drusilla → i have lived with shades, a shade; i am hung with graveyard flowers
The thought of waking Mayaseralle only to put her back to sleep at Riva seems entirely too much for Veda, and unfair to a child whose rest has been troubled lately; the idea of managing to keep her asleep for the return trip strikes her as laughable. Her luck hasn't been quite that good lately and being not nearly desperate enough to actually ( Read more... )
The tumbling water drew her in. It was singing to her. Soft and sweet. Like the silver bells that somebody had forgotten to plant in the garden.
Drusilla sat down, allowing her fingers to break the rippled surface of the water and her dress to pool around her legs.
Footsteps. Someone who wanted to shatter the pieces and the quiet. The light cut through her shadows like a knife. The girl cut through the shadows like a knife.
"Pretty girls shouldn't wander on their own."
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Knives were something Veda was comfortably familiar with; she carried one more often than she didn't, and the glint of it hid behind the faintly displeased expression she wore as she examined Drusilla in her garden, by her fountain. The sewing was abandoned but she kept a hold of her lamp as she took a step forward (bare feet, pale gown, a green rope tied under her breasts and no adornments at the late hour) to get a better look.
"Pretty witches do whatever they like," she said, succinctly. "What do you mean to be doing on my property?"
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She wasn't just pretty, she was beautiful, but she was wearing a face that didn't belong to her. She looked like Morgana but she didn't smell like her, and she had a power that was all her own.
At first, Drusilla didn't know if she should be angry, amused or intrigued.
In the end, curiosity - killed the cat, it did - won out.
"That isn't your face."
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The differences were mostly subtle; Veda was taller by a few inches, and her near-black eyes were nothing like Morgana's pale blue, looking out of that familiar face with a chilly refusal to back down in the slightest.
"You know one of the others, then," she said, scrutinizing Drusilla as if she were trying to decide which of her doppelgangers it'd make more sense for her to know. (She'd guess Mary, to be perfectly honest.) "I'm afraid that makes it no less my own. What do you want?"
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She had coal black eyes, this new girl. Drusilla wanted to claw them out. They weren't right. They weren't bright and blue and secretive.
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Not bright nor blue, but they burned; she kept few secrets, ostensibly, which was to say she kept a great deal of them.
"Oh, mysticism," she said, hanging her lamp from the hook and sitting down; she had come down to spend time in her own garden and she had no more intention of being driven out than was evident in Drusilla. "You'll find nothing in my water but a propensity to burn."
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"I can always find secrets in the places people don't want to look."
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Knowing nothing but what she could sense on her own was enough to call her brave or foolish or both. The word she heard most often was 'willful', and however it was meant she'd always tended to like the appellation.
She wasn't sure what Drusilla was, besides not human and clearly dangerous, but she was relatively sure that the other woman would be inconvenienced if the fountain she was so near were to burst into flames. It was a comforting thought.
"Well," she said, simply, "where else would you find secrets?"
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A lot of people could see secrets, but very few people wanted to look.
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"They're all the same," Veda answered, taking up her needle and thread instead of the book; sewing let her occupy her hands while her mind was free to work, and something about the sharp point and easy control seemed appropriate to the moment. "If they wanted to be looked at, if their keepers wanted to look, then they wouldn't be secrets any more."
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"Oh," her smile glinted like the needle, "does one ever run out of space for secrets?"
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"Yes. If you filled yourself up with something else."
Like blood or guts or bones. Ordinary things that tasted sweet but filled a person right to the brim.
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"I won't ever worry about that." Veda felt limitless; knew herself to be confined only by her own mind, and saw it as no confine at all.
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She was a curious thing, Drusilla. Curious enough to find herself in Veda's garden in the first place and curious enough to try and pick apart the girl now she'd found her. A girl both familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and ugly, lost and found.
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What did she worry about?
Veda felt struck by the question, unwelcomely enough that she bridled at her own discomfort- she'd give an answer only to defy her own feelings. (It was the sort of thing she did.) "If my daughter shall be a Beldaran or a Polgara."
In a hundred years, would she be mourning the babe that slept safely inside? Or would they stand side by side as she did with her own mother, untouched by time? Was there power sleeping inside Mayaseralle, or would she raise her only to outlive her?
It would be years before she knew.
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