The elves tend not to die unless somebody kills them, but they've done a lot of that to each other.
The elven tendency was developed over ages of the world; an initially fragile consensus that not all feuds needed to be to the death, until the world's infants drowned in the blood of their elders. Symbolic victories are victories still, and entering your enemies' strongholds and taking their dearest treasures is as much a test of one's prowess as taking a sword to them in a field.
You can still die doing it — elven trapsmithing is now a highly-developed lethal art — but this is generally counted as a tragedy of hubris on the part of the infiltrator, not a ratchet on an endless spiral of blood for blood. If grudges are held, it's against the bloodstained dungeon, not its builders.
It pleases the human world to ignore the bulk of this and simply sneer that elves are natural filthy burglars, as if purloined wealth were any of the point.
Presently, one of the city's veteran crime investigators is attempting to extract an opinion from Cawden on a fresh wave of pickpocketing.
"I don't know anything about finger-dipping, Lestrige," she says wearily, watching the heat of the public house's hearth steam away the flakes of snow speckling his peacoat. "I'm not a tame criminal mastermind, you understand? I'm just an elf."
"You've got a gift," Lestrige says. He's rough and stout, with the scarred hands of heavy labour; probably the only one from the station who'd dare come this far into the dwarven district, into this place Cawden was drinking in to not be disturbed. There's a sprawling, days-old game of Esczec between two craggy anvilthanes on one of the back tables, and the place is silently intense, every dwarven eye on the movement of pieces. "For the psychology."
That he found her at all makes Cawden itch between her shoulders. The Poque Riots were long before Lestrige's years, and the danger of knives over any given game is vastly exaggerated; nonetheless the bylaw banning the sale of playing-cards to dwarves was never rescinded, and Rocktown is lightly trodden by the likes of Lestrige — or the hin Barovar van Djens. A few coins to street urchins, to quietly dog her steps? Or the less avoidable eyes available to warlockry?
She pretends to be cringing instead at his invocation of the newly-coined study of the machinations of the mind. Hardly implausible; it's a contentious entry in the annals of the dubious crafts of Progess.
"Show me a building and I'll tell you how to get in and out," she sighs. "I couldn't lift a wallet if it was the only thing between myself and starvation."
"Well, come uptown and walk over the streets with me," he says doggedly. "We've got an idea that it's all at certain times of day; you can look at 'em as architecture, see where you think they come from and go to."
He's got a point, damn his eyes.
It is, of course, a ruse. In the draughty station house, so cold she keeps her coat and hat on, she's barely warmed one of the miserable wooden stools at the writing-desks before Girona hin Barovar van Djen enters and stands quietly at her shoulder. Lestrige has somehow found bureaucratic tasks elsewhere, while she puts ink to paper with her thoughts on his investigation.
"Miss hin Barovar van Djen," Cawden says, without looking up from the soft scratch of nib on paper, and Girona sighs softly at her formality.
"Cawden," she says. "If you'd rather we didn't speak, I'll go — you've been plain enough, in the way we've been unable to find you. But first, I must tell you: Elena is bitterly sorry, and we miss you."
The scant sentences she's written, as they are, accurately convey the absence of useful insight that Lestrige's badgering has elicited. She should soften it, add something diplomatic, find a suggestion for further enquiries.
But Girona is standing an arm's length away, after weeks of Cawden avoiding her and her wife, and it's all Cawden can do to swash the final Ts and dab the stop at the end of the final sentence. She lets it lie, the ink drying slowly in the cold while she swishes the dip pen rapidly in its beaker of astringent-smelling nib cleaner, dries it with a torn corner of blotting paper, and tucks it away in the desk.
"Elena," she says finally, measured, "was in a state of pharmaceutical disinhibition; and furthermore, as you surely know, she was not mistaken about the effect such a proposition would have on me."
"And yet we've bruised your feelings," Girona says, and Cawden need not look to know she stands like a lightning rod, straight-backed and ever ready.
Cawden presses a knuckle to the corner of her eye, the centre of her lips. "The bruise on my feelings," she says slowly, "is not Elena's fault, nor yours. I wouldn't have it distress you."
"I'm not certain you understand," Girona says, very softly. "I told you that I'm not much moved by the sexual appetite. I'm not immune, or averse, to sensation; our marriage bed has been neither cold nor difficult, but my beloved Elena has always been free to seek what she will."
"You did tell me."
"The very first time she came to me and asked, blushing like a nervous virgin, was after long years of our marriage. After we made your acquaintaince," Girona says. "The nerve to ask you — the words to ask you — have been failing her for some time."
Cawden looks around at her, then, at Girona's thoughtful expression, and eyes turned politely downward so as not to pressure Cawden; at the paladin's hands, folded one over the other in front of her, gripping too tightly for a gesture of ease.
There is an unfamiliar feeling in Cawden's ribs; something like pain. Something, perhaps, like the shocking, unfamiliar ease of pain long-felt, stopping.
"You're stealing nothing," Girona says, and the corners of her mouth bend, just a little, in a smile. "You're the prize, Cawden. I don't pretend to know the elven tendency well; what's the etiquette for a fresh attempt, after being dismayed and having your fingers bloodied with an incautious grab?"
Cawden massages her sternum. "Generally," she says, voice roughened by fulness of feeling, "the done thing is simply to do better the second time."
"We miss you, Cawden." Girona unclasps her hands, smooths them down her coat, and gives her a shy but more direct smile, and Cawden relunctantly takes her hand away from the phantom feeling that the internals of her chest are being rearranged to make space for — new things of some kind.
"Let me give this to Lestrige," she sighs. "I'll find you, afterward, and — well. I'll find you."
For a moment, Cawden simply stops and watches them as they stand unaware of her. It's hardly the first occasion.
In the station house nook containing coat hooks, Girona hin Barovar van Djen stands, face soft, rubbing a small circle on her wife's lower back. One of Elena's arms is awkwardly pulled to her chest, fist clenched beneath her chin, glimpses of a crushed handkerchief poking between her fingers. Her lashes are wet, mouth tight.
Intolerable.
Long legs make her silent strides few. "Miss hin Barovar van Djen," Cawden says, wrapping her own fingers gently around Elena's white-knuckled grip, and with her other hand she pulls the snow-dampened felted wool hat from her own head.
Her carefully-tucked hair falls, disarrayed, she knows; she flicks one ear as if to dislodge ticklish strands, coquettishly arresting Elena's wide eyes on it.
Cawden has never been precious about her status; feels no need, especially here in the city, to flaunt the stylised geometric skeleton of the Tree-of-Knowledge with its glyphs at the intersections, its hard-earned meanings, the fact that she is a Master thief, with all the many weights that doesn't carry for the people here.
These weeks, she has given to contemplation. Reassessment of who she shows herself to be.
Inside the shell of each ear, well-healing now, is newly tattooed the tracery of the Tree-of-Knowledge; at each station, instead of the symbol that names her successive masteries, glints sterling silver, melted and cast from a few of a small bag of elven coins, unspent keepsakes held from Cawden's first flawless solo venture. Eight polished eyelets, flesh around them reddened still, not quite yet comfortably accustomed to the new way of things.
Much, she supposes, like the butterfly-filled ache within her.
Elena hin Barovar van Djen's breath seizes gratifyingly.
"Miss hin Barovar van Djen," Cawden repeats. "I hope you'd grant me a little of your time? I believe I might soon find myself in need of some length of ribbon; there's a gift I have in mind to wrap attractively for a very dear friend." She strokes her thumb over Elena's fingers, as a tremble shakes the warlock's hand, and smiles for her. "I know you have excellent taste in these matters, and know all the best places to shop."
"I've told you," Elena says, her free hand coming up to wrap around Cawden's wrist, as if she might leave at any second if not prevailed upon; and she bends her head to press winter-chilled lips to Cawden's knuckles. "It's Elena," and Cawden's smile widens.
"Of course it is, Miss hin Barovar van Djen," she says smokily.
