1st Draft Fridays - A Fistful of ... (#6)

Redskin Plains

Waislen has a crude map with her, sewn into fabric, and references it to guide Lallie through the maze of craigs in the dunes. In the small depression they end up in, the air feels as wrong as it smells and nothing living surrounds the tiny pool that apparently feeds into the reservoir used by the locals.

"I don't get it," Lallie says. "If they know what causes it and where, why let it continue? And why call it a curse?"

Waislen is crouching, staring at that pool with the intensity of someone refusing to show fear. That expression doesn't change as she slowly, carefully, brings out a small vial of black liquid from her person and dumps most of it in. The water turns yellow where she put it, but that quickly spreads and diffuses.

"It was made so the first elves could cross the ocean," Waislen says softly. "Then the first emperor leveraged it to punish those against him, and he started the propaganda that it's some kind of curse. The Plainskin adopted it as a penalty for convicted criminals, since it theoretically forces you to think ahead, and kept the 'curse' rhetoric as a social politeness. It is possible to contract unintentionally or to avoid even with exposure, but that's rare."

Lallie stares at her. "That camp has children."

"Who are documented and can leave at will, once of age. The Plainskin use these camps for offenders that are expected to be able to be rehabilitated, so some clans use them more than others. They're segregated by affinity, mostly."

Waislen keeps crouched, keeps glancing outward, and Lallie belatedly realizes that the elf probably just violated Plainskin law, herself, in seeking to kill whatever it was in the pool.

She starts away, slipping a bit on the rock, and Waislen follows silently. She wonders how the elf learned all this, which brings the question of 'when', and that's dangerous water to tread.

Water! her feral side protests.

Lallie scowls. "I get that you want to fix what your people mucked up," she says, "but if that's where it comes from, why aren't they more leery of you?"

She then freezes midstep, realizing-- "How are you here?!"

Waislen is an elf. Elves need life about them, matching their affinity.

"I infected myself, yes," the elf answers quietly, pausing with Lallie rather than continuing on. "Removing it renders a person sterile. I'm looking forward to never having to..."

She glances to Lallie, then away. "Geddis wasn't your husband's only lover."

The hurt spikes. "I thought that was before."

Waislen sighs. "Yes...and no."

Something in her voice... "You lost the baby?"

The elf's gaze narrows on her. "Warming a man's bed was bad enough. I wasn't about to have his bastard, too."

Lallie struggles to follow, to understand... "The relationship ended before, but you found out you were pregnant after, and you..."

Ended it. Lallie can't imagine intentionally ending a pregnancy, not with how much she'd wanted her baby.

But... She's always been montai, an earth elemental. Earth affinities rarely miscarry, with unhealthy pregnancies not even taking root, so a pregnancy pretty much is a person who'll be born healthy. And that's aside from how earth magic's preference for natural states mean people with that affinity heal faster and better than other affinities, regardless, where childbirth isn't the risk it is for others.

If those weren't true, if all she could do was hope the pregnancy would result in a baby, would she still think of it as a baby?

And if the birth could have harmed her or killed her, would it even matter? She's killed people to prevent harm to others, and she's wondered if maybe someone should do the same to her. Good intent doesn't make her actions necessarily good, and repercussions don't care about innocence.

The -len on Waislen's name means she's legitimate, and Lallie has a belated realization that makes her sick. "That's how some of you handled the slavery," she blurted. "You..."

She had noticed that the lack of illegitimate children, borne of the slavery, tended to run in families. She'd assumed those families had just been lucky enough to escape the abuse in that fashion.

Waislen's expression stays even as she watches Lallie carefully--a reminder of how Lallie isn't nearly as sane as she wishes, that she's hurt people for what many would consider less cause.

"I understand, I think." How that must've hurt her husband. He'd wanted a biological child so badly...and he'd had a habit of focusing on what his magic told him would be without pausing to think if it should. Otherwise, he might've paused to ponder if he even wanted to be married to her, before...

Lallie sighs and starts out of the crevice, since it's probably a good idea to be gone before any patrols or  whatever show up—though if Waislen's correct about the situation, she does wonder why this pool wasn't better guarded. "Is Berthen having problems with Firthé?"

Liathen's biological son is illegitimate and an infant, too young to be considered for ruling, and his mother wouldn't be interested in pushing that. The adopted son, Berthen, is a teenager—young, but old enough to actively rule and utilize his inheritance—and legitimate, though Lallie isn't sure if his parents were.

Berthen dislikes Firthé's mother, but he's not the sort to punish someone just because he happens to dislike them, or to hold someone accountable for the mistakes of their parents. Any problems between the two would be from others idolizing purity of bloodline.

Waislen frowns at her. "Firthé was taken by slavers."

No. Lallie freezes. Why hasn't anyone contacted her?!

"Your cousin went after him." Dirt crumbles under Waislen's hand, and she eyes the wall for another hold.

"Tuelzi?" Lallie asks blankly, and hoists her up. Her cousin is a clumsy kleptomaniac who's generally oblivious to social cues. "Tuelzi went after slavers?"

Waislen pauses before gripping the top and hauling herself. "You...do realize that her haplessness is an act, yes?" The elf apparently reads her answer in her expression, because she winces. "I suspect she was encouraging your magic not to notice hers so she wouldn't end up lulni, herself."

"She was doing that before." Before Lallie was lulni, back when she was just a middle-class woman in Saf, doing her damnedest to play human and control her magic and hide the feral side that became a myrecat. She runs and jumps up, reminded of when she would do this sort of thing—the climbing—with her husband.

Creator, she misses Liathen. Not the same way she does her first husband, Peyton—she didn't love Liathen, but she did like the poor boy.

The elf shrugs, the angle of her shoulders speaking to cautious attention to Lallie. "I don't know why, then, but she's quite effective when she wants to be. Her daughter was the same, I think."

Cold washes through Lallie. "She had a daughter in Marsdenfel? Back..." When the slavery occurred. "She's not old enough for that!"

Waislen gives her a flat look. "I remember her daughter. Onlé saved a lot of us who refused to have our masters' children."

"But...that means Tuelzi is older than Endellion was." Elves can't have children until they're sixteen—or at least the women can't. Lallie's unsure if that also applies to the men.

Wind picks up, and they both grab their cloths to wind about their face before they eat too much dirt. Waislen carefully folds up her map, puts it away, and pulls out another.

She doesn't invite Lallie along, but she doesn't shoo her off, either. When the elf starts following the new map, Lallie goes along.