rufio was lining her eyes with charcoal. Smudging the black, powdery stick along her caramel skin gently in strokes, while looking in a reflective piece of metal to see what she was doing.
Making sure to stay steady of hand, making short strokes so as not to draw the line too thick and garish.
A striking Drykas sat next to her, painting her jawline with a brush dipped in red ochre, dried and powdered, mixed with a little oil, when she sighed wearily, carrying on a conversation that had been slowly, surely building to a tension all morning.
"It is not natural, it is—" bad omen "—what you do invites trouble into our craft."
"What do you mean, Emry?"
Rufio put the charcoal down, which she borrowed from Emry, to shape her sign—insisting, inquisitive, defensive—with her question.
The fierce Emry's attentions, though, were taken with applying paint to her face. Using delicate brush-strokes, she swept white into the hollows of her cheeks and raked charcoal along the waterline of her piercing azure eyes.
"I mean what I say, Rufio. Reading Chavi is not speaking with the dead."
With that elusive, evasive explanation, Emry's brushes and cosmetic tools were let to clatter onto the low table as she rose and announced.
"I'm going to eat—" As if an afterthought she bent request into her sign—"Ferem?"
The Elder, who was sitting at the back of the large tent brewing tea over a large black iron brazier, waved her off without looking up. A pipe was perched between her aging teeth, the smoke releasing its pungent, herbal scent into the atmosphere.
Rufio felt unsettled by Emry's jabs, and came to sit by the elder. "What does she mean, Ferem?"
It was just then that the Elder looked up, though not at Rufio, at a Kelvic that wandered in. Fixing the stranger with a dark eye, swirling with corporeal observation, and an orb of blind-white, which was striking in its 'seeing'. It was as if it peeled back the skin, flesh and bone, down to the very soul.
"Do not listen to Emry, child, she speaks of things she holds not ken. Hht-"
The Elder ticked her tongue against the back of her teeth bluntly and gestured with a gnarled hand. Rufio turned, noticed Sisquoc then.
She rose to greet him with warmth pervading her sign—welcome, welcome. Her ochre gaze met his, ebbing with a smile, and curiosity. She sat down on a cushion behind another low table made of rare willow.
There was unspoken invitation for Sisquoc to sit on the cushions opposite her.
"I'm Rufio."
Her tone lilted lightly with whispers of a Shiber accent tinting her native Pavi tongue. Syna's light glinted off her nose-ring, and brought out the scattered freckles and copper tones in her ebony hair, fading gently from the Summer.
Ferem puffed on her pipe and sipped her tea, the scents of ginger and honey and jasmine and herbs wafting in the tent, making dreamy the air, and sleepy those who breathed in its intoxicating, heady mix.
