever silent disbelief Cawden's body may telegraph, adds, "Cawden, I'm of the kind that naturally feels little of certain animal appetites, and we settled long ago, long before our marriage, that there's no harm between us if Elena...did she not say?" The concerned crease deepens.
"Someone slipped her spiked wine," Cawden says. "I'm at fault for this, Girona; she's not in her right mind, and I — should be."
"Cawden." Girona's looking full at her now, and frowning in earnest at whatever she sees. "Are you all right?" and Cawden sobs out a laugh, staggers forward to snatch up the paladin's hand, and presses a kiss to her knuckle.
"Take care of your wife," she says.
There's very little magic in what Cawden knows, and in a way that's to be proud of. There is skill and discipline and endless patience in being able to get into and out of the most secure of places with nothing but your mind and your body. But very little is not none, and Cawden knows a secret way in which the world's fabric reveals a mere meniscus, the brimming membrane between itself and another, mirrored place; and in the advanced mastery of her craft is a way to press herself instantaneously through the meniscus, to bodily disappear.
The sun turns blue.
In the other place, there is usually nobody; the only people there are others with Cawden's ken. There are few living creatures at all, commonly only cats, with their innate arcane ubiquity of access. Afterimages of pale flame hang in the air to mark where people exist in the world proper; most other things are a constant mirror of the world.
Cawden can stay only for one hundred and thirteen beats of her heart, and with her pulse already thrumming beyond all control, she summons all haste; darting through the open doorway into the corridor leading to the kitchens and the stairs. Taking the staircase three at a time, she heads into Girona's study, chest clenching with gratitude for the paladin's habitually open window, slithering herself out via the small pane, and launching herself onto the roof of the smaller building opposite, before she is yanked back to the correct side of the meniscus.
She flattens herself against roof tiles, teeth in her own lip. The deepest secrets of her craft are not things she shares freely, even with these, her friends, her chosen comrades in investigation; this ability is not one they knew of, let alone something they're ever witnessed. They will not know how to reason out the path of her retreat, even if, after all this time, they have somewhat internalised her admonition to look up.
No matter, in any case; she slithers up and over the ridge tiles, putting the roof itself between her and sight of the townhouse's windows, the first of all the barriers and distance she'll muster. On her tongue, the taste of the elven reputation:
All they do is take what's not for them.
