How well she rates
Derek and J'lor discuss the matter of Aivey's rescue. Occurs a while after Roa's delivery of Aivey's letter.
He's out longer than usual, and it's full dark, well past, before the bluerider is making his way home again. Vellath lands and J'lor is sliding down his dragon, expecting his empty home to be just that. In the darkness, Derek is not immediately visible anyhow. Until the rider turns and notices the man-shaped shadow seated in the entryway. He startles, one hand flying to his chest, as he's squinting and trying to determine who, of the residents, is sitting there. But, really, there's only one who would have the audaciy. "Shells, man," J'lor exhales a shaking breath. "Don't do that."
"Sorry," replies Derek, already pushing up from the long-patient cross-legged sit he'd sunk into some time before. That's all: 'sorry,' voice soft, as if he means it - but it's just a throw-away, a little apology for a necessary rudeness. He has hold of a bit of hide, folded and double-folded and folded another time so it almost fits in the closure of his hand, nearly obscured. In the dark, that probably comes down to 'entirely obscured,' and leaves him looking like he's got a fist cocked and ready at his hip. "I have news."
"Oh?" That's atypical. Derek comes here to get news. Not to give it. J'lor clears his throat as Vellath turns his head so a single, glowing eye can rest squarely on the ex-captain. He rumbles, a low raspy tremor, deep in his throat. "Can the news wait until I unshield a few glow baskets?"
"If light helps your ears work, by all means," snaps back Derek. Such a jest should normally be presented in his most softspoken voice for best ironic effect, perhaps with a trace of a smile - but tonight the man is irritable and snappish, and his words have a crisp, bitter edge rarely present when he speaks about anything except the betrayals, the trials, and the mainland. He doesn't even backstep at Vellath's rumble - instead he turns a sharp, impatient glare through the darkness on the dragon, and says, "Oh, stuff a goat in it. I just need to talk to him."
Derek apologizes for taking so long. While chatting away in other window I had to figure out how D reacts to dragon sass in this case. >_>
Vellath's rumble stops midway and the blue rears his head back and snorts softly. Blink. Glowing eyes vanish and reappear as the three lids shutter and lift. J'lor has slipped into the weyr and he quickly reveals one, two, three sconces so that the room is lit well enough. He stands in the middle of the weyr, looking back towards Derek. "Tell me."
"I've been saying for months that something's wrong back on the continent," Derek says, as soon as the light's revealed, and starts a slow pace inward while he speaks. His path describes a slow half-circle inside the weyr, keeping near the wall or things thereby. However roundabout it may be, the trail leads inevitably to J'lor. "There's been some kind of action. A try at a coup, or an underground, or - I got a letter."
That Derek has his own rare ways of finding out information from the mainland has probably never been lost on J'lor. This - the thrice-folded hide bent from the clutch of the man's hand now held out in his palm - is likely more direct proof of this mythology than anything he's ever shared before.
"They must have failed," Derek says, while holding the hide out, stopping with his hand within J'lor's arm's reach. "They failed."
The rider's dark eyes follow Derek as he moves restlessly, and one hand reaches out to accept the hide. It is slowly unfolded, then a second time, then a third. It takes only a moment to look over the contents, but his eyes linger there as J'lor reads and rereads the simple missive. "This came here. Didn't it." The bluerider's voice is flat and, for once, certain. "You didn't get it from over there. It was brought to you."
"It was," replies Derek, voice still sharp-edged but a little softer in the vowels, and he stretches out the words in something approaching a drawl he's decades ago parted ways with. He adds on a little shrug, then glances down at the letter, and - as if it means more to him than he's quite yet willing to let on - the island's leader puts his back to the man from whom he ursurped that position and starts back toward the cavemouth, to stare as is his wont out to sea.
Slowly, J'lor begins the process of refolding the letter, returning it to it's triple-compressed state. "She's at High Reaches Weyr, then," he says slowly and quietly. "There have been attacks there and those responsible were recently caught and tried." So, the bluerider gets news too. But with Diya's arrival, is that any real surprise. "She wouldn't have written if they were being exiled." He works through it carefully. "Not like that. They'll stake her out for thread."
"I understood they'd kill her," says Derek, only loud enough that his words won't be entirely swept away by the ocean whispering up on shore below. "She wouldn't have risked contact with us otherwise." And then he's just quiet, staring out into the dark.
The letter is held out, but it's to Derek's back. "I don't presume that you've come here to be consoled, Derek." J'lor's swallow is audible. "Why are you showing me this?"
"I want to go get them," says Derek, no louder than what he said before. "My daughter, and her allies."
He must know the letter's there, waiting for him to take it, and he turns with hand already reaching to reclaim the hide. "She deserves this much from me." He snorts through a wry, uncharacteristically gentle smile, and bows his head - seeming gentled, even as his fist tightens so hard around the hide that it crumples. "'Sh. They're tangled up in -your- dreams, J'lor. They deserve this much from all of us."
J'lor doesn't look surprised. He looks...in pain, the grimace on his face all too evident. "You said they hadn't forgotten us. You said they were waiting." He turns to look out at Vellath and the blue looks right back. "She's hurt people. Perhaps she did it for my cause, but that is not -of- my cause. You know that. You...you use that." Another one of those audible swallows. "If we take her, we'll infuriate the mainland. If you thought Nabol was foolish..." He lowers his head, lifting up his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. "You know what you ask. But, you ask it anyhow."
The shorter, darker man with the paler, colder eyes just watches while his rider counterpart struggles and aches and swallows. "And they use it, too, J'lor," he says, when the other man's nose-pinching silence cues him. Derek brings his hands together, locking them in a clasp, the battered hide hidden between clenched palms. His first statement was rhetorical. This one, more gently put, and all the sharper-edged for its sweetness, is not. "Tell me you wouldn't do the same."
His fingers pinch more tightly. "-I- would," J'lor admits. "But there are many things I do that you would not. And vice versa." Slowly J'lor's hand falls away and he lifts his head to again meet Derek's gaze. "Swear to me this is real. That you are asking for the same reasons I would ask. Not...anything else. Swear it."
"What reasons would you ask for?" Back to rhetorical. Derek unclasps his hands, the letter now little more than a wad of hide, bent and crumpled with the folds sticking out at angles. His mouth downturns at the corners. "Because you're a softhearted dragonrider? Because you'd feel it's wrong to put people to death? I can't swear those things." He closes his fingers around the letter and raises a fierce glare for J'lor. Thump! His fist lands over his heart. "Because she's mine, first. And because she was trying to do something that mattered, second. Once she's here you can teach her whatever you want to, J'lor. Peace and rainbows and puppies. But I can't just let them die. We need them - "
Another thump, harder, and Derek steps forward so he can squint hard up at the bluerider, voice barely better than a whisper. "- and they need us."
Dark eyes narrow in return. "You only said that last because you knew it would get me," mutters the bluerider. But then he turns sharply and walks over to his desk to pull free a series of hides and two blank ones. All of this is dropped to the floor and J'lor drops with it, spreading one wide. He begins writing on another, glancing over at the first for reference. Equations fly quickly across the page.
In the time it takes for J'lor to get started on his work, Derek is silent - and because of this, it may seem that he's a little stunned. The fact that he opens his hand and looks down at the crumpled letter does little to detract from this seeming. "I never noticed you being above using the truth to make a point," he remarks after a while. "You ought to be proud." He sounds - petulant, a little. And starts smoothing out the hide, as if he could undo the harm he's done.
J'lor is busy. He's in that place that he goes when he's working on a formation, and if he hears Derek's words he doesn't acknowledge them. The equations keep going, over one side of the hide and the down the back of it. Twenty minutes...thirty...pass before he sits up with a wince. "They'll have fall overhead next on the fourteenth. In the afternoon," he says finally. "It's the only time she'll be somewhere we can get her. The only time the queens and the other dragons will be too distracted to stop us."
Twenty, thirty minutes pass and without J'lor to keep him company, yet lacking any way down from this hole once he's got up here, Derek paces. He stops from time to time to look at this or that of J'lor's things, and if he spends longer looking at the little drawing than he ever has before, well, that only lends poignancy to the argument he's already made.
Finally, the bluerider's voice and pronouncement. Derek turns toward him and narrows steely eyes. "How long is that from now," he says, not quite with the lilt it'd need to be posed as a question - because it gives so much away, says so much about him and the island he's lived ten turns and more upon, about what they've done to one another.
The bluerider stares up at Derek for a moment, but the words come almost immediately. "Five days, counting this one." He begins to stand, picking up the hides to set them back onto his desk. "I'll need four to come with me. Four riders," he clarifies. "I'd like to pick them myself. I know thier flying styles better than you do."
Derek nods in silence, and turns to start toward the mouth of the weyr, not that he's liable to go far from there. He stares out into the dark instead, slipping the folded hide into a tattered pocket at his hip. "No need for me, then," he says, in time.
"I've been saying that for turns," J'lor mutters as he settles the hides on his desk more precisely. But then he sighs sharply, turns, and walks over to where the slightly shorter man waits. "Vellath and I will see you down," he offers gently.
The island leader whips around, and by the time J'lor's over to his side, there's death in those steely eyes. The letter is lucky to be in his pocket; the fist at his hip tightens, and it's unlikely that clench is any sign of emotional strain this time. But Derek has asked his favor, and been granted it, and at some level he seems to know he's beholden to what's transpired here - and the man who'll be responsible for making it happen. So he settles for a slow wrenching grind of his jaw, forces his fist to uncurl, and closes his eyes a moment to get hold of his breath.
When he opens his eyes, he's considerably gentled - enough so to nod once and accept what he must do next: mount Vellath. His second winged ride in one night.
His daughter should only know how well she rates.
He's out longer than usual, and it's full dark, well past, before the bluerider is making his way home again. Vellath lands and J'lor is sliding down his dragon, expecting his empty home to be just that. In the darkness, Derek is not immediately visible anyhow. Until the rider turns and notices the man-shaped shadow seated in the entryway. He startles, one hand flying to his chest, as he's squinting and trying to determine who, of the residents, is sitting there. But, really, there's only one who would have the audaciy. "Shells, man," J'lor exhales a shaking breath. "Don't do that."
"Sorry," replies Derek, already pushing up from the long-patient cross-legged sit he'd sunk into some time before. That's all: 'sorry,' voice soft, as if he means it - but it's just a throw-away, a little apology for a necessary rudeness. He has hold of a bit of hide, folded and double-folded and folded another time so it almost fits in the closure of his hand, nearly obscured. In the dark, that probably comes down to 'entirely obscured,' and leaves him looking like he's got a fist cocked and ready at his hip. "I have news."
"Oh?" That's atypical. Derek comes here to get news. Not to give it. J'lor clears his throat as Vellath turns his head so a single, glowing eye can rest squarely on the ex-captain. He rumbles, a low raspy tremor, deep in his throat. "Can the news wait until I unshield a few glow baskets?"
"If light helps your ears work, by all means," snaps back Derek. Such a jest should normally be presented in his most softspoken voice for best ironic effect, perhaps with a trace of a smile - but tonight the man is irritable and snappish, and his words have a crisp, bitter edge rarely present when he speaks about anything except the betrayals, the trials, and the mainland. He doesn't even backstep at Vellath's rumble - instead he turns a sharp, impatient glare through the darkness on the dragon, and says, "Oh, stuff a goat in it. I just need to talk to him."
Derek apologizes for taking so long. While chatting away in other window I had to figure out how D reacts to dragon sass in this case. >_>
Vellath's rumble stops midway and the blue rears his head back and snorts softly. Blink. Glowing eyes vanish and reappear as the three lids shutter and lift. J'lor has slipped into the weyr and he quickly reveals one, two, three sconces so that the room is lit well enough. He stands in the middle of the weyr, looking back towards Derek. "Tell me."
"I've been saying for months that something's wrong back on the continent," Derek says, as soon as the light's revealed, and starts a slow pace inward while he speaks. His path describes a slow half-circle inside the weyr, keeping near the wall or things thereby. However roundabout it may be, the trail leads inevitably to J'lor. "There's been some kind of action. A try at a coup, or an underground, or - I got a letter."
That Derek has his own rare ways of finding out information from the mainland has probably never been lost on J'lor. This - the thrice-folded hide bent from the clutch of the man's hand now held out in his palm - is likely more direct proof of this mythology than anything he's ever shared before.
"They must have failed," Derek says, while holding the hide out, stopping with his hand within J'lor's arm's reach. "They failed."
The rider's dark eyes follow Derek as he moves restlessly, and one hand reaches out to accept the hide. It is slowly unfolded, then a second time, then a third. It takes only a moment to look over the contents, but his eyes linger there as J'lor reads and rereads the simple missive. "This came here. Didn't it." The bluerider's voice is flat and, for once, certain. "You didn't get it from over there. It was brought to you."
"It was," replies Derek, voice still sharp-edged but a little softer in the vowels, and he stretches out the words in something approaching a drawl he's decades ago parted ways with. He adds on a little shrug, then glances down at the letter, and - as if it means more to him than he's quite yet willing to let on - the island's leader puts his back to the man from whom he ursurped that position and starts back toward the cavemouth, to stare as is his wont out to sea.
Slowly, J'lor begins the process of refolding the letter, returning it to it's triple-compressed state. "She's at High Reaches Weyr, then," he says slowly and quietly. "There have been attacks there and those responsible were recently caught and tried." So, the bluerider gets news too. But with Diya's arrival, is that any real surprise. "She wouldn't have written if they were being exiled." He works through it carefully. "Not like that. They'll stake her out for thread."
"I understood they'd kill her," says Derek, only loud enough that his words won't be entirely swept away by the ocean whispering up on shore below. "She wouldn't have risked contact with us otherwise." And then he's just quiet, staring out into the dark.
The letter is held out, but it's to Derek's back. "I don't presume that you've come here to be consoled, Derek." J'lor's swallow is audible. "Why are you showing me this?"
"I want to go get them," says Derek, no louder than what he said before. "My daughter, and her allies."
He must know the letter's there, waiting for him to take it, and he turns with hand already reaching to reclaim the hide. "She deserves this much from me." He snorts through a wry, uncharacteristically gentle smile, and bows his head - seeming gentled, even as his fist tightens so hard around the hide that it crumples. "'Sh. They're tangled up in -your- dreams, J'lor. They deserve this much from all of us."
J'lor doesn't look surprised. He looks...in pain, the grimace on his face all too evident. "You said they hadn't forgotten us. You said they were waiting." He turns to look out at Vellath and the blue looks right back. "She's hurt people. Perhaps she did it for my cause, but that is not -of- my cause. You know that. You...you use that." Another one of those audible swallows. "If we take her, we'll infuriate the mainland. If you thought Nabol was foolish..." He lowers his head, lifting up his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. "You know what you ask. But, you ask it anyhow."
The shorter, darker man with the paler, colder eyes just watches while his rider counterpart struggles and aches and swallows. "And they use it, too, J'lor," he says, when the other man's nose-pinching silence cues him. Derek brings his hands together, locking them in a clasp, the battered hide hidden between clenched palms. His first statement was rhetorical. This one, more gently put, and all the sharper-edged for its sweetness, is not. "Tell me you wouldn't do the same."
His fingers pinch more tightly. "-I- would," J'lor admits. "But there are many things I do that you would not. And vice versa." Slowly J'lor's hand falls away and he lifts his head to again meet Derek's gaze. "Swear to me this is real. That you are asking for the same reasons I would ask. Not...anything else. Swear it."
"What reasons would you ask for?" Back to rhetorical. Derek unclasps his hands, the letter now little more than a wad of hide, bent and crumpled with the folds sticking out at angles. His mouth downturns at the corners. "Because you're a softhearted dragonrider? Because you'd feel it's wrong to put people to death? I can't swear those things." He closes his fingers around the letter and raises a fierce glare for J'lor. Thump! His fist lands over his heart. "Because she's mine, first. And because she was trying to do something that mattered, second. Once she's here you can teach her whatever you want to, J'lor. Peace and rainbows and puppies. But I can't just let them die. We need them - "
Another thump, harder, and Derek steps forward so he can squint hard up at the bluerider, voice barely better than a whisper. "- and they need us."
Dark eyes narrow in return. "You only said that last because you knew it would get me," mutters the bluerider. But then he turns sharply and walks over to his desk to pull free a series of hides and two blank ones. All of this is dropped to the floor and J'lor drops with it, spreading one wide. He begins writing on another, glancing over at the first for reference. Equations fly quickly across the page.
In the time it takes for J'lor to get started on his work, Derek is silent - and because of this, it may seem that he's a little stunned. The fact that he opens his hand and looks down at the crumpled letter does little to detract from this seeming. "I never noticed you being above using the truth to make a point," he remarks after a while. "You ought to be proud." He sounds - petulant, a little. And starts smoothing out the hide, as if he could undo the harm he's done.
J'lor is busy. He's in that place that he goes when he's working on a formation, and if he hears Derek's words he doesn't acknowledge them. The equations keep going, over one side of the hide and the down the back of it. Twenty minutes...thirty...pass before he sits up with a wince. "They'll have fall overhead next on the fourteenth. In the afternoon," he says finally. "It's the only time she'll be somewhere we can get her. The only time the queens and the other dragons will be too distracted to stop us."
Twenty, thirty minutes pass and without J'lor to keep him company, yet lacking any way down from this hole once he's got up here, Derek paces. He stops from time to time to look at this or that of J'lor's things, and if he spends longer looking at the little drawing than he ever has before, well, that only lends poignancy to the argument he's already made.
Finally, the bluerider's voice and pronouncement. Derek turns toward him and narrows steely eyes. "How long is that from now," he says, not quite with the lilt it'd need to be posed as a question - because it gives so much away, says so much about him and the island he's lived ten turns and more upon, about what they've done to one another.
The bluerider stares up at Derek for a moment, but the words come almost immediately. "Five days, counting this one." He begins to stand, picking up the hides to set them back onto his desk. "I'll need four to come with me. Four riders," he clarifies. "I'd like to pick them myself. I know thier flying styles better than you do."
Derek nods in silence, and turns to start toward the mouth of the weyr, not that he's liable to go far from there. He stares out into the dark instead, slipping the folded hide into a tattered pocket at his hip. "No need for me, then," he says, in time.
"I've been saying that for turns," J'lor mutters as he settles the hides on his desk more precisely. But then he sighs sharply, turns, and walks over to where the slightly shorter man waits. "Vellath and I will see you down," he offers gently.
The island leader whips around, and by the time J'lor's over to his side, there's death in those steely eyes. The letter is lucky to be in his pocket; the fist at his hip tightens, and it's unlikely that clench is any sign of emotional strain this time. But Derek has asked his favor, and been granted it, and at some level he seems to know he's beholden to what's transpired here - and the man who'll be responsible for making it happen. So he settles for a slow wrenching grind of his jaw, forces his fist to uncurl, and closes his eyes a moment to get hold of his breath.
When he opens his eyes, he's considerably gentled - enough so to nod once and accept what he must do next: mount Vellath. His second winged ride in one night.
His daughter should only know how well she rates.