Monday, November 4th
Indirk sat against the little window of Mardo’s apartment, staring down at the muddied streets. She was wrapped in white sheets, like some fragile thing they needed to keep dust off of. Mardo had brought her clothes, but she’d ignored them, like she was ignoring everything, just some naked broken creature sprawling here or there and ignoring the passage of days.
Outside, on the rotting steps of the building across the way, there sat a Writhewife in plain gray clothes, hood pulled over her head to hide her face such that Indirk wouldn’t not have been able to tell it was a Writhewife at all but for the emptiness of one sleeve, the familiarity of the clothes, this particular Writhewife being well-known to Indirk by now.
The Writhewife’s shoulders shook. It looked like she was crying.
“I’m going for a walk.” Indirk got up and looked down at the Guardian Lion. Each time Mardo had left, he’d said, Hado will stay here to protect you, so there the black-furred creature was, ever-pacing the little open space between the tiny apartment’s kitchen table, its bed, its cabinet, its wardrobe. He’d been watching her all weekend, expression flat, betraying no thought.
Indirk sloughed her sheets and eyed the clothes that Mardo had brought from her apartment. Simple things. Shirts and pants. Her admiralty uniform. After breakfast that morning, before he’d left for his workday at the admiralty office, Mardo had said to her, I’m not looking to keep a pet, Indirk. Wake up and heal. I expect to see you back at the office at some point. But the idea of getting dressed and acting like a person seemed like it would’ve been an admission that Indirk wasn’t ready for: that she had survived, that she would heal, that she would move on and things would go back to how they had been. She didn’t want to do any of that. Things needed to be different, somehow.
She put on her heavy admiralty coat and a pair of boots, and that would be enough: a compromise. She put her pistol in one of the big pockets and Avie in another. Hado followed her out, quiet but not completely silent. It was the first time she’d left Mardo’s apartment since the night of the Sickle-Sough. In the dusty, dark hall outside, she paused to look back at Hado’s reflective eyes, staring at him for a moment before muttering, “Thanks,” and going outside.
It was a sunny day. The coat was hot around her, the mud sticking to her boots. Indirk stood in front of the Writhewife, looking down on her, listening to her sobbing. Indirk said flatly, “What are you crying for?”
The one-armed Writhewife brushed at her face and looked up, little yellow candles beneath the ragged hood. “There’s people dying. Every day in this city, there’s people dying, and I always see it all.”
Indirk thought about Vont’s steamships in the Larlost Expanse, fleets pulled into the sea by great, dark tendrils, sailors staring down into glowing yellow eyes in the deep, locking their gaze with the unfathomable, the ancient mind of the Writhe, as they drowned. “So,” Indirk said, “You do understand the value of an individual life? What it means for a person to die?”
The Writhewife sat up and fixed Indirk with a hard look. Brow vexed, lips slightly parted, pale tongue on her teeth ready to speak but silent, the Writhewife stared, and in her eyes there shone the same light that shone in the depths. “I know it hurts. Oh, my Gray love hurts every day.”
“So does Vont. And Pharaul, and the Laines, and a hundred little places that used to exist in the Warring Lands.”
“Old aches that became part of the rest of us, I know.” The Writhewife wasn’t done crying. She pushed at her eyes as though she could force them to stop. In the sun, her gray cotton and pale skin had a shimmer of salt to it. “I never wanted any of this. Not even from the first, nor this century, nor even this morning, but it never ends.”
Even the Writhe couldn’t stop the war, it seemed. Indirk had read the history, how the Writhe had seemed confused by the war at first. A thousand years ago, perhaps even as recently as a few centuries ago, the Writhe hadn’t fully understood what it was getting itself involved in. It had been so confused when Vont’s ships had sailed into the Cradsea with harpoons, dragging Grim Confidants onto their metal decks, there to coat them with oil and set them aflame.
The Writhe didn’t understand dying. But it understood pain.
Indirk dropped down, sitting on the step right next to the Writhewife. She slung on arm over the Writhewife’s shoulder and leaned heavily onto her, hugging them tight much like she might do to Amo. The Writhewife’s response – that surprised grunt and gasp of “What?” as she straightened and looked all around – was oddly normal. It was as if, caught off guard, the Writhewife had forgotten she was a limb of some massive, ageless being, and for an instant was just a woman.
Indirk said, “Hang onto me. You don’t need to talk about it. Just hang onto me until you feel better.”
The Writhewife sat rigid against Indirk. Her crying had stopped. Her pale hand hung in front of her, forefinger sliding over her thumb idly. “That’s a strange thing to say, Indirk Correlon.”
A few days ago, Indirk might’ve agreed. “What’s strange about it?”
“I don’t know that anyone has ever tried to comfort me before. Is hanging on to you a comfort?”
“It might be. Try it?”
“Hm.” The Writhewife moved her hand to grab on to the front of Indirk’s coat. “Like this?”
“Writhewives don’t hug, do they?” Indirk reached for the Writhewife’s hand, and then stopped. “Sorry. I should’ve asked; can I touch you?”
And the Writhewife, this anthral possessed by a thing that was both the literal enemy of Indirk’s homeland but also so alien that it did not completely understand what it meant to be an enemy, said, “I do know what hugging is,” and shifted to put her one arm around Indirk and lean into her. “Like this.”
“Oh.” Indirk found her chest unexpectedly tight. The Writhewife smelled like a warm breeze on the sea, but she was cold, seeming to resist the heat of the sun. Still, the press of another body against Indirk was surprising. Last night, Indirk had crawled into Mardo’s bed while he slept, curling up beside him like an animal. The bed was so small that she’d been pressed against his huge back, and he was so incredibly warm, like metal left out in the sun.
She’d felt this same way: a tension in her chest that was a kind of pain that was not pain, pulsing through her body like a heartbeat. When Indirk was younger, touching another person, dancing and fucking, had seemed so natural and insignificant, but she’d been changed. She’d laid against Mardo, staring at his fur in the dark, almost hoping he’d wake up. Feeling that heat, that pulse, that hope, she’d fallen asleep.
Indirk had dreamed about Norgash. She’d been dreaming about the dancer every night, but this had been different. In her dream, Norgash had been made of fire and danced directly against her skin, and when Indirk put her mouth upon Norgash’s body it burned painfully.
She’d woken alone in the bed, and felt incredibly cold. When she’d sat up to look for Mardo, she saw him at the stove with his back turned to her. Not even sunrise, and for some reason, he’d gotten up and started to work on breakfast. She didn’t ask why, just lay back in his bed and stared at the ceiling until sunlight appeared.
Indirk had spent those hours wondering if Norgash had broken something inside of her. There was no bitterness to the thought, just a marvel that she couldn’t quite figure out what had changed. Maybe, whatever it was had already been broken.
Now, holding this Writhewife, Indirk took a moment to close her eyes and squeeze the Writhewife close, almost until it hurt the wounds on her side, but felt no echoes of heat at all. This was a person, right? Not just an entity, even if it was also that.
Indirk asked suddenly, “What’s your name?”
“I don’t want you to know my name,” the Writhewife answered. “You wouldn’t use it how we use it among ourselves.”
“Where do you live?”
“I live everywhere.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“I don’t sleep.”
“I know the Writhe sleeps. There’s legends about the Writhe sleeping.”
“But Writhewives don’t. That’s what you care about, isn’t it?”
“Do you remember a man from Gray Watch named Landed Bardis?”
The was a gentle breeze between the tenements, carrying the chill of the sea and also the gentle sound of the surf a few blocks away, waves upon stone. It was the sound of slow change, the ocean eating away at the shore ever so patiently.
Indirk said, “I wasn’t quite grown up, passing time pushing papers in the office of the Seat of the Warmaker, when this man named Bardis came in and asked to talk to the August Seat. That's my foster mother, by the way, which is how I got the job. So I took him to her office, and he gave her this box and said it was a peace offering. Turned out Bardis was a spy from Gray Watch. Snuck all the way into the heart of the city just to give this box to the August Seat. He’d been told by his commander that it was the most important thing he’d do with his life, that he must succeed at all costs. So the August Seat opened the box, looked in for just a moment, then closed it and had someone take it and lock it in a vault somewhere.”
The Writhewife said, “What happened to Bardis?”
“The August Seat had him tortured for information. She made me watch some of it, for education. He didn’t know anything useful. Then she had hooks driven through his shoulders and hung him from the cliffside, above the slope where Cradsoun keeps trying to attack. I’m pretty sure his body is still there.”
The Writhewife stood up, pushing off Indirk for leverage, and stepped into the middle of the lane. She pulled her hood into place. Indirk briefly glimpsed the flash of yellow light, the Writhe’s magic moving inside of the woman, before she turned to quietly walk away.
Indirk got to her feet quickly. “I never found out what was in that box. What did he bring?”
“Exactly what he said,” The Writhewife muttered. “Nothing but a token. I’d thought it would’ve been enough, but I’ll never understand.”
“What’s your name?”
“Why do you keep asking that?”
Indirk caught the Writhwife by her sleeve. “Because I’m trying to…”
The Writhewife stood in place, either patient or just still.
Swallowing and lifting her head, setting her shoulders, Indirk took a deep breath. “Because of who I am, who I was, where I'm from, it's hard to feel safe here. I am trying to trust you. I am trying to let you make me feel safe in this city. I’m supposed to feel like that, right? People in Gray Watch feel safe because you’re around.”
“Not always, no.” The Writhewife spoke bluntly and flatly. “Often, they are afraid of me. I don’t resent it. They see so little. But no matter how they feel, I do what I can to keep them safe. Even if my Gray love often has doubts about me, I will always stand by it.”
