PM to join [Khida] Behind the Strangeness of Your Eyes

[Aramenta]

Spring 7, 513 AV
A Farrier's Home, Endrykas
--------------------------------

The Spring Festival hung in the air more thickly as it entered its final day. The pavilions around Endrykas were thick with the gathered sundries of the Clans, the streets heavy with the smells of rich cakes and the preparations of the last day of feasting. It was early yet, though, and most of the city had been up late listening to tales, swapping stories. It showed in the demeanor of those who walked the ways of Endrykas - the city was awake, yes, for Endrykas was a city of living things, and nature was no respecter of persons, no matter how hungover. But a sort of humid muted quality hung over the city, a combination of heads held gingerly, and the warm, sweaty pleasure of people stil snuggled close against the encroaching sunrise in the cots of the pavilions. Life, this morning, was thick and well stewed but did not, perhaps, bubble and snap - it simply steamed pleasantly.

Aramenta Stonewhistling had been, the night before, old enough to participate in the night's festivities as a full adult. She had not drunk so much - liquor, anyway, tended to irritate her fragile throat - but certainly she had perhaps stayed up a bit too late, listening to a narrow old woman telling an entrancing, long lay of the Time Beneath the Caverns, when the Striders gnawed at the growth of stones, and the Earth herself fed the people at her breast.

Livvy had not stayed up late whatesoever. She was nearly a woman herself now, only a year younger than her mistress, and aa practical one at that, who knew how things worked: a sleepy city liked to have more of its work done for it by others. She had gone to bed early, imagining a busier morning for herself today. She had been correct, bustling about in the paddocks just as the first sliver of light pierced over the horizon, helping to muck the stables, and carry water. Ara had woken with her - it was seldom that Ara could sleep past when Livvy crawled out of bed, and usually a sign of illness rather than luxury. She had curried and fed Canterfoot, first, then yanked on a pair of worn boots to turn to the same muck-work as Livvy.

They were both, then, wide awake by the time the sun crawled over the horizon, and rose up to mid-morning, and Father, grudgingly satisfied with Ara's hard work, had sent them off to run an errand - this was the day for settling spats, and the Stonewhistlings had one with a neighboring pavilion. The argument was over a neighbor's strider who had twisted his hoof galloping in amongst the Stonewhistling herd. Ara was to go to the farrier's for liniment. The farrier the Stonewhistlings frequented, like most businesses in the city, was not marked in any particularly apparent way. For Ara, it need not have been. She simply knew it was there. She chattered happily with Livvy as she walked, leaning in close to whisper in her ear.

Livvy chuckled, and waved her hand dismissively, over some private joke. They passed an old woman, who sat atop half a hogshead, twirling horsehair into long braids with bits of unfinished stones woven into them. They glimmered softly in the light of morning, meant to be woven into horse-manes on festival days. Ara stopped, and looked over the woman's work with the delight of a child not quite grown up, and signed softly in a sort of pretty admiration. The woman looked up - she recognized Ara, who was near her own people, still - and nodded with a grin. "Kind of you, Ms Stonewhistling."

[Khida]

Khida and her partner had been up before the sun, the very beginning of the day being an ideal time for hunting. She had fed well from their success, and a quite satisfied bird had spent some time basking in the sun and preening her feathers afterwards. He had gone away on his own business, to what end the falcon remained unaware; she didn't mind the not knowing. When her grooming was complete, Khida turned her attention to the city around her, observing the people at their daily errands. She reflected upon one person in particular, the woman she had spoken with last night. Vallora. Talvael, her memory supplied shortly afterwards, the horse in tandem with the rider, as the Drykas seemed to always be. Even he had his Strider -- and horses had been no part of her upbringing, except very circumstantially. What Khida knew about horses still seemed tiny, even miniscule, when set against the role they played in this place, in these people's lives. That, she felt, needed to change. The falcon launched herself from her perch and swooped down into the city. In the main thoroughfares, people wove around one another in ever-shifting chaos, leaving no open spaces she felt comfortable enough to land in; Khida chose an empty niche between two tents instead, a place which seemed forgotten and no one was like to walk through. Her feet on the ground, she shifted to human, then stepped out into the passageway. Khida wasn't interested in the people right now, but in the items set out on display, be they entire tables of goods for sale or a mere handful of representative offerings, discreetly hinting at more given the proper query. She gave the Drykas themselves no notice as some of them glanced at her, then did a double-take, then either stared or turned to whisper to friends as suited their natures -- for the young woman wore no clothes and bore no windmarks on her entirely exposed skin, twice over a strange sight in the midst of Endrykas. Yet she displayed exactly no self-consciousness on either (or any!) score, and seemed to hardly notice the disconcertion she left in her wake. She was looking for something particular, though it took a little while for Khida to find it. In the end, she caught sight of a familiar shape from the corner of her eye -- a wooden oval nearly the size of her hand. Khida stepped over and picked up the horse-brush, turning it over and examining the thing as if to confirm its identity, then curiously regarding the other, presumably related, things set out with it. Some were clearly also brushes, albeit of different types. Others... She exchanged the brush for a hooked bit of metal, studying its glinting shape with patent unfamiliarity.

[Aramenta]

As the sun grew hotter on the tents of Endrykas, more people began to emerge slowly - and after all, it doesn't take a lot of people to make a crowd around a strange sight.

Ara offered a kindly response to the old bangle weaver, and she and Ara moved on. There was, after all, not truly a 'market' in Endrykas - or rather, all Endrykas was a market, in a sense. Each family pavilion had goods to sell, or swap, and shopping was more a matter of deciding how distant a neighbor one must turn to for what one needed. Without the Web, or without someone who could sense the Web, it was difficult to navigate this informal exchange. Ara knew this particular chain of the Web - this area was her stomping grounds and, while of course the physical location shifted each time the city reformed, the configurative location in the internal web was the playground of her childhood.

And as confusing and perverse as the idea of a market that can be navigated only by memory and arcane knowledge might have seemed to an outsider, to Ara, a Drykas born and a webber besides, it felt comforting and familiar - shopping was an intimate, familiar activity, general devoid of haggling and advertisement, something one did amongst family and friends. And the channels of the web were so deep and familiar, she could feel them almost without closing her eyes.

She slipped through a pavilion, past a distant cousin who twined rope on a long frame set across her pavilion, and stopped for a moment, closed her eyes, and stretched her fingers to just dip her toes into the web of the city on feast-day, to feel the awakening buzz of a festival city.

And heard immediately the crescendo of a slowly forming knot of Drykas.

Little tangles of Drykas were not uncommon on the web, after all. The web-song of a Drykas was not an aria, but a chorus, in general, and Drykas sounded better in Ara's mind, in chords. The little chorus of a hunting party, of a quilting group, of just a pleasant gossip sit-down, these were all familiar variations on a song that had been sung across the web since long before she was born, that echoed in the chorus-echo of hundreds of years.

But this tangle of song was peculiar, jabbering and surprised, and worried, and mixed with excited and intrigued and hungry. It was an uncomfortable, unnatural thing, something that must be changed. But it was not the web itself - it was the song being sung across it.

She unlaced her fingers, looked at Livvy with a deep frown and jerked her head urgently forward before turning to rush quickly out of the tent. Livvy would follow. Livvy would've followed even if she hadn't asked, Ara knew that. They rushed out of the tent, threaded between a few pavilion-walls, skipping between the thoroughfares into the Endrykas equivalent of winding alleyways. Ara felt the pull of that strange song, more firmly as she thought on it, and buried her own thoughts in it, at the expense of her own self-reflection, ignoring her own emotions, a mixture of compassion and the love of the order of her people, and just simple, old-fashioned curiosity. There was a thing happening. she wanted to find out what.

And then, she was in the clearing of a street again, and there was the crowd. Drykas stood bout shame-faced, but intent, staring, whispering, sidling, keeping their distance. In the center, stood the naked woman, picking up the bits and pieces of horse equipment.

Ara blushed a deep, deep red. But the impulsiveness of a youth of social isolation had carried her this far, and it carried her to stumble past the loose ring of spectators onto the impromptu stage itself. Livvy paused longer - the risks of a slaves life do not teach one to seek to be seen. But her loyalty to Ara carried her scurrying in behind her, undoing her loose, rough cloak as she did so.

Ara grabbed her slaves shoulder and leaned in close, whispered to her, her hands gesturing compassion, caution. Livvy nodded, and the two girls walked together, closer to the woman, Livvy holding up the cloak to the woman now. She stumbled out a string of rusty, disused common-tongue.

"Miss is confused, hmm? Miss is not from here?"

Ara looked on with her shy blushing face while Livvy speaks, fascinated at the strangeness of the sight. But impulse carried her yet, one step further, and she reaches forward to touch the nude woman, just in the center of her slender left collarbone.

[Khida]

Khida looked up for the person behind the table, because there was always a person -- man or woman -- associated with one of these displays. But before she could do more than notice the man's peculiar expression, she caught motion from the corner of her eye. Deliberate motion, coming closer. She turned to see two women approaching, one of them holding up something large; the Kelvic took an automatic step back, her hip pressing against the table's edge. In the next moment, she identified the large sheet as cloth, a cloak of some kind. This reminded her that humans were fussy about clothes and coverings. Raising her head slightly, Khida let them continue to approach, watching the pair's movements with a very direct amber stare. She let the one with the cloak hold it up to her shoulders, watching her with a wary eye, not quite willing to step away from the table so it could be wrapped around her. She preferred to have the table at her back, even if it wasn't much as protection went. Then the other one reached up to touch her, and the situation changed again. Khida felt suddenly confined, hemmed in by the girl on her left and the girl before her; she hissed at them both, dropping the hoof-pick to plant her hands on the table. Boosting herself up onto it, she slid over the top to the other side, heedless of all the things which were shoved unceremoniously aside in the process. Some clustered to either side; others plopped down onto the ground, disregarded by the Kelvic. With the table between them, her personal space as quickly restored, Khida felt a little better. She looked up at the sky, the blue vastness into which she could always retreat, and regained more confidence from that fact. She still had questions she wanted to ask these people, besides; she didn't want to leave without them answered. Dropping her gaze to the two girls, Khida blinked once. "What do you want?" she asked in Common, her tone abrupt and wary. The Kelvic glanced to the one who had spoken before, then the other. "Is?" she asked, for lack of a better Pavi word -- only now did Khida realize, she had no way to ask a person's intentions in the Drykas language. So she added a gesture instead -- confusion, the motion he used when he didn' t understand what she wanted of him. She certainly didn't understand what they wanted.

[Aramenta]

Neither Ara nor Livvy had even the slightest familiarity with Kelvics. The idea of it would never have even entered their heads. And yet... and yet. There was a quality of the feral about this woman, jerking about with the instinctual quickness of a beast, savvy of herself and naive of others, that, just in the subtle corners of Ara's psyche, made her approach the woman differently, with some of the caution and humility one brings to a hurt animal.

This didn't mean she was precisely in control of her reactions - this was not the conscious intelligent choice of experience, but the clumsy instincts of a child. The sudden leap of the woman backwards made Ara herself shrink back a bit, cringe into a clumsy guard position. The look of the woman's face, not fear but caution, and the gesture of 'confusion' made Ara frown into her own confusion.

Livvy by her side, was more dramatic - for Ara was working off nothing but emotion. Livvy worked off of duty and love. Her Missy Ara had touched someone, and that someone had then hissed at her and leapt over a table. This was a threat. Livvy then pushed herself protectively before ara, just set her hand to her axe at her belt, her small, shorn-haired face looking fierce and protective in response to the woman's sharp, amber eyes.

Ara, though, immediately put a hand to Livvy's chest and gestured a fast, emphatic 'No!' with her hands. Livvy frowned, but she was a slave, not a mother. She did what she was told. She move her hand slowly away - though she kept her eyes trained on the woman, with a suspicion tautening her muscles.

Ara, though, did the opposite. In the way one might approach an angry dog, she drooped her shoulders submissively, bowing her head slightly, looking up at the taller woman. She shuffled, just slightly closer to the table, extending her hands, palm up, in a gesture of submission, helplessness that was so universal and instinctual, that it was barely the tongue of the Drykas at all, no more than a scream is in any given language's lexicon. Then she gestured, with one hand, slowly, slowly, ever slowly so as not to startle, a slow, simple progression of emotions: apology, shame, the desire to serve. Submission wrapping hard around all three. Ara's pride was a real thing, but one that had its limits, and in this case was bounded by fascination, and a very real appreciation of the amber-eyed woman's superior virtues, the lithe fluidity of her, the force of will that had launched her over the table, her unconscious, animal beauty. Her eyes flitted hopefully from where she bowed them. She opened her mouth, without even thinking of it to speak, and the softest hiss of a whisper, murmured in clumsy, unpracticed common tongue, "I am servant you."

A hawk's ears would catch the words. A human's? If they were very, very sharp, and very, very alert, perhaps the shadow of them.

Livvy watched, nervously.

[Khida]

Neither of them responded to her words. Strange, for humans; humans always responded to words. Instead, the one took a half-step forward, interposing herself between Khida and the other; one of her hands dropped to a handle at her belt in a way that telegraphed intentions very clearly. Intentions Khida didn't care to stand still to meet, even if there was the width of a table between the two of them right now. She drew back, on the cusp of shifting -- would have shifted, but in the moment before she did, the other one intervened. In much the way that a perched bird regarded too steadily might lift its wings in agitation, then hesitate on the very edge of flight, Khida held herself on that internal line, gaze darting back and forth between the two. Both apprehension and bewilderment wrote themselves across her features, clear as day. Did they threaten her... or not? The one that had touched her stepped forward, slow, careful, her hands dancing through patterns which meant exactly nothing to Khida -- and that incomprehension, too, was evident in her expression and posture. As the one with the axe remained still, she focused intently on the speaker, tipping her head to one side and blinking exactly once. The gestures the girl made were nothing like any he had ever used. She saw the girl's lips move, heard the barest whisper of her voice, but couldn't make out the words; couldn't even tell if they were Common or Pavi or another language altogether. What the falcon Kelvic could clearly discern was the girl's exaggerated display of humility -- indeed, that was impossible to miss. "What do you want?" she repeated in Common, despite the failure of her earlier attempt with that same query. She had nothing else to try. Her tone ratcheted up a notch in this iteration, taut and wary; Khida was less put at ease by the display of meekness than she was stressed by their apparent ongoing failure to communicate. Given that one had already shown a willingness to take offense, and bring weapons into play... the falcon Kelvic still wasn't convinced that retreat wasn't the wiser course of action.

[Aramenta]

Livvy now frowned, hard. This was all getting nowhere, and the way her Missy was bowing to the thing in front of her made Livvy uncomfortable in ways she was not sufficiently self-aware, at the moment, to plumb too far. What she knew was simple: the woman at the table was tense and nervous, and looked strong and wild enough to be dangerous. And her Ara was standing very close to the woman.

//Stupid petching foreigner,// Livvy thought viciously, //Can't she see Missy is trying to help?//

Ara pulled her hands back timidly, and frowned. Livvy sighed, irritably and spoke in her smattered commontongue.

"She cain't answer, Foreigner. She cain't talk none. She answer iwth hands, you don't know to read hands, eh?"

Livvy pointed firmly to Ara, then, taking charge, "This is Aramenta Stonewhistling. This is Ara. Ara."

She pointed to herself, "I am Livvy. Err..." her mind blanked. The word slave escaped her, suddenly. "I walk with Ara, to help."

Then, she pointed to the woman, in a business-like, cautious way.

"You. You're naked. You should not be naked. We try to give you clothes. Hmm?"

Ara looks up at this sentence, and nods, leans in to Livvy's ear, while she unclasps her own cloak, now, a finer material than Livvy's. She whispers inaudibly, and Livvy nods, with abit of apprehension.

"Lady Ara. Ara." Lady wasn't quite the right word, but she couldn't come up with the right one, "Ara says, she serves you. You need someone to help, eh? You are looking for something, eh? You can't find things in Endrykas, less you are Drykas, eh?"

[Khida]

The axe-girl's tone was challenging, even disdainful. Fortunately, Khida didn't feel any pressing need to strive for her good opinion, and as long as there was enough distance between them, she thought she could live with the bad. At least the girl was talking now, the give and take of conversation, which in the Kelvic's appearance meant some willingness to coexist. She couldn't be said to relax, quite, but the edge of tension gradually leached out of her posture as they went on. The explanation that the quiet girl didn't speak, Khida met with equanimity; indeed, it would be hard for an observer to say it made any matter to her at all. It was a fact of being, and the Kelvic took it so, without either scorn or pity. "I know some," she replied evenly on the subject of signed words, not offended by the blunt accusation of her ignorance. "Not enough. None of those." She went on to nod as the axe-girl introduced them both, and scowled as the other went on to the subject of clothing, not comprehending her reasoning. "Is that what you came for? You crowd close and stand angry --" at least for one of them "-- because I don't have clothes?" Clothes were important to humans for silly reasons as well as practical ones, Khida knew that, but important enough to menace her over... really? Perplexed by that as she was, her frown only deepened as Liv went on. Not that she minded help, when it was needed, but what the girl described didn't quite match up with Khida's own experience. "It is not hard to find things," she disagreed, casting a glance at the tents around them -- then another, longer, slower, considering it more in depth. She stopped to see them as a human would -- the walls of cloth all around, deceptively similar in construction, the pattern of their layout obscure from the earthbound perspective. She could imagine getting lost, if she were only to walk through Endrykas. In the end, the Kelvic shrugged. "I suppose it could be. I've never tried with just walking."

[Aramenta]

Ara cocked her head, her eyes furrowing - perhaps half of what the woman was saying was coming through to her. Perhaps less, given the woman's accent was foreign to her as well. She caught the word menace, though - less the word than the obvious intent behind it, and it made her chew her lower lip thoughtfully. She looked down at the table, at the scatter of horse-tools, gnawing on her thoughts, considering.

Livvy on the other hand had a certain parallelism to the bird-woman. If she had feathers, they would be ruffled, now. There's not a touch of pride or standoffishness in her demeanor, just a sort of animal protectiveness, and nervous agression. Her feet were planted a bit apart, her shoulders were hunched, her hands at the ready, almost like a raptor mantling its prey. Or, its clutch of eggs.

She stayed in common, but her nerves showed, removing some of her ability in the language. She had to burr of almost a low growl, in her speech, and her hands made small, quick movements of standoffish nervousness as she spoke.

"Nobody threatening you, lady. All people these around you, they gawking, don't like you. Clothes make them like you more, then THEY won't threaten, eh? What you look for? Drykas-folk, they get nervous foreigners walking around with no purpose."

Ara heard this, and understood it BETTER - probably not least becuase Livvy's hands drifted vaguely along a sort of Pidgin grass-sign along with her words. But still imperfectly. But she stared at the horse tools again, and leaned forward slowly, keeping her hands on her belly. Her eyes remained down cast, pointed closer to the woman's breastbone than her face. The lean was slow, but not at all subtle, and she had to lean in very, very close, passing the boundaries of the woman's face to put her lips just a few inches from the bird-woman's ear.

Then, she spoke, a voiceless, breathy wind of a whisper, in very rusty, childlike common speech, thick with a foreign accent.

"Is liking horses? IS looking stuff, like horses? Want to see horses?"

Then she backed up, but instinctually for the convenience of her mode of conversation, not very far, stopping her own face less than a foot from the woman's.

[Khida]

The axe-girl grumbled back at her, and Khida narrowed her eyes at the near-growl in Liv's tone. She glanced -- briefly, very briefly -- away towards a knot of Drykas visible over the slave's shoulder, some distance away and watching the goings-on with obvious interest. She then dismissed them with a twitch of her shoulders: what was their opinion to her? She could have explained this to the axe-girl, could have described how it was her actions, her posture, her manner of speaking which communicated potential threat to the falcon Kelvic. At least, she could have said the words in Common. But when it came down to it, she didn't really care if Liv understood what she had meant, any more than she cared if the cluster of Drykas way back over there were nervous. Explaining would gain Khida nothing, so far as she could imagine -- so she didn't. Questions, to the axe-girl, didn't seem like they'd get her anything useful, either. But the other girl, the quiet one, stepped forward, her movement commanding Khida's attention. She came up to the table, her hands kept still and in sight, her posture all but exuding a lack of threat. The Kelvic stood stock-still as she approached, intently focused upon Ara even as she leaned her upper body over the table and in past Khida's field of view. Reflexively, Khida flinched away from her head, but didn't move -- and remained still when it proved that the girl only wanted to whisper in her ear. Ara straightened, clearly awaiting a reply. "I've seen horses," she answered, with another slight lift of her shoulders. Khida paused a moment to sort through her scanty lexicon of Pavi. "No horse. Not a horse... about horse. About horse and Drykas and Pavi and, and..." It seemed like so much in that moment, all of these things that were inherent in his world but no part of her experience. He never asked her to do more than hunt, but she could help him more -- if only she knew these things. Everything, though -- even she recognized that was too much to ask for from one person. Or even two people, did Liv deign to contribute to her instruction. Khida huffed her frustration at words and languages and learning, then leaned down to scoop up some of the things which had fallen on her side of the display table, dumping them back onto its surface. "Brush," she said, separating out the bristled tool from the others. "This is?" she continued, sliding something else out from amongst the heap, a thing she didn't recognize.