Johanna (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bythegrace) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
northclifflogs2019-07-03 05:45 pm
bythegrace) wrote in northclifflogs2019-07-03 05:45 pm
Entry tags:
A Reasonable Reaction
WHO: Johanna and Adhemmar, but also concurrent threads for anyone who is likely to visit her.
WHAT: She is not taking that public execution well.
WHEN: After the execution.
WHERE: Johanna's house, newly built, just outside town.
NOTES: None yet, will update.
WHAT: She is not taking that public execution well.
WHEN: After the execution.
WHERE: Johanna's house, newly built, just outside town.
NOTES: None yet, will update.
Johanna's house is small and wide, built of heavy stones and cement, half atop a deck of hewn logs and a foundation of brick. The waterwheel attached to it moves sluggishly in the water and the quiet scraping knock it makes is a persistent sound. It is loud enough that, once one approaches her door, they might not hear through it. On any other day that would be true, but today she is very upset and she has decided to take that anger out on the furnishings in her home. There are crashes and clangs, shattering sounds and frustrated cursing and they, like the waterwheel, persist.
It is fortunate her home is not precisely inside town and, apart from a precious few folk, there are none who would travel to the river to bother her without good reason.
It is not quite sunset when she finally stops her tantrum (for what else could she call it but that?) and the building goes quiet.
no subject
(He may be an unrepentant heretic, but he's not a particularly worldly one. He is a priest, after all.)
"You too?" she says at last, after a string of incomprehensible Haguennot, and that breaks the spell. He loosens his fingers from their curled fist, and some of the tension in the air eases around them. A wry smirk tugs at the corners of his mouth, and for a moment he very much resembles the cat who got the cream. He could try to free his arms from her grip, if he wanted to. He doesn't.
"You sound surprised," he replies, and has the audacity to sound almost sly about it.
no subject
As though she should have known. As though there had been even the barest hint of a sign in his reserved countenance. He is a world more careful than she is, she cannot even begin imagining him using his gifts as freely as she is wont to, if at all--she can only wonder if his gift is earthly to provide such constancy.
She is torn for the briefest of moments--she wants to scold him, but she has lost the words in Glennich. She wants to ask him questions, but she cannot sort the thoughts into a line. She wants to show off gifts for gifts as she hasn't since Arcote, but the exhaustion of her destructive tantrum has already seeped into her bones. She is delighted and, without hesitation or pause to consider the wisdom of the act, closes the space between them to press an enthused but entirely chaste kiss on his lips. When she draws back a heartbeat later, that manic energy still lingers.
"Of course I am," she proclaims in something akin to a stage whisper--between them but too loud to be truly private if someone were lurking. "I could not have begun to guess!"
no subject
Chaste or not, he goes abruptly still under her hands and, once she draws back to whisper at him, stares back at her in stunned silence. It stretches a breath, and then two; his eyes flick across her face without settling anywhere, and whatever cheeky reply he'd had planned is forgotten. Several other things are not forgotten, of course, such as her fingers on his arms, or how her mouth felt against his--
He closes his eyes to draw in a breath, then opens them again, letting it out.
"I'm good at hiding things," he answers her softly. He raises his eyebrows. "I would have burned at the stake years ago, otherwise."
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"I used it every day, all the time--it is so hard to keep from doing small things, to use my hands when it is easier not to," she complains and this, at least, she remembers to speak in a low whisper. She is still happy, vibrant and relieved in equal measure. He will understand and that is a precious thing. It has not occurred to her yet that he might be more reserved in this, just as Maireglenne is more reserved in all things.
"How do you stand it? Being so careful?"
no subject
"How do you stand it? Being so careful?"
In the flickering light of the candle, a bit of broken glass on the floor catches his eye. He kneels down carefully to collect it, examining it in his palm when he straightens up. After a moment, he says, "I have never thought about it in that way. Tolerating caution." He turns to set the shard on the table, where Johanna won't tread across it with her feet, and smooths one thumb deliberately near the edge.
When he looks up at her again, that thin, nearly-there smile is present at the corners of his mouth again. "I suppose there is an element of excitement present in deliberate deception of people who would kill me, if they knew what I was. Some satisfaction in success, in spite of their expectations." He lifts his chin some, expression growing wry. "I have hubris of my own."
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"Strange humor, but good," she commends and some of her delight falls away. Her smile falters just a bit before she continues. If the destruction around her bothers her, she does not show it.
"I am put on terrible edge by such things. I am not nice, or sweet, or particularly kind--" that last bit is a lie, even she knows it, but she must craft her armor from something. "I could not fool them for long..."
And, realizing what she has said and how true it must be, is just a little sobering. It brings them back around, to her desire and willingness to fight back. A brief bolt of panic dashes through her countenance, then, and she looks up at him, suddenly and truly worried.
"I was not joking before. I am...almost certain I am hunted." She says and her tone is quiet again. It is the truth, of her sad story and how she came to survive Arcote and the fires that consumed it. She is hunted and now he knows of her. And he is like her.
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A sobering turn for the conversation to take, indeed, but a necessary one. It answers a question that has been hovering in the back of his mind since he first began to suspect her nature, and now it has come to the fore; it alarms him how preoccupied with the thought he's becoming.
"Who discovered you?" he asks quietly. "In Haguenne."
no subject
For a long moment, she is paralyzed by the threads of thought she must explain. They run through her like water trickling through fine cracks in glass, and she is not sure she is delicate enough to speak without shattering the thin veneer of peace she had found.
But he was like her.
They are standing close (too close and not nearly close enough) and a flightiness takes her features, just for a second. Her eyes dart away from him and she turns, moving to the table with nervous energy. She grasps that box again and holds it close, like a talisman, before she can bring herself to look back at him.
Where could she even begin? Was there a route that was circuitous enough that she could fool herself?
"I--" she starts and steps toward him. A piece of glass cracks under her foot and she recalls the ink she has spilled.
The idea that strikes her then is painful enough that he would be forgiven for thinking the shard had gone through her shoe. She grimaces and pauses in place--but there is nothing for it. She gives him a look, sad and wary, but nods quickly.
"Come." She commands, but softly, and turns to the doorway in the far wall. It leads away from the river, so it is not her workshop. The opposite is true, in fact, it is her bedroom.
It is deeply inappropriate to invite him in but this, of all places, is the one she trusts to hold her most private things. It is a small room, barely bigger than a closet itself, and the bed is just a frame with a woven hammock across it. The blanket is askew, cast off by her cloak and bag. This room doesnt have a window and, for that, she is glad. She cannot close the door in their wake because there is no door hanging.
Kit had done a truly exemplary job building this flooring but she had pried a board up nevertheless. She bends by the foot of her bed and pries it up as she waits for him. Inside she pulls free the book she had handed him once, and a small sheaf of parchment. The book is cast aside onto the bed and the first of the pages of parchment is held out for him. She doesn't rise, not yet, and her expression is pained even as she holds it out.
"To understand I must...explain. This...is my home."
The page is a drawing, a very meticulously rendered one in the style of the drawings inside her notebook. There is a watercolor wash over this, however, and the fine blues in the sky and water mean she had not wanted for money.
The city, because it is, is on both banks of a large river and half of it is atop a bridge. In her drawing there are a multitude of windows and doors. This was not like Northcliff.
no subject
How many different ways can one man possibly intrude into the private life of another person? Adhemar has come into her home, coaxed out of her a deadly secret--and now here he stands in her bed chambers, holding a piece of her past. He studies the drawing in pensive silence, noting the quality of the ink and the paints; another layer of mystery laced upon everything that came before it.
"Arcote," he replies rhetorically, looking up at her again. "You've spoken to me of it before, and of what brought you to Northcliff Pass." Her pilgrimage to the mountaintop was still to come, but departing so soon on the heels of the Shepherds' visit would not be wise. He takes a slight step nearer to her to offer the drawing back, mindful of their proximity in this very close, very private space.
no subject
"Arcote--" was razed to the ground.
She can't say it and her voice sticks in her throat. More circuitous, then, farther from the heart of it. Haugenne, then, if nothing else.
"We are less pious than you are here," she explains, as carefully as she is able. Her tone is measured and quiet and does not stray, so tight is her leash upon it. "But we are not...we did not...."
What? Beg for Divine Retribution?
"We have the term, Profane, we use your word for it but...it is uncommon. To invoke it a person must be--Dépossédé is what we say, in polite conversation at least. They who have this power--they must be like us...and be willing, ambitious enough to contest the Gods."
It is hard to explain the subtlety in Glennich. The desire to usurp the Gods is a distinction between those born with power and the Profane that, apparently, is not shared in Maireglenne. She sidesteps it, it isn't important, not really, and if she becomes distracted her resolve with falter.
"It was not encouraged, not at all, but it was accepted as a strangeness of life. So long as harm, as darkness does not come of it, it is just a little thing. It can be ignored but should be kept private."
And here is the problem with this direction, with rounding the problem this way. Now she must talk about the only other person who survived Arcote.
"I was very pious, despite being Dépossédé. I was the only one in my family born this way. My husband was not. My daughter was not. Her twins and her husband were not. That was fine, they had other gifts that I lack still."
There is a tremor in her hands as she speaks, she doesn't notice it, as distracted and distant as her gaze is. The shaking intensifies as she continues. The hand holding the parchment is clutched so tightly that her fingers have all but turned white.
"When the sickness came to Arcote….I do not know why I was spared. I was not the only Dépossédé, I had no designs on great power and I was not particularly humble either. But it still consumed them."
It takes actual force to speak the next words and even she hears the falter in her voice.
"The children died first. A hundred or so...each turned black and blue, rotting from the inside. The elderly were next...and the weak...the delicate. My daughter and her children. Her husband. My husband."
"Men lost their minds with fear of it, with fear of the illness, of the Dépossédé, of the river. The sicker they grew, the more the rot took their minds. The bodies clogged the streets but we could not throw them in the water. They shot anyone who attempted to."
no subject
(What better way to usurp a god than to deny its existence in the first place?)
"...My daughter and her children. Her husband. My husband."
He looks up from the drawing and watches the play of emotion across her face as she details each loss dealt to her by the plague: a daughter, grandchildren, a son-in-law, a husband. He frowns; in the past parishioners have come to him begging that he perform last rites over the dead and dying, and in those circumstances he performed the necessary emotions that the grief-stricken had come to expect from their vicar over the years. They come to him as easily now, like muscle memory: the gentle reminders that all life is borrowed from the gods, and thus all life must return to the gods' in due course; the funereal sacraments; the follow-up visits to the home once the dead have been buried and the rest of the village has moved on. These steps are expected of him--but to put on such a pantomime for Johanna sits badly with him, and so he says nothing.
"...The bodies clogged the streets but we could not throw them in the water. They shot anyone who attempted to."
"They would not let you leave the city." It's only a guess, rather than an assumption of truth, but from what he has seen of sickness, it is often the case that even the hale and healthy are quarantined to prevent the spread of disease.
no subject
"The...Lord of the province. He commanded that they bar the gates and burn the boats," she explains quickly, "The river itself is large and deep, the current moves very fast. Even strong swimmers could not cross it without being washed downstream."
The heaviest part of her task had been setting the scene, describing the illness and the deaths. To think those over, to remind herself that it had happened, was a costly thing. To describe this...this worries her, it gnaws at her, but it does not devastate her. Her trembling calms but the set of her shoulders is sharper, more tense, as she continues.
"They stationed archers downstream, to shoot those who made the attempt. At first, they did not kill many people. When they set Arcote ablaze, that changed."
She can still recall the smell of it. That had been the very worst part. The fire and the terror had been awful, the most horrible sight she had ever seen. People were consumed as they fled their own burning homes, whole blocks and streets were cut off, trapped by burning rubble, and the fires gradually destroyed the very bridge that the city was built atop. It did not take long for Arcote to burn, it was a city of wood and plaster, but the smell as it did was so noxious she can nearly taste it from the memory alone.
"I don't even know how I intended to escape the flames, it was chaos, but I ran for the little docks from my home," she says, the account a little faster and her expression less removed as she becomes a presence in her own tale. Her brow furrows as she tries to remember, but everything in her mind is choking smoke and fire.
"I am not a strong swimmer, I can barely float, and there were no boats--I knew that. But as I ran I--"
Should she share his name? Would it matter? Not all priests know one another and, certainly, Adhemar would not know some boy from the far shores of Haugene.
"He was our Vicar," she finally answers his question. "He was terrified, stunned to silence and watching as the city burned. I had known him since he was a boy--I had no plan but I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him with me. He did not fight, he was barely aware we were moving. When we arrived at the water..."
Here she pauses and her expression becomes openly frustrated. Her hands finally release the bedframe and her gaze shifts from the space before her to her fingers. Her hands are pale, thin, and have new callouses. They do not have answers.
"I still don't know how I did it." There's a distant almost academic note to her voice then. The story becomes a blur, a haze of action and reaction, of flight and fear.
"I...lifted the river around us."
It had been something similar. Johanna remembers jumping in, taking the priest with her, and falling onto hard ground below. It was dark, then, and very cold, but it was not so different from running in the deep woods...except for the silence. The closeness of the sound. She was not scared of the water.
"We fell to the riverbed and the water closed overhead but it bent away as we walked. As I dragged that poor boy." She folds her hands before her and looks up at Adhemar again. Her expression is almost apologetic.
"I don't know how far we walked, but when we came up the bank, it was night and the fires of Arcote were distant. I was so tired, but we were finally free," she pauses and lets out a sharp breath, "and that boy drew my own knife on me and called me Profane."
no subject
This story does much to explain her initial hostility towards him, though even under the best circumstances the Profane rarely have cause to celebrate encounters with the clergy. Still, the gall of that unknown priest--to threaten and vilify the woman who had just saved his wretched hide from a truly miserable end.
In her shoes, Adhemar would have left him to die. Or dispose of him more ruthlessly when he became a risk.
(Maybe it shows a little in the coldness of his eyes.)
He considers Johanna in silence for a moment or two once she has finished speaking, weighing his words before giving voice to them. Slowly, he says, "I won't ask if you killed him. But know that, if you did," and here he pauses again to meet her eyes, "I would not blame you for it."
no subject
"No," she replies and sounds more than a touch disappointed in herself. "I couldn't bring myself to kill him. I had known him too long--he was the only one left that I had known."
She sighs, then and sits back, rests her hands on her knees and looks at him. The bed creaks beneath her.
"I ran instead. I do not know what happened to him, whether he was killed for breaking the quarantine, or if he fled himself, but I know he knows me and hates me.
"If anyone lives who remembers me, it is him, and so...if he does...I am hunted."