#girls will betray every friend they've ever made and scam innocent people who were nice to them rather than go to therapy :)

[ehlnofay]

Summerfest Day 3 - STARLIT

The Key in Arabella’s hand is a hauntingly beautiful thing.

It’s like a shard of midnight biting into her palm, its teeth dark and jagged, its neat round bow spangled with constellations. A pattern of pinprick dots. It doesn’t glow, but it feels like it does. It feels like Arabella stole it out of the sky.

(She didn’t, of course; she stole it out of Karliah’s pocket, easy as anything.)

The Key doesn’t glow. It doesn’t do much of anything, truth be told; whatever hidden potential it’s supposed to be unlocking remains securely fastened in whatever secret recess of her mind it’s stuffed in. But it’s fine – this is probably something that takes time, and she’s only had it for a day.

Arabella twists the cold metal shaft in her unbandaged fingers, ignoring the spike of pain the motion provokes, and glances at the door. Still shut; firelight seeps in from the other room through the cracks. This room is lit with a tall tallow candle, dripping its wax across the surface of a wooden nightstand. It’s quiet – though she can hear people shuffling about behind the door, they seem to be trying not to make too much noise, hesitating to disturb the sweet young traveller that came pleading for aid. How kind of them.

She thinks she has an hour, perhaps a little more, of resting quietly before someone comes knocking. Best use it wisely.

So she strips off her top few layers, dropping them crumpled onto the bedspread, and then pulls off her patchy blue underdress. It’s not exactly comfortable – even with the air heated by the hearth in the next room, it’s still bloody cold, and everything she touches with her right hand rasps painfully against the glowing burns. The bandages on her left aren’t much better. At least they’re silk, from her poor old scarf; easier on her mind that way, if not on her skin, and the dregs of the honey poultice they bind in is still somewhat doing its job. Unfortunately, she needs both hands. She painstakingly undoes the bandage, stuffs it into the pocket of her pack, wipes her still-sticky hand on a goose-pimpled thigh, and turns her dress inside out.

It's a shame, she thinks; this is one of her favourite pieces. Bought and then altered and dyed by her own hand after her first pay at the Guild. She can see the patches where she applied the pigment unevenly, where the expensively imported dye began to run out. A shame; oh, well. She finds the silk thread under the bust where the cloth is gathered for the dart to be stitched in, pinches the fabric between her fingers, brings it to her mouth.

It’s good quality stuff – doesn’t rip easy. But she’s not got her nifty little scissors – left them in the other pack – and can’t be bothered to sift through the one she took for a small blade when she can tear it open with her teeth just as well. It only takes a minute. When it’s done the fabric hangs, uneven and frayed – but it won’t show, it’s just the inside, and this is so much more important.

(Y’ffre, it’s so much more important. There could be nothing in the world more important than this, this hurts-to-hold chip of nightertale, its stelliform bitting, the hypnotic lustre of its bow. It will move mountains. It will move her.)

Arabella slips the Key in between the piece of fabric she tore and the one external. She doesn’t have all her sewing things – the scissors left at Brynjolf and Karliah’s poorly improvised camp, half her threads left behind in the waterlogged ruin – but she has a couple trusty bone needles and a skein of unpigmented thread. With neat, sturdy stitches, she sews the gap back up again.

From the front, you can’t tell it was ever disturbed.

(Not strictly true – there’s a little lump. But when she’s wearing it, it won’t be noticeable, disguised by its location under her bust; if she could get something else to wear – something with the inelegant silhouette of the loose dresses and aprons so often preferred by the women of Skyrim, for instance – it would never be seen at all.)

Arabella pushes herself up off the bed and tugs the dress on over her head. The knobby shape of the Daedric artifact sewn into her bodice presses against her ribs. She flexes her hands – searing in the cool air, most of the blisters still swollen and glistering – and prowls over the floorboards, silent and sure-footed, to riffle through the coffer chest pressed up against the wall.

There’s plenty in there – more than one person’s worth, she thinks. Maybe she got lucky and this little side room is where all this kind clan of cattle-farmers store their clothes. She sifts through it all with the care of a surgeon – taking out a yellow ribbon-belt here, a plain brown kirtle there, a dark blue overcoat, a garishly orange apron-dress. They’re not awful, but they’re also things she would never wear; if she can just get her hands on a hood for her hair, she’ll be able to move with much more ease. Her friends won’t know how to ask after her –seen any gorgeous Bosmer women in hideous linen garb, wearing a hooded mantle that makes them look like an egg? She’s aware that she’s not the most visually unidentifiable, but if she changes just a few things, she can blend in. She’s done it before. She’s willing to do it now, if it means that afterward, she’ll never have to again.

The talk outside the door has risen, just a little. Arabella nudges the coffer closed and darts back to the pack left on the bed, rolling up the clothes into tubes and stuffing them under Karliah’s bundle of medicines Arabella would refuse to use and Brynjolf’s drawstring bag of dice. (They were surprisingly useful – provided many an eve of entertainment while they travelled, though the fact that the game dice came out the cave with them and much of their food and tools did not is ridiculous.) By the time the doorknob rattles, Arabella is lying curled up on the bed next to her crumpled pile of jacket and overdress, blinking sleepily at the light pouring in through the chinks.

The door creaks open. The woman who led her to the room is standing there silhouetted, a stout-fingered hand on the knob. In this lighting, Arabella can hardly make out her face, the grey in her hair washed out in the hearth-gold. She blinks again, to sell it.

“Hey there,” says the woman whose name Arabella has already forgotten. “How are you?”

Arabella smiles, then – closed-lipped and sunny. “Oh,” she says, with a careful handle on her voice, keeping the posturing under control, “so much better. I can’t thank you enough for letting me impose on you like this.”

The woman flaps a hand. Her eyes, Arabella can just about see, are glittering; there’s a dimple folded into the fine seamed wrinkles on her left cheek. “There’s no imposition at all. There’s not much chance of meeting new people so out of the way – it’s a big to-do when someone from the next farm on comes a-visiting. We’re happy to have you.”

“I’m so grateful,” Arabella says brightly. There’s a haze of cooking-smoke in the doorway, and with it open she feels like she can hear voices rising all through the house.

The woman smiles, drawing back a little from the doorway; the light falls over her face, long nose and big teeth and downturned eyes. “No trouble at all,” she says, fingers tapping on the iron knob. “I just came to check – make sure you’re awake, and all, seeing as the food is ready.”

Arabella blinks. This time, her surprise is mostly genuine.

(Ah, shit. She’d more or less forgotten the conventions of hospitality, and now she has to politely extricate herself from its trappings.)

“You’re so kind,” she says, voice as sugary earnest as she can make it, “but that’s not at all necessary! I was just going to begin to make my way to our rendezvous point – we did make plans for some kind of event like this, I promise we weren’t complete fools.” Oozing hell, what name had she given them? She remembers the names of her companions – Viatia and Bravyn, the three of them a group of intrepid would-be adventurers that got separated fighting a couple of frost trolls, and please, ma’am, I’m not entirely sure what to do out here in the dark, could I come in out of the cold for just a few minutes? But she’s not entirely sure what she told them her name was. And she wasn’t careful enough about stressing that when she said just a little while, she meant it.

(It’s not safe to stay still.)

Brusquely, the woman says, “Ah, don’t be ridiculous.” Her face twists, and she’s quick to add, “No-one thinks you’re a fool, dear, just young. But of course you’re not running off so soon – you’ve been injured, you need to rest a little while.”

“My hand’s much better,” Arabella objects. She twirls her fingers in the air too quickly for the woman to notice that it very much is not – then busies herself putting on the layers she’d taken off to alter the dress. “It was the bandages stopping me from fighting more than the injury, truly. I took them off. And besides, I don’t want to make my friends worry. They’re already there, most likely, and I can’t make them wait –”

“You can’t travel at night. You’ll get horribly turned-around in the dark.”

“You already pointed me in the direction of the road. I know how to get there based on that.” The guileless little voice is beginning to rasp on Arabella’s throat; this is an act she prefers to play when she’s sure of getting something out of it, and a stead of cattle-farmers out in the middle of nowhere don’t have much for her to connive for. But she has to stick to the play she’s chosen.

The woman’s fingers are callused on the tips. She wrings them, rough as wet wool, and frets, “It’s really not safe. You should stay the night, get some food into you and some sleep, and we can have someone travel with you in the morning.”

“I can’t,” says whoever Arabella is pretending to be, all frowning and softly regretful. “I’m sorry.”

It’s so astonishingly easy to say the words when she doesn’t mean them.

The woman deflates. “If you’re sure,” she says. “It’s your choice, of course – but I can’t have it on my conscience, if someone I promised shelter came to harm.”

How stiflingly sweet. “I won’t,” Arabella promises.

It’s a positive cacophony behind the door, now; rather nice that all these seemingly very loud folk were keeping quiet on her account.

The woman claps her hands together. “Well,” she says, bright again, “if you will go marching off into the snow again you must at least eat first. Can’t go venturing on an empty stomach.”

It would be sweet, how responsible this complete stranger feels for her wellbeing, how determined she evidently is to stuff her with food and keep her as safe as one might expect to be in the middle of nowhere in the dark, if it weren’t so frustrating. Arabella rolls back her shoulders, conscious of the press of the Key against her ribs. “I can’t possibly impose –”

“I insist.”

She really should go.

But. Eating isn’t a terrible idea – last thing she had was Brynjolf’s poorly-butchered horker, his soft city-blitzed hands barely able to slaughter the thing much less carve it up, and that was last night. She’s out of luck trying to hunt until the swelling of her hands goes down and she returns to a more reasonable level of pain. (One would think the mythical artifact sewn into her dress would be able to help with this; apparently not.)

Arabella isn’t a fool. She fully expects Karliah, at least, to try to track her down without delay – and Karliah is good. She’s seen it. Until she’s put a little more space between them, she can’t afford to let her guard down. But Arabella is good at what she does, too – she’s been on the run near as long as Karliah has, and she had more than a bleeding-out Guild and a backstabbing coward on her tail for a good bit of it. The only tracks she left them were her boot-prints marching unfaltering into the river, and the first place they think to look won’t be the longhouse of some backwater acreage.

“I only eat meat,” Arabella says.

The woman scarcely blinks. “We’ve plenty of that to hand,” she says, gestures to somewhere in the smoke-tinged hall behind her. “Nanna’s just made a new batch of tallow, so there’s fresh beef scratchings.”

(There’s one more advantage Arabella has, if Karliah does manage to sniff her out: Karliah is a better person than she is. She’s in no state to fight after half searing her hands off on Mercer’s fickle hide, but if worst comes to worst she can torch the wooden walls and slip away in the aftermath.)

Arabella smiles. “I do like scratchings,” she says, and lets the woman take her to feast.

It’s actually not bad, as these things go.

Soon as she steps out of the room, pack slung over one shoulder, a gaggle of people she is reasonably certain weren’t even in when she arrived greet her extremely loudly. The room had seemed so enormous scarcely an hour ago – long and narrow and taking up most of the building, a proper storybook Skyrim house – but now it feels small, so filled with people and noise that Arabella can scarcely cross the floor. The hearth-fire eats merrily away at its wood logs, casting everything in orange light. Cooking smoke clings to the cluttered rafters. The long table is laden with food, most of the strangers standing or sitting around it, one bright-haired child sitting on top of it with their legs swinging off the side. Someone has a horribly tuned catgut lute that they’re plucking at ineptly at various intervals. It’s all very sudden; Arabella feels gloriously dizzy.

The woman who persuaded her to stay – who fussed over her when she arrived an hour ago – drags her around, ever-helpful, to introduce her to every bright and blurring face in the jumble. Arabella learns all of their names, greets them with painstakingly exaggerated politeness (if she’s locked herself into playing this way then she’s going to at least have what fun she can with it), immediately forgets who they are. It’s all an anarchy of siblings and cousins and the child of someone’s good friend and oh, it’s a funny story actually, he came here just like you one day, great slab of ice in his gut and the wraiths following him, we had to light a bonfire in the fields to get rid of them before they got at the cows – and so on, and so forth. There’s no real difference between any of these things that matters; Arabella chatters with them all, smiling closed-lipped so none of them would be put off by the teeth, lets them drag her onto the bench next to a small child who stares with great fascination at the jangle of her earrings and tries to touch the bars jabbed through the cartilage. She’s seen children, of course, in the last few years – even talked to them, on occasion – but this one is so very small. She stares back at it until it gets bored enough to look away.

The food is fine. A bit boring, but then it’s improvised – they hadn’t expected a guest – and, of course, it’s Skyrim, so all the good cuts of meat are drenched in herbs. There’s even beer in the delicious-smelling stew. But there are scratchings, as promised, and boiled eggs, and something lean and tender cooked in ghee; the old woman she’d met, pupils almost as pale as her hair, glares ferociously at a platter of liver when she hears that Arabella won’t eat it when it’s cooked with leek and says something about sour milk that she can’t quite catch over the noise. The noise never quiets, everyone shouting over one another to be heard; she quite likes it. She listens to whatever she can pick out as she peels her egg with her fingernails, demurely covers her mouth as she eats.

The kid keeps trying to grab her hair, now. One man across from her tells her that he used to go out venturing, back in the day, and attempts to give her a great deal of advice. It’s entirely well-meaning, so she nods and smiles with just the edge of her teeth and does not, under any circumstances, spit at him. (She’s acting inexperienced, she knows. Even so, it grates.) She refuses all the wine she’s offered – fruit and honey both – but it keeps getting offered by new people, red-cheeked and grinning. She learns about the ins and outs of cattle herding, and the story behind that pale young man’s nickname, and that they don’t normally have so much food to hand but there are a few neighbours visiting at the moment, isn’t that lucky? She’s getting a free meal out of it, and everyone is so delightfully clamorous, so she keeps smiling, keeps nodding, keeps eating until her plate is clean and the child is now, inexplicably, asleep.

There’s no signs of the company winding down, so she says very quietly to her woman (who is engaged in a spirited debate over the best way to figure out which chicken of a coop has developed at taste for egg) that it’s time for her to go, and then she has another five of them trying once again to persuade her to stay – just until morning, it’s not safe.

It’s a rather dull thing to dodge through, the second time.

Half of them walk her to the door. It’s very kind of them. It’s all very kind. She pulls her coat tighter around her shoulders and bids her goodbyes individually to each of these people she’s met within the hour and won’t remember by tomorrow. They all wish her well. It’s very sweet.

When she finally ducks out into the dark she’s struck by the silence. The needles of the trees are rimed with frost, the house roof covered in snow; it’s a shock to the system, all of it cold and clean. Arabella feels, standing at the end of the shovelled-clear path at the beginning of a copse of trees, like the world has stopped moving.

Fields and forests before her. Beyond that – forests, the proper ones. The stars glitter above her in their high-north formations; Arabella presses the heel of her hand to the metal at her ribs, feels the shape of it cold against her skin. She can’t wait to forget these constellations.

She’s going home.