LOG: Betrayal
Date: Day 15, Month 1, Turn 26
Location: Resident Common Room, High Reaches Weyr
Synopsis: Rilka tries to make Sibella understand just how terrible things are.
Resident Common Room, High Reaches Weyr
Just off of the main passageway lies the small cavern that forms the hub of the residents' quarters, kept immaculately clean by the headwoman's staff and warmed in cold weather by a stone hearth to the left and well back from the entrance. Comfortable chairs and a plush fur arrayed before the hearth make an inviting spot to curl up with a book or handicraft, or just to sit and chat. Beyond, additional chairs stand in clusters throughout the room, some upholstered with age-softened hide, some plain wood. At the widest point of the cavern, a round table gleams with polish, though its surface is nicked and scarred from Turns of use. Beyond the table, the very back of the cavern often lies in shadow unless the glowbaskets there are unlidded to cast cozy pools of light. The commingled scents of klah, smoke and polish permeate the air along with the sweetness of rosemary and lavender.
Tapestries hang across the entrances to dormitories and more private quarters as well as the exit to the outer hall, colorful protections from drafts.
It's a bitterly cold, windy night halfway through the first month of the new turn, and the Common Room is in full swing. A group of middle aged women are playing cards about the round table, whilst others gather in chairs around the hearth, their small children playing quiet games on the floor in front of them. Despite the clamour, Rilka is a visible figure: she wanders aimlessly through the entrance of the tunnel that leads into the Inner Caverns, bare footed and coatless, her thin shoulders shaking from the cold, snow still melting in her long, unkempt hair.
The domestic scene is everything that makes life worthwhile for motherly Sibella, who sits before the hearth with a few of the other lower caverns women, directing and otherwise watching the weyrbrats play. Every once in a while, she or one of the other women will lean forward and moderate the children, either with firm reprimand or gentle encouragement. Sibella herself holds her personal favorite of the fostered babes, one barely weaned and curled sleepily against the plush baker's breast. Automatically, Sibella turns her head to check the table that holds all manner of light "midnight snacks" for those whose bellies rumble long after supper has been eaten. Content that there is still plenty arrayed there, she starts to return her attention the sweet sleepiness of the baby, but is halted by the arrival of a small, waif-like figure in the doorway from the Inner Caverns. Forehead wrinkled slightly, Sibella keeps watch over the girl silently, if only because her interest is piqued by the pitiful condition of the child. No, not a child. Something about the /woman/ bespeaks an age near Sibella's own, which adds to Sibella's consternation.
Rilka, unaware of any attention her entrance draws, floats aimlessly through the room, her bare feet leaving muddy footprints upon the polished stone of the floor. Despite the vagueness of her expression, there's a hint of panic, too: it shows increasingly strongly as she reaches for a door, pulling it open with a clumsy hand. Behind, there's just a corridor, long and winding; it's clearly not what she's looking for.
Further concerned with the welfare of this woman by the minute, Sibella stands. The babe against her chest starts, but the motion made as Sibella makes her way across the cavern soothes it. The matronly woman frowns at the muddy tracks on the floor - no, no, that can be taken care of later. Stepping over the little footprints, Sibella pauses a length away from the girl, unsure and not wanting to startle the other. She satisfies herself by calling, "Er... can I help you find something?" Is this woman an exile? Anyone else would know their way about the Weyr, surely.
Spinning on her heel, Rilka stares at Sibella with an expression that makes her look very much like a small animal caught in a bright light: all big eyes and startled expression. Long, white fingers wrap around each other, an endless gesture that is probably intended to give her some comfort, though for now, it doesn't /seem/ to be particularly working. "I want to go home," she whispers, finally, tears appearing around the corners of her big, pale eyes.
Sibella feels her eyes widen and her mouth begin to gape at the big-eyed apparent innocence, sweetness, and vulnerability of the girl. Every motherly instinct responds to this, the absolutely perfect thing to stir a personality such as Sibella's. Cradling the babe with one arm gently to her breast, Sibella reaches out with the other arm as if to embrace the girl. "Oh, my dear girl. Don't you like our beautiful, stony Weyr?" Sibella begins to babble in the way that she does to comfort the smaller children, "Are you cold, child? Would you like a nice, warm bubbly pie? Or perhaps some proper, warm clothing? Come, come, here's the hearth and there's the fire. Come sit with us daffy old women and get warm. Come, come." Sibella is crooning, all of the warm motherliness that makes up her being pouring out to near smother this woman who is, indeed, near her age. She can see that now that she is nearer to Rilka, but all that she can feel is that this, here, is a small, vulnerable being that is much too much like an orphan child in need of a good coddling.
Rilka stiffens, faced with this onslaught of mothering; it's barely possible for her eyes to grow wider than they already are, but they do, at the same time as her arms wrap suddenly and protectively about her slender shoulders. "I don't want a /fire/," she says, stony-voiced. "I don't want new clothes or a bubbly pie or-- I /want/ to go home." And maybe home is behind one of these doors, one of the ones she hasn't opened yet! It's hard to know what she's thinking of, turning to rush towards the next one, to open it with the same hopefulness as she did the last one. Home, however, is definitely not in /there/, either.
"There's a good-" Sibella's litany is halted by the protests of the woman/girl... person. The beckoning hand recoils to her hip, where Sibella rests it while pondering the situation. What to do? Certainly there was help needed here, but what could Sibella offer but comforting doomed to be rejected? The woman sighs and looks on as Rilka dashes to the next door. Quite confounded, she only watches. A hand raises to pat the baby on the back, something that Sibella often finds herself doing to keep that /awkward/ feeling from creeping into her. The only thing she can think to do is, well, point out the obvious. "Well, child, you won't find home behind any door in the Weyr," she snaps, finding herself to still be ruffled at the rejection of her mothering.
"I'm not a child," insists Rilka, darkly, scowling now: it's a visible emotion, one more concrete than her previous distress - it's aimed directly at Sibella. "You stole me from my home. You made me come. I want to go /home/." More tears. Maybe she's given up looking through doors - for now - but her expression is increasingly desperate. "I want... We have betrayed the /ocean/. She curses us now. We need to make it /right/."
Sibella is quite perplexed. This emotion is as clearly visible as Rilka's, and Sibella bounces the baby lightly to release some of her agitation. Clearly, the babe is used to this, as it sleeps as soundly on as before.
Lines of consternation again appearing between her brows, Sibella again reaches out for the desperate girl, but thinks better of it this time and checks the motion, returning to her patting of the baby. "Alright, /Miss./ But I simply don't know what to tell you. /I/ certainly didn't take you from anywhere and /I/ only want to help. I'm no dragonrider who can just take you right home and show you what has become of it- but I can tell you that, if you give me a chance, I can help make things right. What can I do?" This being the first outright display of the upheaval the relocation has had on the exile's lives that Sibella has personally witnessed, she means what she says. She truly wants to make things right for this poor, desperate waif.
Rilka is shaking now, partly with cold, but partly, too, it seems, with her surges of emotion. She flinches away from the reach that doesn't quite reach her, backing up until her back is flat against the door she was so recently looking through. She looks scared, now; genuinely frightened, somehow, despite Sibella's obvious kindness. "How can you make it right if you can't take me home?" she wants to know. "I don't belong here. It isn't right. The crabs-- the /island/. It needs us. It needs /me/. Why won't you let us go home?"
Now thoughtful, Sibella's expression takes on a distant look, as though having an inner conversation - not unlike a rider communing with his dragon. She taps the baby's back lightly with her fingertips absently, then draws her gaze back into the present, to Rilka. "I have no authority here, but perhaps we can get it cleared to have a dragonrider take you home. Perhaps not to stay, but you must know what that storm did. Surely you wouldn't rather have weathered the storm on the island unaided? I speak for the majority of the Weyr when I say we do not want your unhappiness." She cocks her head at Rilka, wondering at the strange fear this girl has. Having never been outside the Weyr, herself, she cannot imagine wanting to be elsewhere, or feeling unease in the presence of any Weyrfolk.
"No, I need to stay. I /need/ to." Rilka bypasses the rest of what Sibella says to concentrate on that: the prospect of home. "We shouldn't be here. Everyone keeps saying that the winter has been so terribly bad, and it's because of /us/. Because we're not there to look after the weather. I need to calm it down. I need to-- the storm would never have been that bad if we'd been there. It was a test, and we failed it, and I need to go /home/." She's rambling now, desperation so audible in her tone; her eyes reach for Sibella, hopeful and pleading.
Another woman from the lower caverns comes to Sibella, muttering something about bedtime and the children, darting glances warily at Rilka. Sibella reluctantly gives over the baby, then turns back to Rilka, folding her now-empty arms. Making an attempt at understanding the woman's logic, she returns it with what she feels is the same. "Well then, if there was a test to be failed, you did not fail it. /We/ did take you away, and thus /we/ failed the test. Nothing that happened was any fault of your own, and you are free from blame." While at a loss as to how to convince the girl that weather is uncontrollable, she simply lets the matter go and concentrates on diverting the guilt and responsibility that Rilka seems to be feeling. The pleading expression in the girl's eyes catch Sibella off-guard, and again the motherly feeling takes over, and Sibella starts on a pleading tack of her own. "Dear, look to the orphans among you. Would you really have us put them out into this cold, stormy weather while you attempt to placate it? Would you have us leave them to freeze and die? And if you leave them here, who will look after them? Us, who know nothing of your ways?" This being the opposite of her true feelings of the orphans, she herself wanting to round them all up and take over the care of them. But this is beside the here and now, this want to calm and soothe the girl before her.
"No," whispers Rilka, the word apparently her personal word of the day. "We failed. We let you take us away with promises of warm clothes and safety. It was wrong of us to agree. It was wrong of our /council/." She can't possibly be a member of said council, not given her age, and especially not given her obviously wobbly mental stability, but she's clearly taking partial responsibility. "You can't have our children. You won't raise them right. They need the ocean, and they need to /understand/. You'll teach them wrong. We all need to go home, back to the way it was, so that we can all be safe. We /need/ to. Why can't you help us?" A tear slides down her dirty face, and with one hand, she wipes vaguely at it. "Please."
Sibella is so very, very helpless in the face of the girl's tears, of the apparent weight of responsibility and homesickness and guilt. Even as a tear slides down the cheek of the other, a steady flow begins from Sibella's eyes. She is speechless, unknowing and out of all the right things to say. To be ripped from the Weyr and all she holds dear, to be torn from the daily responsibilities that are her own, that are her /right./ She is so torn, certainly not wanting to allow a waif like this to return to that island-waste, but wanting to terribly to be able to see this face -before now unknown to her- smiling and free of burden. This face and so many, too many like it. Sibella groans and sits in a chair set against the wall, covering her face with her hands. So terribly heavy, the burden of so many people, and Sibella takes it as though it is solely hers. "Where is the Weyrleader when you need him?" She says aloud.
Sibella's reaction seems to startle Rilka, skittish as she already is. There isn't anywhere for her to back into further, not with her back already at the wall, but she wraps her arms around her shoulders more tightly than ever, instead. "You have to tell him that we need to go back. You /have/ to. If we don't--" she swallows; she apparently takes this deadly seriously. "It could be catastrophic."
Sibella straightens herself and regains her composure. She folds her hands in her lap and gazes at the girl quietly for a beat. "We can talk to the Weyrleader. Either together, or I'll go myself. I will /not/ ask for you to go back, but I do think..." she pauses, and taps her lip thoughtfully. Her next words are to herself, muttered low. "I'm going to need advice on this. Never knew any of you felt this way, anyhow. How could I? Oh, these poor babies." She looks up at Rilka with sad, pitying eyes. "I'll do what I can to sort things out. If I could promise more, I would..." The left she leaves unspoken; that she can't promise more because she simply doesn't want, even after this peculiar conversation, to send the exiles "home." What better place to raise the babies up than in the Weyr?
Shuddering, Rilka looks absolutely terrified at mention of the Weyrleader:her head shakes, over and over again. "We have to go back," she says, drawing away from the door. "You have to tell them that we need to go back. Everything is wrong. /Everything/. Tell him for me. Convince him." She seems to have missed the fact that Sibella doesn't intend to argue for them to go back. Perhaps it's simply the wonder of someone who is listening - more or less. "I want... where do I sleep here?" She's lost.
Sibella takes on her best, most comforting smile, and herds the girl toward the proper door as best she can, trying at once not to frighten her and to shoo her in the correct direction. "Over toward that corridor there... here, just follow me, sweetling."
However fragile Rilka is, she /still/ doesn't take kindly to being mothered; the glance she aims up at Sibella as she's herded is unhappy, even-- offended? It's hard to tell, even with those expressive eyes. She doesn't glance back as she heads through the door, but she does say one final thing: "Make them fix it. Make them send us home. You have to." And then she's gone.
Sibella sighs and returns to her original seat by the hearth, where the fire still dances cheerfully. The lack of children and the other women makes her restless after recent events, and she quickly decides to resolve the matter as soon as humanly possible. She again stands, this time purposefully, and strides across the cavern and out into the chilly bowl. A beat later, she is back inside, grabbing a cape to drape around her already wind-ruffled clothing.
Location: Resident Common Room, High Reaches Weyr
Synopsis: Rilka tries to make Sibella understand just how terrible things are.
Resident Common Room, High Reaches Weyr
Just off of the main passageway lies the small cavern that forms the hub of the residents' quarters, kept immaculately clean by the headwoman's staff and warmed in cold weather by a stone hearth to the left and well back from the entrance. Comfortable chairs and a plush fur arrayed before the hearth make an inviting spot to curl up with a book or handicraft, or just to sit and chat. Beyond, additional chairs stand in clusters throughout the room, some upholstered with age-softened hide, some plain wood. At the widest point of the cavern, a round table gleams with polish, though its surface is nicked and scarred from Turns of use. Beyond the table, the very back of the cavern often lies in shadow unless the glowbaskets there are unlidded to cast cozy pools of light. The commingled scents of klah, smoke and polish permeate the air along with the sweetness of rosemary and lavender.
Tapestries hang across the entrances to dormitories and more private quarters as well as the exit to the outer hall, colorful protections from drafts.
It's a bitterly cold, windy night halfway through the first month of the new turn, and the Common Room is in full swing. A group of middle aged women are playing cards about the round table, whilst others gather in chairs around the hearth, their small children playing quiet games on the floor in front of them. Despite the clamour, Rilka is a visible figure: she wanders aimlessly through the entrance of the tunnel that leads into the Inner Caverns, bare footed and coatless, her thin shoulders shaking from the cold, snow still melting in her long, unkempt hair.
The domestic scene is everything that makes life worthwhile for motherly Sibella, who sits before the hearth with a few of the other lower caverns women, directing and otherwise watching the weyrbrats play. Every once in a while, she or one of the other women will lean forward and moderate the children, either with firm reprimand or gentle encouragement. Sibella herself holds her personal favorite of the fostered babes, one barely weaned and curled sleepily against the plush baker's breast. Automatically, Sibella turns her head to check the table that holds all manner of light "midnight snacks" for those whose bellies rumble long after supper has been eaten. Content that there is still plenty arrayed there, she starts to return her attention the sweet sleepiness of the baby, but is halted by the arrival of a small, waif-like figure in the doorway from the Inner Caverns. Forehead wrinkled slightly, Sibella keeps watch over the girl silently, if only because her interest is piqued by the pitiful condition of the child. No, not a child. Something about the /woman/ bespeaks an age near Sibella's own, which adds to Sibella's consternation.
Rilka, unaware of any attention her entrance draws, floats aimlessly through the room, her bare feet leaving muddy footprints upon the polished stone of the floor. Despite the vagueness of her expression, there's a hint of panic, too: it shows increasingly strongly as she reaches for a door, pulling it open with a clumsy hand. Behind, there's just a corridor, long and winding; it's clearly not what she's looking for.
Further concerned with the welfare of this woman by the minute, Sibella stands. The babe against her chest starts, but the motion made as Sibella makes her way across the cavern soothes it. The matronly woman frowns at the muddy tracks on the floor - no, no, that can be taken care of later. Stepping over the little footprints, Sibella pauses a length away from the girl, unsure and not wanting to startle the other. She satisfies herself by calling, "Er... can I help you find something?" Is this woman an exile? Anyone else would know their way about the Weyr, surely.
Spinning on her heel, Rilka stares at Sibella with an expression that makes her look very much like a small animal caught in a bright light: all big eyes and startled expression. Long, white fingers wrap around each other, an endless gesture that is probably intended to give her some comfort, though for now, it doesn't /seem/ to be particularly working. "I want to go home," she whispers, finally, tears appearing around the corners of her big, pale eyes.
Sibella feels her eyes widen and her mouth begin to gape at the big-eyed apparent innocence, sweetness, and vulnerability of the girl. Every motherly instinct responds to this, the absolutely perfect thing to stir a personality such as Sibella's. Cradling the babe with one arm gently to her breast, Sibella reaches out with the other arm as if to embrace the girl. "Oh, my dear girl. Don't you like our beautiful, stony Weyr?" Sibella begins to babble in the way that she does to comfort the smaller children, "Are you cold, child? Would you like a nice, warm bubbly pie? Or perhaps some proper, warm clothing? Come, come, here's the hearth and there's the fire. Come sit with us daffy old women and get warm. Come, come." Sibella is crooning, all of the warm motherliness that makes up her being pouring out to near smother this woman who is, indeed, near her age. She can see that now that she is nearer to Rilka, but all that she can feel is that this, here, is a small, vulnerable being that is much too much like an orphan child in need of a good coddling.
Rilka stiffens, faced with this onslaught of mothering; it's barely possible for her eyes to grow wider than they already are, but they do, at the same time as her arms wrap suddenly and protectively about her slender shoulders. "I don't want a /fire/," she says, stony-voiced. "I don't want new clothes or a bubbly pie or-- I /want/ to go home." And maybe home is behind one of these doors, one of the ones she hasn't opened yet! It's hard to know what she's thinking of, turning to rush towards the next one, to open it with the same hopefulness as she did the last one. Home, however, is definitely not in /there/, either.
"There's a good-" Sibella's litany is halted by the protests of the woman/girl... person. The beckoning hand recoils to her hip, where Sibella rests it while pondering the situation. What to do? Certainly there was help needed here, but what could Sibella offer but comforting doomed to be rejected? The woman sighs and looks on as Rilka dashes to the next door. Quite confounded, she only watches. A hand raises to pat the baby on the back, something that Sibella often finds herself doing to keep that /awkward/ feeling from creeping into her. The only thing she can think to do is, well, point out the obvious. "Well, child, you won't find home behind any door in the Weyr," she snaps, finding herself to still be ruffled at the rejection of her mothering.
"I'm not a child," insists Rilka, darkly, scowling now: it's a visible emotion, one more concrete than her previous distress - it's aimed directly at Sibella. "You stole me from my home. You made me come. I want to go /home/." More tears. Maybe she's given up looking through doors - for now - but her expression is increasingly desperate. "I want... We have betrayed the /ocean/. She curses us now. We need to make it /right/."
Sibella is quite perplexed. This emotion is as clearly visible as Rilka's, and Sibella bounces the baby lightly to release some of her agitation. Clearly, the babe is used to this, as it sleeps as soundly on as before.
Lines of consternation again appearing between her brows, Sibella again reaches out for the desperate girl, but thinks better of it this time and checks the motion, returning to her patting of the baby. "Alright, /Miss./ But I simply don't know what to tell you. /I/ certainly didn't take you from anywhere and /I/ only want to help. I'm no dragonrider who can just take you right home and show you what has become of it- but I can tell you that, if you give me a chance, I can help make things right. What can I do?" This being the first outright display of the upheaval the relocation has had on the exile's lives that Sibella has personally witnessed, she means what she says. She truly wants to make things right for this poor, desperate waif.
Rilka is shaking now, partly with cold, but partly, too, it seems, with her surges of emotion. She flinches away from the reach that doesn't quite reach her, backing up until her back is flat against the door she was so recently looking through. She looks scared, now; genuinely frightened, somehow, despite Sibella's obvious kindness. "How can you make it right if you can't take me home?" she wants to know. "I don't belong here. It isn't right. The crabs-- the /island/. It needs us. It needs /me/. Why won't you let us go home?"
Now thoughtful, Sibella's expression takes on a distant look, as though having an inner conversation - not unlike a rider communing with his dragon. She taps the baby's back lightly with her fingertips absently, then draws her gaze back into the present, to Rilka. "I have no authority here, but perhaps we can get it cleared to have a dragonrider take you home. Perhaps not to stay, but you must know what that storm did. Surely you wouldn't rather have weathered the storm on the island unaided? I speak for the majority of the Weyr when I say we do not want your unhappiness." She cocks her head at Rilka, wondering at the strange fear this girl has. Having never been outside the Weyr, herself, she cannot imagine wanting to be elsewhere, or feeling unease in the presence of any Weyrfolk.
"No, I need to stay. I /need/ to." Rilka bypasses the rest of what Sibella says to concentrate on that: the prospect of home. "We shouldn't be here. Everyone keeps saying that the winter has been so terribly bad, and it's because of /us/. Because we're not there to look after the weather. I need to calm it down. I need to-- the storm would never have been that bad if we'd been there. It was a test, and we failed it, and I need to go /home/." She's rambling now, desperation so audible in her tone; her eyes reach for Sibella, hopeful and pleading.
Another woman from the lower caverns comes to Sibella, muttering something about bedtime and the children, darting glances warily at Rilka. Sibella reluctantly gives over the baby, then turns back to Rilka, folding her now-empty arms. Making an attempt at understanding the woman's logic, she returns it with what she feels is the same. "Well then, if there was a test to be failed, you did not fail it. /We/ did take you away, and thus /we/ failed the test. Nothing that happened was any fault of your own, and you are free from blame." While at a loss as to how to convince the girl that weather is uncontrollable, she simply lets the matter go and concentrates on diverting the guilt and responsibility that Rilka seems to be feeling. The pleading expression in the girl's eyes catch Sibella off-guard, and again the motherly feeling takes over, and Sibella starts on a pleading tack of her own. "Dear, look to the orphans among you. Would you really have us put them out into this cold, stormy weather while you attempt to placate it? Would you have us leave them to freeze and die? And if you leave them here, who will look after them? Us, who know nothing of your ways?" This being the opposite of her true feelings of the orphans, she herself wanting to round them all up and take over the care of them. But this is beside the here and now, this want to calm and soothe the girl before her.
"No," whispers Rilka, the word apparently her personal word of the day. "We failed. We let you take us away with promises of warm clothes and safety. It was wrong of us to agree. It was wrong of our /council/." She can't possibly be a member of said council, not given her age, and especially not given her obviously wobbly mental stability, but she's clearly taking partial responsibility. "You can't have our children. You won't raise them right. They need the ocean, and they need to /understand/. You'll teach them wrong. We all need to go home, back to the way it was, so that we can all be safe. We /need/ to. Why can't you help us?" A tear slides down her dirty face, and with one hand, she wipes vaguely at it. "Please."
Sibella is so very, very helpless in the face of the girl's tears, of the apparent weight of responsibility and homesickness and guilt. Even as a tear slides down the cheek of the other, a steady flow begins from Sibella's eyes. She is speechless, unknowing and out of all the right things to say. To be ripped from the Weyr and all she holds dear, to be torn from the daily responsibilities that are her own, that are her /right./ She is so torn, certainly not wanting to allow a waif like this to return to that island-waste, but wanting to terribly to be able to see this face -before now unknown to her- smiling and free of burden. This face and so many, too many like it. Sibella groans and sits in a chair set against the wall, covering her face with her hands. So terribly heavy, the burden of so many people, and Sibella takes it as though it is solely hers. "Where is the Weyrleader when you need him?" She says aloud.
Sibella's reaction seems to startle Rilka, skittish as she already is. There isn't anywhere for her to back into further, not with her back already at the wall, but she wraps her arms around her shoulders more tightly than ever, instead. "You have to tell him that we need to go back. You /have/ to. If we don't--" she swallows; she apparently takes this deadly seriously. "It could be catastrophic."
Sibella straightens herself and regains her composure. She folds her hands in her lap and gazes at the girl quietly for a beat. "We can talk to the Weyrleader. Either together, or I'll go myself. I will /not/ ask for you to go back, but I do think..." she pauses, and taps her lip thoughtfully. Her next words are to herself, muttered low. "I'm going to need advice on this. Never knew any of you felt this way, anyhow. How could I? Oh, these poor babies." She looks up at Rilka with sad, pitying eyes. "I'll do what I can to sort things out. If I could promise more, I would..." The left she leaves unspoken; that she can't promise more because she simply doesn't want, even after this peculiar conversation, to send the exiles "home." What better place to raise the babies up than in the Weyr?
Shuddering, Rilka looks absolutely terrified at mention of the Weyrleader:her head shakes, over and over again. "We have to go back," she says, drawing away from the door. "You have to tell them that we need to go back. Everything is wrong. /Everything/. Tell him for me. Convince him." She seems to have missed the fact that Sibella doesn't intend to argue for them to go back. Perhaps it's simply the wonder of someone who is listening - more or less. "I want... where do I sleep here?" She's lost.
Sibella takes on her best, most comforting smile, and herds the girl toward the proper door as best she can, trying at once not to frighten her and to shoo her in the correct direction. "Over toward that corridor there... here, just follow me, sweetling."
However fragile Rilka is, she /still/ doesn't take kindly to being mothered; the glance she aims up at Sibella as she's herded is unhappy, even-- offended? It's hard to tell, even with those expressive eyes. She doesn't glance back as she heads through the door, but she does say one final thing: "Make them fix it. Make them send us home. You have to." And then she's gone.
Sibella sighs and returns to her original seat by the hearth, where the fire still dances cheerfully. The lack of children and the other women makes her restless after recent events, and she quickly decides to resolve the matter as soon as humanly possible. She again stands, this time purposefully, and strides across the cavern and out into the chilly bowl. A beat later, she is back inside, grabbing a cape to drape around her already wind-ruffled clothing.