CHAPTER 1.35 - OVERNIGHT INTERLUDE I - ANUK

Anuk retired a little before midnight, leaving a party in full swing.  Hugo is still playing to his crowd, demonstrating an annoying degree of showmanship.  From introducing some local child to changing song styles as the mood of the party (and level of drunkenness) evolved, the little man is winning over the populace.  She’s been making an effort with him, particularly since his plan of attack demonstrated he wasn’t a total idiot.  She tries to resist his ‘entertainer’ label from triggering her trained contempt. 

Not that every predator she had encountered was an entertainer.  Her mind flicks to the travelling merchant who decided that an eleven-year-old girl’s arse was prime for grabbing - not once, not twice - and the man seemed to have his aim set on much more.  He taught Anuk a lesson about the Brewers, her…fosters?  Carers?  …Owners? 

The deftness with which her dagger had leapt from its sheath under her shift and pinned the merchant’s hand to his table within a blink (or within the third grab) was a lesson learned from life with her mother.  THAT was nothing new.  The surprise was Old Frank.  She was watching the blood puddle under the merchant’s hand, as transfixed on his palm as it was to the table, when Frank appeared, interposing himself between the girl and her aggressor.  His face was thunder, his attention on Anuk, his hand flying to hers as she pushed the blade deeper into the wood. 

For a frozen moment she pictured the innkeeper backhanding her, old man Brewer cursing her out for bringing trouble to his establishment.  Or, at least, for driving off a man who had dined and drunk well through the evening, and who had booked one of their better rooms for the night.

Instead, Old Frank asked, in the softest version of his voice she had ever heard, “Y’aright Anuk?”  Almost inaudible beneath the screams of the merchant.  And then a direction: “G’wan, girl”, as he unwrapped her fingers from their grip on the dagger.  Half shocked, markedly more so from Frank’s response than the altercation, she took off like a rabbit.  Slipped behind the bar and into the rooms beyond, the tiny portion of the large inn which was dedicated to the workers.  She was already used to having eyes on her in the bar, but her face was burning, pulse pounding in her temples.  Some part of her felt things would have been simpler HAD she been violently attacked.  By either of the men.

She sat on the narrow bed in her narrow room and fully dissociated.  She had never been much of a planner; had heard some self-important, and richly clothed, customers of the inn talking about their ‘five-year plans.’  Usually in a tone laden with self-importance and at a louder volume than necessary for only their group to hear.  Suffice to say it was never a concept that made sense in young Anuk’s head.  Planning five DAYS in advance was a stretch in her eleventh year.  She pictured being out on the street, possibly without even a dagger, but the thought didn’t scare her overly.  Nor did the idea of betraying her mother.  Her only thought concerning Aspatria was the parallel of finding herself without a roof over her head following a criminally violent outburst.  What grated on her, she thought, was her fate being so far beyond her control.  An odd thought for the girl sold to cover a drinking debt.

What felt like hours (but more probably minutes) later, there was a light knock at the door to her room.  Not a ‘knock and wait’ style of rap, more of a cursory ‘I’m informing you that I’m coming in.’  Followed, of course, by Magrit walking in like…well, like she owned the place.  As she did.

Anuk stared up at the woman, face full of challenge, daring her to scold or berate.  Instead, the wife shocked the girl as had her husband.

She knelt, placed a gentle hand on Anuk’s knee and asked, “Are yer all roite, moi girl?”  Anuk must have flinched as the woman raised a hand to her face, but she merely shifted the fringe out of the girl’s eyes.  Her eyes shifted to Anuk’s.  Not locked, instead holding a slight frown of concern as her hand stroked the side of the girl’s cheek.  Briefly, but gently. 

-x-

Magrit produces the dagger in the hand not stroking Anuk’s face.  Looks at it, proffers it hilt-first.  “You knows I don’t hold with weapons in the bar, but – moi girl – you’d still as best keep it with you.  Only for toimes loike this, unnerstand?  But…”  Magrit’s words fade as she nods.

Anuk draws breath, angry at how unsteady it sounds, about to say SOMETHING, but feeling lost in this moment.  Magrit gestures gently with the weapon, urging the girl to take it.  Which she does.  Anuk’s confusion is plain, but Magrit smiles.  A tight smile on her thin lips but not lacking warmth.  Not ALL warmth.

The dagger now out of her hand, she produces a small purse from her apron, again gesturing for Anuk to take it.  She does, confusion intensifying.  “You needn’t worry about that BARSTARD comin back here; ‘e left this as an apology to yer”.  Magrit closes Anuk’s hand around the pouch with both of her own, squeezes a little.  “Now, you knows we’re busy this weather, but me an’ the old man can look after things if you need some toime t’yourself”.

-x-

And that was that.  Well, mostly that was that.  There were some gold coins among the silver and copper in the merchant’s pouch.  And Greg, the huge man who looked after the door, assured her every day for the next month that the merchant hadn’t returned.  Magrit, despite her burst of affection, had returned to business as usual.  Literal business. 

And as Anuk realises she’s dreaming, as she’s pulled through the culmination of the story, she feels it again.  “But Old Frank?  When I finally emerged to gather glasses…”  She’s helpless to prevent her own narration.  “…on a truly busy night in the bustling inn…”  Another memory felt far too keenly to simply be a memory.   “And Old Frank exclaimed, loudly enough for the patrons to hear…”  Her brain feels wrenched, propelled as by a strong current.  “‘There she be!’  His old face beaming…”  Impossible to swim against.  “His old face beaming as a cheer goes up…”

Reality stuttering around her as she feels the prickle of being observed.  “A cheer goes up from the customers…”  She tries to tear her mental gaze away from this scene she has replayed so often.  “From customers raising their…”  She doesn’t know what there could be to see, forces herself to focus anyway.  The world’s foundations shudder again.  “Their tankards all raised…”.  THERE, there on the edge of her vision.  Her eyes move impossibly slowly, impossibly painfully towards the imagined spot of purple.  “Raising their drinks in a toast to me.”

She feels something rip in the instant between her bloody-minded rebellion from the script and that script finishing.  She gasps, screams voicelessly, soundlessly as suddenly her eyes are again her own.  The pressure preventing their swivel is released and she feels whiplashed, as though she’s trying to see the back of her skull.  Feeling as though time is suddenly moving too quickly, she resumes the hunt for a mote of purple light.

Reality dissolves entirely as she locks onto it, onto Him, but nothing makes sense.  Mirry, an inch from her ear, whispers “Caiphon.”  The girl’s madness, her own, intensifies as Anuk realises that space, scale is all wrong.   Her perspective’s jumbled, disordered as simultaneously He is a tiny atom of light just beyond her arm’s reach.  And at the same time He’s something fantastically huge, larger than suns, an impossible distance away.

She recognises this, of course.  From six months ago, the screaming dream from which she awoke knowing she had a measure of the power she had craved for so long.  That she so needed.  And as she thinks “screaming” her mind is assailed by impossible noise.  The wall of sound has been there as long as she has, as long as He has, but she realises her senses were overwhelmed, shut down in the face of it.  And then, Mirry’s cracked, awful voice is mocking her.  “You think you’re hearing this with your ears?  You’re a fucking nutcase, you.” 

It works, though possibly by dream logic.  Not, she is certain, that this is simply a dream.  The noise is still overwhelming, but she can, at least, think past it.  Maybe it was this wall of sound that had previously swept her away like a match in a flood.  That had rendered her unconscious and helpless.  For days.  She panics then, dwarfed in the clashing, clanging noise of it.  If the others wake up and she doesn’t?  What then?  She trusts that Thae, at least, would tend to her, clean her filth…

And as she thinks that, she’s thrown into perceptions of Thae.  The chainmailed stranger rushing out from the forest to join Rian’s fight.  While Anuk still lingered in the tree line, deciding whether to cut and run.  Thae holding that warm healing light over the scorched wound on her side from Fruk’s ring, now Hugo’s.  And with the thought of the halfling, his handsome face is suddenly centred, raising her hackles as he declares himself Gnomish and royal in a situation that requires neither additional tension nor dishonesty.  Her focus, the focus, shifts instead to the little man throwing himself into melee combat with too many goblins, to keep her safe…the smile and look of contentment he gave when he noticed her yesterday…

But her mind’s moving.  She’s learning, despite the hellish noise.  And in that moment, she feels a shock through herself.  She doesn’t trust the image she suddenly sees of Hugo pilfering from her pack.  It isn’t a memory, and although it holds that uncanny reality imbued upon the rest of this – she could feel Mirry’s breath on her ear, her neck if she would allow it.  She shakes the thought away. 

Or tries to shake it off, to clear her mind.  Recognises the trigger.  She knows that should she think of anything, her mind will feed her these hyper-realistic slices of her experiences.  Or, maybe, He will?  It’s difficult to focus, however, as the reminiscence of that merchant, Mirry’s stale-sweet breath, conjure the only man who has ever made Anuk feel more helpless than that merchant did.  The stink of the drink on his breath as, intimately, he tells her that he owns her.

Thankfully, the shock, the humiliation animates her.  She stares at this ball of purple fire, this impossible thing, feeling her mind trying to flee from its nauseating inconsistency of scale.  Dares, as a tiny speck, to scream at it, voice disappeared amidst the impossible noise.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?!”

Reality, whatever this is, flickers, seems to freeze for a moment.  Thinking that she doesn’t have lungs to fill in this place, with Mirry chuckling at her ear, she inhales. 

And is swept away in a torrent of images, feelings, senses overloading and drowning in the deluge.  Sees herself throughout her entire life, impossibly.  Pictured from outside herself, seeing her present self asleep, arm reaching towards His book.  Seeing her child self overloaded with dirty plates.  Seeing her foetal self sucking her recently formed thumb.  Experience upon experience unworthy of record.  For a moment, the colossal sound seems to have subsided in the flood of images of herself.  Then, with a discordant crash, it returns as her mind drops those impossible selves.

She tries again “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”, braces for another wave of insanity. 

Her mind again grasps for any handhold against a tsunami, but this time instead of herself, she sees others.  Her mother, looking older than Anuk has ever seen her, careworn.  Her good looks dissolving under the constant abuse to which the woman subjects herself.  Or maybe child Anuk never noticed the cracks forming.  Then an endless catalogue of faces, some she knows immediately, others on the edge of recognition.  Many, she feels, must be people she served in the inn over the years, or ciphers.  People she passed in the street, maybe, or…she recognises the woman from whom she pilfered the all-important book. 

Nosey old bitch, eyes following Anuk around her shitty little shop of nicknacks as though she was untrustworthy.  Anuk has often wondered whether she would even have pocketed the journal, flexed the soft tan cover into a U-shape to fit into her pocket, had that woman not treated her like a villain.  Might she have missed the innocuous, slim volume?

The thought of the book distorts reality again, Anuk feeling her sleeping body shudder and shift.  As she screams her question into the purple glow it seems to diminish, less pulling away from her than always having been distant, tiny.  Somewhere else entirely, her mind assures her as her eyes snap open.

Hugo’s in the middle of the room, staring at her with shock on his face.  She looks at him guiltily, thinking her mindset is twisting her perceptions, staining his face with her own guilt.  She realises she must have screamed, her throat feeling hoarse.  Tries to mutter an apology, hearing it more like a cough than words, then she slumps back onto the bed.  Somehow, she knows that her book is in her pack. 

Somehow, as she drifts away again, she knows that there are more gifts inside of it now.