#brenneth lets a lot of children cry on her over the years

[words-writ-in-starlight]

hey I was wondering. what kinds of friendships did brenneth have when she was growing up as a blacksmith? did she go to neighborhood parties? did a nice baker's apprentice invite her to alleirat prom? (did they smooch?) did she go to the alleirat mall with the other kids her age and hang out near the food court? did she sit with the elders and listen to their stories? did she chase the neighborhood children around, roaring like a fearsome monster, and die dramatically when they slew her?

It’s not–it’s not like Brenneth’s master thinks.  She’s not lonely.  She sees their customers, and she sees people at the market who might be more than acquaintances, and Crispin sneaks out of the scholar’s quarter to come hang around the forge like a particularly persistent spirit until his teachers come to collect him.  She kisses girls and boys and neither and both and sometimes more than one, and she doesn’t really mind that they’re never something more than a few touches and maybe a night.  She trains to fight with the lathan, with the guards, and they like her, this strange world-wandering child with her fire-hot skin, and it helps that one of their own is really rather attached.  (Torei doesn’t declare her feelings for two years, but everyone knows why she’s stopped using the lathan armories in exchange for a teenaged blacksmith who’s only just set up her business.)  Even after Brenneth is out on her own, holding up her own smithy rather than working out of her master’s, she eats meals with him and with his daughter Kessen and eventually with her wife every few nights.

She’s happy.  Her master worries that she’s lonely, never keeping a partner for long and working alone and sleeping alone, but she’s happy.  Brenneth is a quiet person–not literally, Brenneth sings while she works and sometimes when you bring the singing smith a new tune, she’ll give you a discount, but in terms of people, Brenneth is happy with her handful.

Alleirat believes in community, Brenneth knows this.  People have friends and family and amdrin and amiasan and children and business partners and spouses and–Brenneth has Crispin, and she has her regular customers, and she has her master, and she’s happy with that. 

She indulges in a rather wild few years between sixteen and twenty.  Many people do–Alleirat believes in experimenting–and Brenneth tumbles as wide a variety of people as she’s kissed.  Kessen, with her lethally pretty blue eyes and her carpenter’s hands, is the longest lived of those matches, and the two of them sneak through dark shadows and kiss in the closet and sneak into each other’s cots for all of two weeks before Kessen pecks Brenneth on the cheek and says she’s glad they’re friends, a painless parting.  Brenneth has a big heart, falls a little in love with all the people she kisses, loves them in the curve of their collarbones or the muscles of their thighs, but never more than that.  She doesn’t know how to fit them in, around the rest.

Ultimately, Brenneth is more at ease with children.  They don’t know to treat her differently, they don’t remember hearing her stumble over Alleirai or seeing her have to resort to pantomime in order to be understood.  They don’t look at her with reverence or wariness or anything else that people direct at children from another world, nothing except fondness.  The local kids learn that she won’t kick them out–her master will, but Brenneth doesn’t mind having them there as long as they don’t do anything stupid–and they show up in droves.  They get over their awe of Crispin’s fine clothes and status within an hour of meeting him, and Crispin is startlingly good with kids, happy to sit on the floor and join a clapping game while Brenneth works.  

When Brenneth isn’t working, she and Crispin play Unification War with the children, and they lead opposite sides, city-states at war, or they play pirates and Crispin is the roguish pirate captain while Brenneth’s guards try to capture him and his intrepid crew.  Sometimes Brenneth and Crispin are mad dragons, ultimately slain by the brave warriors of Alleirat, or even gods, summoned to settle a debate–when they’re summoned, Crispin is the Wanderer and Brenneth is the Lady of Stars, a mismatch of their patrons, but they imagine the gods don’t mind too much.

Brenneth is twenty years old, holding a little girl on her shoulders (a “sacrifice” to the dragon) as she and Crispin chase the others through an alley, and she looks at her life, and it’s good.  This is what she wants.  She wants her work, and she wants children, and she has the strangest flash of a little girl with aristocratic features and skin a few shades lighter than her own, dark hair and a scholar’s sharp eyes.  Then the flash fades and she’s watching Crispin jump out at a kid and snatch him up and grin at Brenneth as the boy laughs.

It’s good to see him smile.  Something’s been wrong with Crispin lately, something he won’t tell her about, but the kids make him smile, erase some of the strange cracks in his eyes.  She wants him to have this, too, she wants him to have this easy happiness with kids who think he hung the morning star.  She can picture herself with children, but she can never picture those children with anyone, and Brenneth thinks that this might be okay, having Crispin to raise kids with her and sit in her forge and just be.

Three weeks later, the city center is destroyed by an explosion of lightning, and the whole of Alleirat looks to Brenneth for a savior.

The boy she had seen Crispin playing with that day catches Brenneth’s hand as she leaves the council’s hastily assembled meeting, her sword at her side and armor on her back.

“It’s not true, right?” the boy whispers as Brenneth looks down at him.  (The boy has never thought of Brenneth as tall before, but now she’s miles above him, as if he doesn’t even reach her knee.  He’ll tell people this story, heavily edited, and he’ll always remember her as towering.)  “Pesaruld would never hurt anyone.”

Brenneth has been given carte blanche to recruit anyone she sees fit to her…hunting party, for lack of a better word.  Over two dozen people are dead, and more on the road out of Dase, left with rapier wounds and throats cut with a dagger and lightning burns lacing over their skin.

Brenneth kneels down in front of the ruined citadel, hand on the boy’s shoulder.  “I’m so sorry, meimare,” she whispers back.  “I’m so sorry.”

This is a moment that will be remembered, although incorrectly.  The hero with her hair spilling loose over her shoulders, arm and chest armored and one hand on her sword, kneeling in the sunlight to comfort a child–the stuff of legends.  The Fireheart, the legends all agree, is good with children.  

They linger there for a moment, and then the boy throws his arms around Brenneth’s neck without a thought for her armor and sobs.

This is the last child that will cry for Crispin.  This is not, however, the last time that Brenneth will hold a child in the ruins of Crispin’s destruction and let them ruin her shirt with tears.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

ooh ooh alleirat but fae? faerie courts, changelings and curses and blood oaths that burn in your veins like chains of silver

Hey listen…I’m in a lot of pain today and I was supposed to do this as headcanons and I super did not do that.  Also this is mostly the prequel to a longer story about Brenneth’s quest to win them their freedom.  Sorry dude, I just kinda got In My Feelings about this.

Their names aren’t Brenneth and Crispin yet.  But Brenneth and Crispin walk into the woods, ten years old, on a dare, with their coats inside out and crowns of rowan on their heads, while their classmates clap and chant at the treeline–a skipping game with consequences.  In roses red and briars green, a little girl in white was seen; went through the forest all alone, she’s never, ever coming home. The children laugh, at first, teasing as Crispin’s red hair vanishes.  Then there’s the real calling, the shouts into the dark trees and the thin tremor of voices that won’t admit they’re scared.

Then there’s sunset, and the police, and no sign of either of them–except the rowan crowns, lying one beside another at the foot of an oak tree at the heart of the forest.  Children taken by the Folk, they murmur together, and walk away.

Seven days later, it’s the full moon and the autumn equinox, and a woman of twenty is found unconscious on the edge of the trees, dressed in a fine shirt the deep orange-red of live embers and black trousers and a leather doublet out of an old story, embossed with oak leaves.  Her black curls are braided away from her face with a tender hand, and she lies on thick, soft chamomile with a scent so strong that the teenage girls who find her nearly fall asleep beside her.  The police are called again, to hover uncertainly around the sleeping figure until her eyes flicker open and she springs to her feet with the speed and grace of a startled cat.  An officer steps forward, hands out to calm her, and she closes with him so swiftly that he understands, watching her eyes glitter in the moonlight, how his ancestors must have felt when the Hunt rode by, with horns and bells ringing.

“Where is he?” she demands, catching the cop by his collar and shoving him against a tree with a strength that dazes him.

“Where is who?” he gasps, breathless. She looks fierce and wild and hungry and beautiful in her rage, and for a terrible moment the world gasps, airless in love with her, and the police and the teenagers and the gawkers all remember, suddenly, the stories that are told about humans who live long years with the Folk and come back just slightly too real for reality to bear.

“Crispin,” the woman says, and shakes him with the careless ease of a cat shaking a mouse in her teeth.  “Where is he?  He’s a singer, with red hair–mortal, like me. Why isn’t he here?”

The officer shakes his head, wordless, and says, “Who are you, ma’am?”

“I’m–Brenneth.  Ghadafi,” she says, setting him slowly down and stumbling back with a look of dawning horror in her black eyes.  “He–he didn’t come. He lied to me, he didn’t come.  He said he freed us both, and he–”

She presses a hand to her mouth and sinks to her knees on the chamomile, and the police look at each other over her head, and finally one of them says, “You had better call the Ghadafis and tell them we found their daughter.”

Brenneth’s parents arrive just in time to watch a police officer tackle her to the ground to keep her from running back into the trees.  Their daughter, who was ten years old seven days ago, looks right through them like they’re strangers, or ghosts, and refuses to leave the forest line until the sun rises.  They call her Brenda and she doesn’t answer them, and she snarls like a wild thing when her mother tries to take down her hair, but she lets them take her home, and Brenneth plans.  For four years, she doesn’t do anything else.

Everyone in their little town knows Brenneth, after a while–the un-changeling, the human girl who disappeared and came back something…else.  It has been much longer for Brenneth than for the rest of them, longer than seven days, longer than ten years, and she never smiles, never thanks anyone, never takes any of the precautions everyone else does.  She walks barefoot in the forest, and leaves iron and steel at home, and lingers over vernal pools and fairy rings longingly.  She’s too old and too young and too other and everyone who meets her is afraid of her–is afraid of what those unnaturally steady black eyes could ask them to do, and get a response.

Four years later, to the day, Brenneth walks to the oak in the heart of the forest and drives a steel cooking knife into the trunk to the hilt, and then she stands back and waits for the consequences.

“You have hurt the wood,” says a slow, lilting voice–a singer’s voice, smooth and articulate and with just a thread of warning.  

Brenneth turns.  Somehow, this seems right–seems like she should have known how this would be, who would come when she came to the end of her patience and hurt the Folk in order to find a door, who would be guarding this forest that swallowed her heart whole.  The being behind her looks fey and perfect in the moonlight, utterly and breakingly unlike anything that walks on asphalt under street lamps and among cars, unlike anything that wears a crown of rowan and an inside-out LL Bean coat, with waist-length coiling hair the perfect brilliant copper of a polished penny and dressed all in beautiful white.  The bones of his face are almost the same as when he lied to her, but sharper and colder.

This, then, Brenneth thinks, reaching out thoughtlessly to touch the ground-glass jaw with her fingertips, is what happens when a mortal swears life and soul to the Folk in return for another person’s freedom.  He’s not one of them, not quite.  He’s still as far from humanity as a wolf is from a sled dog.

Crispin stops her hand by catching her wrist before she can touch his face.  His fingers are as cold as ice. 

“Crispin,” Brenneth says, as if his grip isn’t pressing the bones of her arm together to the point of pain.  She’ll see the bruise later and wonder where she got it, press her thumb into the shadowed purple-blue and yelp in surprise at the pain.  “I found you.”

He blinks at her, and his eyes are wrong–the whites are gone, consumed whole by the honey of his irises and large, flashing pupils.  This is what proves to her that he’s real.  If he were an illusion, he would be perfectly himself, and perfectly hers, and he’s neither, not anymore.  For a moment, she wonders if he even recognizes her.

Crispin reaches out with his other hand, and the cold fingers touch her hair, her cheek, trace the lines of her nose and her cheekbone and her brow, until his palm settles against her jaw, his thumb on her lips, and she looks back fearlessly.

“Why did you come back?” Crispin asks.

“Why did you lie to me?” Brenneth replies, just as calm.

He blinks again, more slowly, and says, “I…had to save you.  They were determined to keep one of us.  I had to save you.  Why did you come back?”

“I’ve been looking for you,” Brenneth says, ignoring him, and the hand on her face is beginning to shake, an utterly human fit of tremors.  “I looked everywhere.  All the right places. If I’d found anything, I wouldn’t have come, but you weren’t there.”  She takes a step, expecting him to hold her in place, but instead he falls back, as if she’s dangerous, his hands falling away from her arm and her face.  She takes another step, then another, and Crispin retreats from her until his back hits the wall.  “I knew that if I hurt the forest, someone would come to punish me–I just didn’t expect that it would be you.”

Crispin’s strange, honey-gold eyes are glittering and wet in the moonlight when she stops, and he whispers, “You shouldn’t have come.  You shouldn’t have–I have to punish you.  You used steel on the tree.  Why did you do that?”

“You’re right,” Brenneth says mercilessly.  “You do have to punish me.  Because you made a fool’s bargain for my freedom, when I didn’t even want it.  So.”  She steps back and holds out her wrists, held together like she’s waiting for shackles.  “I propose a trade.  You do your duty to the Folk and the forest, and instead of killing me, or striking me blind, or stitching my lips shut with gold, you take me back.”

“As a slave,” Crispin says dully, like someone watching his life’s work unravel.

“I’m going to do it right this time,” Brenneth says.  “Both of us will be free.”

“I can’t go back to the mortal world.”

“Neither could I.  Take my offer, or kill me, faerie.”

Crispin stares at her with those inhuman eyes, in that face more perfect than it is human, and Brenneth looks back and smiles for the first time in four years.

“Trust me,” she says.  “I’ve never lied to you.”

Crispin smiles faintly, lips twisting like he’s about to cry, at that, and closes his cold hands around her wrists.