"It's like there's someone right behind you, you know? Like when you're training in combat and you're supposed to be doing the move, but you know that your teacher is right behind you, and every once in awhile you'll feel a little tug on your arm, moving you into the right position?" Arlemis runs his hand along the lining of the coat of the Armor of the Scattered Petal. "It's like that."
Tierney's hand goes to his waist, where Richal's Flail is fastened. "Yeah, I know what you mean. Do you ever get the feeling that it's, ah, judging you?"
"A little bit... watch it up ahead."
"Yeah, I see him."
"Okay... yeah, I think... I don't know. What do you know about the Scattered Petal?"
Tierney thinks, freezing for a moment and fading into the bricks as someone passes by. "An old group, very old. They were wiped out hundreds of years ago when they sacrificed themselves in some great battle."
"No, I mean, what do... did... they stand for?" Arlemis draws the shadows around him.
"Good, basically. They were, well, scofflaws, rogues, that sort of thing, but they fought for good."
"Oathmaker must have hated them."
"Oh, yeah. Big time."
"Good. 'Cause I get the sense that the armor likes me, but, you know, I wanted to make sure. I didn't want to..."
"Not get healed in mid-battle?"
Arlemis glares, Tierney thinks. "I was gonna say, disappoint it. It's... it's old. And it's powerful. And I think it's something... someone, maybe... that I'd like to be like."
Tierney gives him a small smile, which Arlemis probably sees.
This conversation goes more or less entirely unnoticed by the average person on the street. As do the participants. If a passerby sees anything, it's a vague, shadowy shape that blends into nothingness when stared at directly. Arlemis refers to it as training, as keeping in practice. Tierney calls it skulking. He's got Arly's Shiftskin ring, since he needs it to have a chance of keeping up with Arly in his shadow-armor.
And because training works best with an incentive program, there's twenty gold riding on who gets seen first.
They've gone through most of town, and are on the walls, now, skirting by the guards and talking in barely-audible whispers that only the two of them have trained enough to hear. It's a cold night -- even in an even year, Fourmon can still have some chilly nights -- and the sky is a deep blue with clouds of stars spilling across the heavens. Arly and Tierney creep by a guard who doesn't even glance their way. It's almost too easy. Tierney is a little weirded out by the whole thing. It's not that reassuring to find out how easy it is to sneak through town.
They come around one of the subtowers, where the wall bows out in a semicircle to allow the towers, full of arrow- and spellslits, to project out over the prospective battlefield. Arly's in the lead, and he comes around the corner, and then, surprisingly, stops. And, to Tierney's eyes, almost falls out of the shadows. He ducks back in, but something isn't right. His armor isn't working -- the shadows aren't drawing around him like they should, and it's just Arlemis trying to hide.
Tierney looks past him, and sees her.
Leny's sitting with her legs dangling over the edge of the wall. She's wearing a dress that, honestly, has to leave her a little chilly. It's not outright sulty or anything, but after seeing Leny in full plate so often, the notion of her having arms and legs is a bit surprising. In the starlight, her skin is an almost perfect white. She could almost be a faerie, riding the moonlight. Except that she's always been on the other end of the spectrum from the fey.
"The thing is," she says, staring out toward the woods, "I almost had myself convinced."
Tierney holds still, except to glance toward Arlemis, who's back behind the corner.
"Relax, Tierney. You can turn off the ring."
Tierney raises an eyebrow, and then wills the ring to leave him alone. He comes into full view -- it's a bit of an odd experience. "How did you know I was here?"
"For starters, I saw you a little when you first came around the corner." She's still not looking your way. "And then there's the other part."
"Oh?"
"There's something in you, something dark. Sometime last year, something changed. I don't know what it was," she says, "but it changed all of us. I'm no sage..." She chuckles. "But I have all these feelings I don't... I can't understand. And you have a darkness in you. I can always tell when you're around. I don't think you're evil, but something happened, something that did something to you, to all of us..."
Tierney looks off toward where she's looking. Trees, pretty much.
"Maybe some day you'll tell us about it. You almost did, back there in the Perishing Fall." Leny smiles. It's not entirely real. "A lot of almosts, back there."
Tierney glances toward the shadows, but Arlemis is staying still. "You said you'd almost convinced yourself..."
She hugs herself against the cold, looks back out over the wall. "You know, there are three things that everyone knows about elves. Elves are graceful, elves are wise in the ways of magic, and elves have these little pointy ears. And I've always..." She stops, kind of exhales a laugh through her nose. "I've always been one for three." She flicks her hair back to reveal her ears. "Wouldn't know arcane magic if it came up and bit me on the ass, and as for graceful?" She looks at Tierney. "Yeah. 'Nuff said.
"And I had almost convinced myself that it didn't matter. I could be a good paladin, I could fight for the Sky Queen, and it didn't matter that I'd never be able to dance or do a damn cartwheel or anything like that."
"I think that's fair," Tierney says. By now it's incredibly uncomfortable. It's far too late for Arlemis to come out, and the whole thing seems weird.
"Arly... he's a half-elf, just like me, but he's got everything I don't. He's dashing, he's quick on his feet, he moves like..." She stops, sighs. "I was so angry at him for that. And then I almost got over it. You know, I was really close. I was going to do it. I wasn't as clumsy as I'd been before. I moved a little better. I was just about at the point where... where someone wouldn't be embarrassed to, you know... dance with me, or something."
There's a muffled sound from the shadows. Tierney doesn't even look. Leny doesn't hear it.
"And then," Tierney says, "the Hammer."
"That god-damned hammer." Leny punches her palm with a balled fist. "And all the little lies I'd told myself all those years, I didn't need them anymore, and I was dancing and cartwheeling and all of that..."
"I heard what happened with your church. They took it from you."
"Great. That's really what I need. To be town gossip."
"That's not exactly --"
She raises a hand. "I know. I'm sorry. It's just... it's just hard. It was there, you know? All of it. Everything I ever wanted to be. I was so damned happy. And now..."
"Now sucks," Tierney says flatly, and gets an honest-to-gods laugh from Leny.
"That it does."
"You want to come to the Broken Dagger? Have a drink?"
She shakes her head. "Doesn't feel like me right now. You know, you've got all this darkness, but you can still hang out in the light. You can sneak through the town all you like being the dark shadow, but you can also pop on down to the tavern and sing or dance or, you know, whatever you like."
Tierney smiles, faintly, hoping this comes out as a joke. "I've seen you sing."
She drops her face into her hands. "Yeah, that was wonderful. I don't think I could show my face in that place ever again." She looks back up. "They say that half-elves kind of get the short end of the stick, walking between two worlds. I've always seen it as being on the wall, looking down at both sides, trying to figure out which side to pick." She takes a loose stone from the wall and chucks it side-arm out from the wall. "I think that maybe this is where I'm supposed to be. Out here, on this wall, just looking. Not picking sides, not trying to fix myself, not falling for... just figuring out who the hell I am, you know?"
Tierney doesn't, not entirely, but being a bard helps. "Yeah, I think I do."
"Have a nice night, Tierney."
"You too, Leny..." For the life of him, he wishes there was something else he could say. He has this sense of there being something, something that would bring her down off that wall, and if he was just a little smarter or a little wiser or a little... something... he'd know what it was. But he doesn't. And if Arlemis knows what it is, he's not saying.
Tierney turns around, heads back around the corner, and nearly bumps into a silent Arlemis.
"Well, I feel like a heel," Tierney says. "Thanks for joining us."
"It just seemed... and then she was..."
"Yeah." Tierney reaches into his pocket, comes out with four platinum coins. "Here you go. Use them to buy someone something pretty, huh?"
"Well, she said she had some way of detecting you. I'm not sure that entirely counts --"
"Shut up, Arly."
"Right. Okay."
And then the two shadows disappear again into the night.
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