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shadeside · 7 years ago

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Petra stuff; A little ditty about the way she found one of her uncommon items.

She was Heloise when she met the Lady Rockfurther.

She'd heard the name in a tavern a town over, eavesdropping on the conversation of two shrewish men. That Heloise of the such-and-suches apparently had a real problem with staying in her knickers- Not in the sex way, because that would have been terrifically boring, but in the 'spontaneous stripping in public' way, and listening to the account of the last time the young woman had dropped trow and run screeching through the streets, Petra had snorted into her honeyed wine.

Heloise, even. Like someone had wanted a sweet baby Eloise and then the babe had come out caterwauling and flinging clothing to the wind and the poor parents had realized they had a little more than they bargained for- Something a little hellish.

Delightful.

She tucked that into her pocket, and when she came upon the border city of Pugenia, she pulled it out again and slipped it on like a shawl- A softer Heloise than her namesake, pauperish and timid, but it was a delightful private joke nonetheless, and one she enjoyed very much as she picked up threads of rumor about the Lady Rockfurther.

The Lady was..Spent. Infamous for her impotence, she'd been an imposing figure once. Her husband had been a Lord, a something-or-other to the inconsequential King of the mountainous region. Then he had died, and he had left his wife a great deal of money and very little else. If Heloise understood correctly, once upon a time she'd been a fierce badger of a woman. But the untimely demise of her husband had cast her adrift, and she'd fallen swiftly into obscurity. Her fortune remained, but her social status had crumbled even as the once keen edges of her aging mind were blunted, and by the time Heloise was birthed into existence she was a rich and lonely and vaguely pitiful widow.

She held parties, though; Fantastic events with food and music that bled money at the seams. And when she held her parties, people came to the towering and pristine Downwillow Hall (which was, mystifyingly, up; This Heloise would resent greatly on her first trek up the tall hill above the city proper) and ate and drank and smiled and soaked up the dribbles of fortune..And then, they left. And the Hall was empty again, at least until the Lady grew desperate enough to host another event, luring company in with the promise of luxury.

She couldn't have concocted a better mark if she'd written her herself; And so Heloise skulked about town until she learned all she needed to know about the Lady, and the next time the tall windows lit up with flickering candlelight and dazzling magelights, she made her way up, up. She batted her eyelashes at the late-coming guests, ignored the sneers, smiled at the interested glances- And whispered to the doorman, sweet words laced with magic velvety and deep as shadow when no one was looking. I play such fine music, she'd breathed, a hand on his arm, steering him as deftly as if she held the reins of a horse. The Lady would like to meet me, you must let me inside..

The Lady required no spells to be warmed, no arcane coercion; Just lowered eyes and hands just restless enough to suggest she was managing her nerves, a lip caught just so between the teeth, and, "If I might play, just for a little while.. I'll make it worth your time, I promise, and perhaps just a bit of coin.. I promise, none of your guests have ever heard my songs before."

And the Lady Rockfurther, a frail thing with creased-paper skin and a curved back, had cooed at her, and oh, certainly-ed her, and Heloise had found a likely corner to settle in, and drawn the Sunside kalimba out from her pack. It was gaudy and cheap, but she'd tuned it as well as she could, and it made a pleasing enough sound. Besides, half of the appeal was the novelty of her; This she knew. If she could play passably, sometimes earning her place was more about being gaunt and grey and strange. She was familiar, now, with the particular look a spectator got when they were paying more attention to the boniness, the angular quality of her fingers than the notes they plucked out. That was well enough. It wasn't about the evening, or the music, or the coin, after all- It was about the moment that came in the wee hours, when the well-to-do people had begun to trickle out the doors, and the Lady was starting to look just a little bit...Bereft, her practiced smile crackling at the edges.

Heloise approached her timidly, head bowed. Deferential, always deferential- Even with this one, who she could surely knock over with a stiff breath. "Is there an inn in town that's..Safe? For a young woman alone," she'd murmured, tucking her hair behind her ear with her fingertips, the gesture of a young, young girl. "I'm never sure- Things do happen.."

The pause was..Just a beat too long, and for an instant, Heloise thought she'd failed. Then, the Lady had reached out and put a papery hand, so light that it felt like it was spun from brittle glass, on her shoulder. It was a wonder the sharp edges of bone there didn't shatter it outright, but if the Lady noticed, she had the manners to keep her opinions to herself.

Instead, she called her "darling", and "poor thing", and invited her to stay. The leftovers from the grand banquet were exquisite- And so was the breakfast, sweet little cakes served not in the fine dining room but in a surprisingly snug kitchen, at a table beneath a window that caught the morning sun in a way that felt fit to melt the bones out of her in the most delicious way.

The transition from the evening, to the day, to the evening again was so seamless she barely had to try. There was some house staff, but besides that, when the Lady wasn't upending her pockets the house was still as a churchyard. And it was such a big house, with so many rooms, powerfully vertical and polished, far too much space for one woman. She only had to.. Forget to leave. And she was welcome without being welcomed, accepted as if she belonged there.

The Lady herself delighted in the company; She would sit and talk to her in a sort of.. Grandmotherly way, about this hobby and that person who was often long dead or rendered unimportant; She was sharp enough to realize sooner rather than later that stories about the elaborate court mishaps of her youth delighted Heloise.. And impaired enough that she never managed to talk for quite longer than Heloise could stand; Because she was impaired. Her mind, quick though it had obviously once been (and still occasionally was), tended to betray her. She would forget herself mid-conversation, lose her words or the thread of the story; Sometimes, Heloise suspected she lost track of where she was, or when. But she was proud, still, even in her diminished state. And so, rather admit her failings, when she was struck by her fits of confusion she would just.. Grow quiet, and withdraw. And Heloise was set free to do as she pleased until her benefactor recovered herself.

And there was a great deal to do in the big house. For the first couple of days, she lined her pockets with delight. But eventually, she was so overwhelmed by how much there was to see that she began to forget to take. The Lady, it seemed, came from a family of "collectors". That was what she called it- "Collecting" antiques, oddities, magical items. It looked quite a bit like hoarding in practice, but hoarding of the most delightful things. There was a clockwork beast in the entryway, some kind of little animal that was like a scaled shrew and that, when wound, clashed its metallic claws together. The table where she ate her breakfast was canopied by a net of fine prisms that cast rainbows down on her face; There was a case in the library filled with ancient, carved stones that sang (Although the Lady seemed deaf to the sound, and these were uncanny enough that she never quite cared to touch them, even on her boldest days). It was a feast for the senses, and without realizing it she found herself feeling..Almost at home.

Even the Lady herself remained bearable as time went on. She was old enough that she was easy. There were no wandering hands, no remarks more off-color than one wistful declaration of, "If I were younger.." that never went any further than that, and might not have meant anything besides. Her stories, when they were coherent and relevant enough, were interesting, and she left her guest to her own devices often, anyway. Eventually, Heloise grew comfortable enough with the old woman to touch, to reach out a light hand and pat the dandelion fluff of her white hair, finding it both airy and surprisingly coarse under her fingers. The old woman had felt it and laughed, and Heloise began to.. Relax with her, almost, by tiny, tiny degrees.

And somewhere along the way she discovered the closed-off wings: The storage wings. They were "dangerous", apparently; Too many things crammed in, all haphazard and any-which-way, for timid young girls named Heloise to explore. So Heloise went to bed, and then Petra got up again, and crept into the fascinating rooms at night.

They were dusty, and dark, and occasionally inhabited by spiders and stinging creatures that scurried out from dark corners, surprisingly aggressive. But the things she found! There was a great deal of junk here, and of crates nailed shut, too tightly sealed to quietly open; Of things bent and tarnished and useless to her. But there were things that were gleaming, too, gold and gemstone; Things that were so old and strange that they fascinated her even though they were made all of dirt and stone. There were things that thrummed with magical energy that she grabbed for, eager and curious, and a few that, like the singing stones in the library, she avoided on account of some instinct she didn't quite understand. There was a mirror that, bafflingly, omitted her reflection; A chalice filled to the brim with a glistening dark liquid, but only when viewed out of the corner of her eye. On one occasion she stumbled unexpectedly upon a great taxidermy bear, the heavy corpse frozen forever upright on stocky hind legs. She'd nearly run into it by the time she noticed it, and this one wasn't magical, at least as far as she could tell. Still, she'd nearly cried out as she staggered away again, and she had avoided that room forever after, haunted by visions of it lumbering slowly, painfully to life the instant she turned her back.

It took her weeks to find the little wooden case. Weeks of lounging the days away, eating her fill until she almost began to gain weight and sprawling on rugs and couches in buttery sunshine while the Lady talked, or knitted with hands too gnarled and knotted to knit even halfway effectively; Weeks of sleeping in a bed so soft she nearly drowned in it, and weeks of forgetting herself. Because that was what it was, really; She forgot herself. She got careless. She slid into the skin of Heloise and found a fit there so comfortable that she lost track of the way out.

And then she found the case.

She didn't find it in the storage wings; Rather, she found it when she finally, finally had the chance to rifle through the Lady's rooms unchecked. She'd been in the Lady's personal rooms before, but only for brief periods of time, or else with the Lady herself for company. The Lady was old and tired easily, and was prone to retiring at odd hours and for unpredictable amounts of time, lingering in her bed or on the soft couches. The door was also, without fail, the only room that was locked if the Lady herself wasn't present, and Petra was poor with locks. At least, if she wanted them to function afterwards, and that was fairly essential if she wanted to be welcome at Downwillow when she was done- And she did, not least of all because there had been a great deal of talk of fruit pies lately. Still, these were the only rooms left that she hadn't been able to prowl through to her heart's content, and it was absolutely maddening.

At last, the opportunity came when the Lady went out to see her doctor. It was the first time she'd gone further out than the front yard since Heloise had arrived, and it was a great to-do to get out of going along herself. There was quite a bit of hand-patting, of the word 'company' and 'darling'-ing and she very nearly had to dig her heels in like an obstinate dog being dragged on a leash to stay behind.

But she got her way eventually, insisting again and again that she was too tired for trips, that she only wanted to lay down. And the maid went with the Lady instead, as was her custom; And Petra went with a collection of hairpins and thin nails and bits and bobs to the locked door.

She understood how locks worked, in theory. And she understood how lock picking might work, too, in the most basic sense. She did not, however, have lock picks, and so began a long process of trial-and-error that would have been infinitely easier if she'd had more than half an idea what she was doing. She cut her finger on the first wire she tried; It bent under the pressure of her hand and slid effortlessly into her skin, raising a thin line of violet blood. That finger went into her mouth, and she swapped hands for her next attempt, only to find that the delicate nail she'd robbed from a forgotten picture frame wasn't delicate enough to fit into the hole. And so on, and so on, until she was left to realize that hairpins were her best bet, and when the lock finally clicked free she hissed with delight.

The rooms inside smelled of dry rose and something medicinal; Ointment and potpourri. The sitting room was plush but cluttered, chaotic with things; the bedroom behind sunny and comfortable. Off to her left was a sprawling closet, big as some houses she'd been in and full of gowns aging but lovely. (She'd tried some of these on, once; None had fit at all, but the Lady had made a remark about having them taken in, because "why not, it's not as if I'll ever wear these old ones again", and Heloise had stroked the emerald fabric draped over her gaunt frame with covetous fingers.)

She made to slip inside, already reaching out to shut the door behind her. One slippered foot hit the rug.. And for a moment, she stopped. A thrill of unease gripped her, so profound that she glanced once again around the room, almost expecting to find someone there, watching. But the room was empty and inviting and still, and she was struck by a new notion as the sensation faded, an image of the maid coming down the hall and finding her there, lurking in the doorway like a fool. So she stole inside, and shut the door behind her- Softly.

She pawed delicately through the desk, first, lifted the cover and shuffled through the papers there with careful fingers. All the letters must have old; She doubted the Lady could read the small print on some of them at all, and the handwriting was all too fine to have come from her shaky fingers. She did see some names she recognized as she skimmed them; Lords and ladies from the stories she'd been told. A chest against the wall was full of silk nothings, soft handkerchiefs and scarves, and she had to resist the urge to shove her arms into it for fear of disturbing them. A lacquered box held tiny pots of paint and dark-haired brushes. She wondered if the Lady had painted, once, or if this was another object she'd picked up as a matter of "collecting". The bristles of the brushes felt stiff under her fingers, as if ancient paint were trapped in them still. There was a brass figure tucked in next to them; A dog, with stern eyes. She resisted the fanciful urge to cover them as she closed the lid, as if it were watching her.

There were pieces that looked like they'd come from some clockwork assemblage like the one in the front room in the first drawer she opened; The next held cases of pinned insects, mundane moths and beetles in next to creatures that looked entirely unlikely, gleaming like gems or glistening like water or double-headed. In a cabinet, a pewter urn that reminded her very much of the maybe-filled vessel she'd found in the dusty dark, although this one never did seem to be full, no matter how she tilted her head or stuck her fingers into it. In another drawer yet, an artfully carved hair-comb that seemed to be made of bone, and a box, wrapped in a handkerchief.

This, she had to lift to unwrap, and she found a dark, glistening wood underneath, a crimson so deep it was nearly black. It felt almost oily under her fingers, and she spent a moment stroking it, trying to decide if the sensation was pleasing or foul. She hadn't yet made up her mind by the time she grew bored and started to fuss with the latch. For one maddening moment, sitting with the case on her knees, she thought she’d found another lock; Then she caught her fingernail under it just so, and flipped the top back.

After some of the things she'd found, she half-expected the unusual box to be crammed full of garbage, but the inside was pristine; A single object lay on a bed of cloth, pillowed delicately in the precise center. It was maybe the size of her palm and fingers, and flat, a rectangle of some kind of thin wood or dense paper. Delicate scrollwork ran along the edges, and a figure dangled down into the frame. Done up all in dark greys and blues and violets, it was upside-down, and she followed the lines of the body down to..

..a face, grey and gaunt, tipped back in what might have been ecstasy or suffering; All angles on a field of dark, wild hair, with a high-bridged nose and blue eyes--

And everything stopped, for an instant, as the shock took her, because she looked down at the box in her lap and she saw Heloise, she saw Petra, she saw an unmistakable image of herself here where none should be. It was old, she could tell it was older than she was by a long shot; The pigment, though vibrant, had cracked, and flaked; The corners were soft with wear; But it was her, it was her face, and there was no mistaking. The longer she looked, the more points of resemblance she found: Collar bones pressed tight to the skin, ears just a shade too large, a plum flush low on the cheeks.

And when she remembered to feel, she felt as if she'd been the brunt of some dangerous joke for ages, and was only now realizing. It was wrong, this was wrong- There was no reason for this to be here and she felt caught and the worst part was that it still didn't make sense. There was no sliding into place of clues she only recognized now, looking back on them; There was no 'aha!', no satisfaction, just the dread and puzzlement. She had no idea how sharp were the teeth in the beastly jaws she'd laid herself in, how great her peril, and she shut the box hard-

-and opened it again, and lifted the painted card out with trembling hands. Her face, on this ancient thing, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

She took it with her when she went, wrapped up in the cloth it had been nestled in. And she went immediately, long before the Lady returned- At least, she assumed. Without notice, without event.. And still, she felt like there were beasts at her back, all the way down the road and for days after. She spent that first evening staring at the card by firelight, watching the orange gleam play across the gilded border; In the morning, she bent low over it, trying to read her own expression. Pain? Triumph? The inverted figure, the head dangling and hair swinging wildly, made her dizzy, and she wrapped it again. The next time she got it out, she would consider shredding it, or burning it; But she never did, only tucked it away and checked to be sure it was safe at the bottom of her pack before she set off again, then and every so often afterwards- Never forgotten, and strangely coveted. Because as long as she had it, no one else did, and that was reassuring, somehow- As if she could see it forgotten. And so she held onto it as she went, through days and weeks and months after.

And if, sometimes, she thought she heard the Lady's voice in crowded town squares, if she glimpsed her in the aged white hair of strangers and felt her blood run cold, she swallowed the fear down. And she ignored the little voice in the back of her head, whispering still, caught, caught, caught.

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