agentlelog | walking in a field of fog

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walking in a field of fog

Who: You and Fayura
When: Today, a week after the Strangers' arrivals
Where: The Queen's Residence and the Old Town Bazaar
What: Q&A
Warnings: n/a

EARLY MORNING, THE QUEEN'S RESIDENCE
The morning is cold and dark. Inhaling the frigid air is so shocking that those who aren't expecting it cough and wheeze with their first breath. No one really wants to make their way to the training field. Even the Queen's court moves sluggishly, but move they do with muttered recriminations against Allairavar. Cold weather doesn't stop training.

A warming spell around the field keeps it warm enough to practice, and bobbling witchlights and steady e-line floodlights keep the darkness at bay. All along one side of the practice area are weapons with blades live and dulled. The court eases onto the field alongside the Strangers with sighs and grumbles aplenty. No one likes practice on chilly mornings, but they like Allairavar's retaliation against tardiness even less.

Everyone has paired off by the time Allairavar strides out of the manor home with his arm around a woman's shoulders. In the harsh e-line lights and softer witchlight, it's clear she hasn't been well and still isn't entirely healed. Sunken golden eyes scan the field, and her expression is vaguely nauseated. She trembles, either from weakness or discomfort, as Allairavar pulls away and calls in two bladed sticks—weapons caught somewhere between sword and ax.

"Let's go," he tells her, and she takes one stick from his hand as court and Strangers alike look on.

Another male follows them in, sleekly predatory in his slow prowl around the practice field. A dangerous look glazes his eyes, and he circles the whole field once before making a second, tighter pass around the marked off area where Allairavar and the woman square off.

Members of the court trade wary looks, sharing them with the Strangers. More than a few murmur things like, "Verim will go for his throat if he pushes her too hard," and, "Should she even be out of bed yet?"

It seems Allairavar's rule for training is absolute. Even the Queen takes part. Under his watchful eye and tutelage, they run through a warm up that clearly exhausts her, but when he asks if they should stop, she snarls at him and pushes on for another five minutes. Only then does she sit off to the side of the field and begin stretching.

As she lifts from a leg stretch, she catches your eye and offers a small, shy smile. "Would you like to stretch with me? Allairavar's workouts are always hardest the first day back," she says softly.

Allairavar's exercises may be hard, but she looks like she's seconds from collapsing from exhaustion. If she spent this last week resting and still looks so wan and thin and weak, her initial injuries must have been severe.

MID-AFTERNOON, THE BAZAAR PAVILION
Snow drifts lazily through frigid air. Though temperatures hover around freezing, the Old Town Bazaar bustles with activity. Slowly, people rebuild homes and shops burned by the Hunter Guild, and for perhaps the first time in the past fifty years, sentiment has turned against the Hunters.

Strangers out and about in the Bazaar hear:

A landen woman, to her friend: It's not right what the Hunters did, burning down our homes, too.

A well-to-do Blood male, at a food stall: …believe what that pompous Grand Master has to say about a Queen of the Blood.

There's some commotion toward the center of the Bazaar, where the Queen has settled at the pavilion with a group of landen and Blood children. Her only guard seems to be the elegant man seated across from her at the pavilion's wooden table, his eyes watchful as the people pass by.

The Queen herself looks unwell. Though she wears a bright smile and her golden eyes glitter with laughter, they are sunken and dark smudges circle them. Her arms are thin, little more than skin wrapped around bone. In spite of the freezing weather, she wears a tunic with wide sleeves that pool around her elbows as she holds up a small plank of wood and tugs at a ribbon embedded in it. Here, in the chilly winter morning, the woman who brought some twenty Strangers across the vast distances of many worlds looks very human, very mortal, and very fragile.

Her eyes meet yours as she looks up, and you feel a gentle brush against your mind. No matter how familiar or strange mental communication is, no matter how disconcerting or easy you find it, the touch strikes you as incredibly polite. *We can talk, if you'd like,* she tells you over a psychic thread.

Should you join her, you find respite from the cold. A warming spell makes the pavilion pleasantly toasty, explaining why no one wears a jacket and, maybe, the Queen's clothes. She's dressed plainly in a loose, knitted tunic and fitted breaches. She wears no coronet and no visible jewelry except for a golden chain that tucks beneath her tunic.

Fayura offers a quick smile in your direction as she guides the end of the ribbon in her hand through the thin strip of wood in a twisting loop. She offers a soft-spoken explanation to the children before inviting them to try—and inviting the Blood to explain the magic to the landens, too.

As the children turn to their task, Fayura turns to you. "I'm glad to see you made it through the Hunters' attack relatively unscathed." She sets her plank down and taps her mug. Steam beings to rise from it and she lifts it to her lips with a sigh. "And I apologize that I wasn't there to greet you." A wry smile tugs at her lips; her appearance is, in her mind, enough of an explanation for why. "How have you found Draega?"

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[ if he were in a better mood, percy might've actually laughed at that exchange. as it is, he raises his eyebrows at the whole thing. ]

I can see that, [ admitted. both about the steward, and about the list. verim actually sort of surprises him -- but fayura doesn't seem like the type of queen who encourages people to be overly deferent to her. ]

Honestly? I agree with him. Not about not sending us back -- can't speak for everyone, but I want to go home, and I'm pretty sure my friends do too -- but there has to be a better way than you nearly dying. [ or actually dying, that'd also be bad. ] I want to help find it.

[ he hesitates, then adds, ]

But I'm gonna need you to be honest with me. Do you really intend to send us back home?

Yes.

[No hesitation in her voice. Steely determination in her eyes.

The Blood guard their minds carefully, keeping their thoughts walled away behind mental shields. The core of the self rests within the mind, and a mind left unguarded is a mind that can be broken. But as she speaks to Percy, Fay releases some of those shields. Surface thoughts flit around her, whispers of her immediate concerns—she's a little hungry, she actually would like to nap but won't give her Prince the satisfaction of admitting it.

Beneath the surface thoughts, more ingrained patterns of behavior and the flavor of her words. With her mental shields lowered, there can be no lies, and she does not intend to lie to the Strangers. She's asked for their help, but she will not coerce it with lies or demand it by force.]

Yes, I absolutely intend to send you home. And I wouldn't have brought anyone here if I didn't think I could send you back.

[ percy watches her with inscrutable sea-green eyes.

at first it isn't clear what she's doing, but as more of her filters through the connection, he starts to realize. percy doesn't overstep, doesn't try to push -- he'd hate it if someone tried to do that to him, and he has no interest in intruding -- but lets the sensation of her honesty wash over him.

and when she answers, he has to admit he can't sense a trace of deception on her.

he wraps his hands around his mug, tapping the side with his fingers idly. ]

Then if there's anything I can do to help you, I'll do it.

[Fay withdraws, rebuilding her shields and ignoring Verim's tight-lipped look of displeasure for the moment.]

Thank you, Percy. If you find any books on old Craft... [She sighs and shakes her head.] We've lost so much. The longer you live, the more chances you have to forget, I suppose.

[She sips her coffee, watching the children idly.]

Do you have any other questions for me? Can I help you with anything else right now?

[ books, he thinks, great. that's a job annabeth would be much better at than he is; she's the one with the knowledge and strategy, who loves reading, while percy's more the guy you point at a monster that needs killing.

but since that's the only suggestion fayura has for him about this, he's going to have to try.

there's a moment where he opens his mouth to say something, and then notices a couple walking by. they're giving him a pretty dirty glare, and he frowns back in turn, turning back to take a sip of his coffee with a grumble.

he! apologized! about the fountains! but some people just can't let it go...blah blah blah, been on the property for centuries, blah blah family heirloom, blah blah priceless. ]

Think you could help with some landen with hardcore grudges?

[ he's kidding, really. ]

[She bursts out laughing at his question.]

Isn't that why you're here?

[Smiling, she nods her head toward the landen couple.]

If apologies aren't working, perhaps bribery will?

So I hear, anyway.

[ he says, frowning; and his frown only deepens at her suggestion. ]

Uh, even if it would, I don't have anything to bribe them with. I'm not exactly rolling in cash, and they made it pretty clear their fountain I wrecked is, like, priceless.

[ if he sounds dubious, well...it's a fountain. it wasn't even that nice-looking before percy destroyed it. ]

That makes two of us.

[She taps her finger against the table, thinking.]

Bribes don't have to be money. As my Prince well knows, the right kind of treat— [Verim makes a sweeping gesture toward the coffee as Fay speaks.] —can be even more effective. As for the fountain, it certainly wasn't priceless. Lives are priceless, things are not, but things are hard to repair and replace. [She's taking his side.

But, then, her fountain wasn't the one destroyed.] Maybe time is the best bandage for this wound.

You might be right about that.

[ it'd be easier if fayura were easier to dislike. she says lives are priceless, as if she cares what happens to her people, what happens to them. she says i won't make you do anything; she says i absolutely intend to send you home, and opens her mind to make her honesty clear.

it's possible that she's just that good an actress. but percy doesn't get that sense off her.

(it doesn't hurt that she's taking his side, but that's not really the thing that matters here.) ]

Okay, I do have questions, [ he says after a beat. ] Why did the Hunter Guild try to kill us? Why do they hate you so bad? -- uh. No offense.

[Ah, the Hunter Guild.

Fay's expression doesn't shut down, but it pinches. This isn't a topic she enjoys because it's hard. It points to the problems that her people caused.]

The Hunters hate the Blood. They are the zealous, the fervent, the maniacal. [She pauses.] Well. Most of them. Master Hunter Raya certainly fits that description, though others, you'll find, burn cold instead of hot.

They take in the angriest landens, the ones who have been personally wronged by the Blood in horrible ways, and turn that very understandable anger into insanity. They coax it to grow until it eclipses all reason at the same time they teach someone how to kill.

So, part of it is simply that they are what they are. But part of it is certainly that what I want to do, healing the rift between the Blood and the landens? That will take away what gives them meaning. If they can't point to the Blood as the source of all their woes and misfortune, they will lose their identity. To be honest with you, I use their hatred of me as a barometer. The more they loathe me, the more I must be doing something right.

[ he listens to all that with his head canted, eyebrows furrowed. ]

So, in other words, they're psycho assassins who want to kill the Blood, including you -- and us -- but don't want to stop fighting, either.

[ that isn't too hard to imagine, to understand. he just has to think back to the likes of luke castellan, ethan nakamura, half-bloods who were so embittered by the gods' mistakes they were willing to ally with kronos and try destroying the world.

(didn't you realize how useless it all is? all the heroics -- being pawns of the gods. they should've been overthrown thousands of years ago.) ]

They knew what you were doing -- or they knew something was going on that night you brought us here. But Allairavar said you barely told anyone anything.

Yes, that about sums it up.

[She nods. Verim does as well, though now he watches the roofs of the buildings around them with even more hawkish intensity.]

I didn't tell anyone until the morning of. Not telling the court at all would have been worse, but I knew they'd figure out a way to stop me if they knew too far in advance. By then, parts of the Craft had already been set in motion. It had to be finished.

[Fayura runs her finger around the lip of her mug in slow revolutions.]

And, of course, they insisted I bring an escort, so I took Verim. He's the only one who'd understand the web.

[Verim's expression darkens. He hates that web for what it did to her, how it could have destroyed her.]

[ percy notices verim's reaction, and raises his hands placatingly. ]

Again: we're gonna find a way to make the next time safer for you. No more of this almost-dying.

[ he drops his hands, then goes on, ]

Thing is, if you only told the court about this, that means someone went behind your back and told the Hunters. Or, [ he adds, thinking of peter's suggestions, ] they have some other way of spying on you. Either option is bad.

[Verim's dark expression turns even darker at Percy's implication that someone in the court might have betrayed her. That same, glazed-eyed expression on Allairavar's face the night the Stranger's arrives settles on Verim's, and Fay leans across the table to take his hand.]

Leash it, Prince. [Her voice is steady and calm, soft and soothing.

He looks at her like he might rip into her next, but the moment passes and he relaxes, just a little.

Fay keeps her hand on his as she turns back to Percy.] It's... not impossible that someone in the First Circle would betray me. Blood males crave service. For some of them, for Verim and Allairavar and Loren, I'm the Queen they need to serve. For others, I'm better than nothing, but the loyalty doesn't go any deeper than that.

[ percy doesn't really expect verim to take his anger out on him, and he doesn't really expect fayura to let that happen, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. so while fayura soothes him, percy reaches into his pocket and pulls out riptide. in its concealed form, it just looks like a cheap ballpoint pen with ancient greek text engraved down the side (anaklusmos); and percy doesn't try to draw attention to it, just sets it beside him on the bench before reaching back for that mug of coffee. ]

Crave service? [ his eyebrows draw together, and he has a vivid flash of memory to the amazons. ] What's that supposed to mean?

[Fay doesn't notice the pen, but Verim does. He makes pointed eye contact with Percy before glancing at the pen, as if to ask, "Really?" Like all Warlord Princes, he's too protective to dismiss anything, and he can think of at least six ways to kill a man using pen and no Craft. Push the power of the Jewels behind an attack... maybe fifteen ways.]

It's hard to say where the drive comes from, but Blood males will always seek out a Queen to serve. They're drawn to it. It's why Warlord Princes are so dangerous: they'll do anything to defend their Queen, their lover, their family. [Fay's fingers brush back and forth over Verim's hand, and he laces their fingers together a moment later, looking content and pleased.] I suppose that's how Blood society grew. Strong males sought out Queens because they were intrigued by the Craft she wielded, and they allied themselves with her. Circles of protection grew around her, spiraling out into society.

For some of my court, I'm the Queen they need to serve, and I'm enough for them. For others, I offer them the direction they need and a comfortable leash for their tempers. They get along with me, but they'll leave one day. There are a few who... don't fit with me. We're like two two puzzle pieces you think should fit, but there's too much space between the tab on my piece and the cut on theirs. They want what I offer, but I can't give them what they need. Oil and water.

[A momentary pause. She glances at Verim, suspecting what she says next will pique his temper.]

That's... part of why I waited to say anything.

[He gives her a disgruntled look but that's the extent of his reaction.]

[ percy frowns right back at verim, unapologetic. he's not going to try killing fayura with a pen, geez, though -- to be fair, riptide is a blade in disguise. and he's not wholly convinced that the sword, which can't hurt mortals, wouldn't affect her -- not with as much magic as she has at her disposal.

still, though. ]

That's...weird. [ a beat, then, ] No offense, I guess.

[ having to say that three times in one conversation is probably pushing it...but it doesn't click for him immediately that this isn't so hard for him to relate to, was why he'd found allairavar so understandable the first time they spoke one-on-one. percy jackson would do anything to protect his loved ones, no matter the cost -- for himself, or for anyone else.

he makes a face, gearing up for another no offense, but, because he can't help saying -- ]

So why not get rid of them? They're obviously not trustworthy. They almost got a lot of people killed, and we probably won't be so lucky next time.

None taken.

[She waves a dismissive hand before lifting her coffee and taking a long sip. Cultures are different. It surprises her just how different the Strangers' many worlds seem to be from her own, but she knows she must take this in stride. Ignorance festers in silence.]

In this instance, I think it's best to keep their poison in my own home. I'm sure by now you've realized how much of Blood society balances on the edge of a knife and how easy it is to throw us into chaos when trust is broken. Because so much hinges on trust, when trust is broken, our action is swift and decisive. The males in my court who aren't mine haven't done anything to confirm they've broken trust with me.

[Her lips press together and she bobbles her head to a thought she's just had.]

Oh, I could weave a tangled web to pull their secrets from the walls or shatter the shields around their minds to learn the truth, but then I would be breaking trust with every person who lives in Draega. They must be able to rely on the fact that I won't invade their minds without good reason.

But if someone were to discover proof of this betrayal, then I could take action.

I guess it's up to you.

[ and he moves to take another sip of coffee himself -- right as fayura casually talks about shattering mind shields and invading minds and he has to go down coughing so he doesn't, like, spew coffee on the queen or anything.

YOU CAN'T JUST SAY THINGS LIKE THAT?? holy hera. ]

Uh yeah, [ he says, coming up for air, ] we wouldn't want that.

[ we really wouldn't. but after a beat, the last thing she says connects. ]

So -- oh. You can't really look for proof yourself, but if someone happened to find something out for you....

Edited 2019-02-17 04:29 (UTC)

[Both Fay and Verim look alarmed at Percy's sudden coughing fit, and Fay reaches for him with a healing spell at the ready. She doesn't need it, though, and she eases back as Percy catches her breath.]

We wouldn't, [she agrees softly.

Worry not, Percy! There are lines that will not be crossed, and this is one of them.

Inclining her head, Fay takes a sip from her cup. A pleased expression curls her lips, leaving her looking like a cat quite pleased it got the cream.]

Precisely right. No one has outright done anything wrong, by which I mean they haven't run through the city center shouting that they've betrayed me. That knife-edge of trust extends not just to how I use my Craft but to how I use my political and social power. [She rolls her eyes, suddenly looking much more like a beleaguered young woman than Queen.] Frankly, it's exhausting.

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walking in a field of fog

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