Post by Kit on Mar 18, 2010 15:44:40 GMT 10
Title: Squires and Sons: Family
Rating: PG
Length: 590
Round: 3/A
Competitor: Alanna
Summary: Kel knows the chamber too well for the usual sorts of fear
They all waited.
Not an easy wait, but a necessary one. The seats in the Chapel a hard and a cold that her back and thighs remembered. Damp from the flagstones snuck into her knees and spine, and she could not help but remember an old man in furs, determined to watch the realm’s second female squire take her first steps alone and uncorrupted.
Her hand still tingled, just a little, from Alan’s last grip, his own skin chilled and sluggish, all traces of the ritual bath and the old words either dripped away or absorbed into himself. His Knight Mistresses suspected it was the latter. Every breath told her so.
“My brother Anders told me it was a gem cutter,” she’d said to him. “That is both inaccurate and the only description you’re going to get. If you ever succeed where I have not, and ask why we have to be mentally hazed to prove our worth, then please, let me know.”
His stricken look was unfeigned and fair, and she had hugged him.
“Take the question up after your ordeal, love. During, just...remember that worth isn’t all the same, and, if we have to continue the ridiculous metaphor, there are different types of gems.”
“Different grades.”
Kel had groaned, and cuffed him. “Don’t get caught up in all the mess, Sakuyo-dancer. I’ll be waiting for you.”
She waited, now. She felt the tension of the other onlookers like a small, shifting group of suns, Alanna somewhere behind her left shoulder, full of love and rage and, Kel knew, all the silent screams she had kept back during her own unspoken time; all the screams Alan was not allowed to loose now.
The Chamber twisted and crippled and dropped the ground away, and she did not try to guess at the horrors the son-of-her-heart was witnessing, helpless and hapless, because those she did not already know would be all the worse for speculation. But she did know the Chamber’s withered old face, and its glass-bowl world, and she knew that Alan would not be lost there. He knew gods; unlike his family, he knew how not to talk to them.
Heat on her back. A soft, agonised noise at the back of the hall. It will be all right, her body cried, but she knew it could not speak over distance.
It will be all right. I know the Chamber. It is petty. It is small. Our boy is more than him.
The door creaked.
She stood, and Alan was there, upright and pale, his hair as shocking as his father’s relieved sob was in this place of gloom and wait. She stepped forward.
He hugged her close. His body, shaking and drenched, obeyed him. Her hands were hard on his body, her lips brief on his hair. “Go to your mother,” she whispered. “If you can make it.”
“Just about. Were you even worried about me?”
“As Neal told me once, “said Kel, remembering with fondness her friend’s late-night tales of a younger Alan of Pirate’s Swoop, ‘stealing from his mother’s hapless victim’, “You’re multifaceted enough. The Chamber didn’t exactly have much to cut.”
Kel stepped away, and Alanna was there, throwing her arms around her son, George behind and unashamed of the tears on his open, trickster face.
It was undignified. It was appalling.
It was perfect, as Alan reached out a shaking arm, and pulled Kel into the warm, babbling midst of them, where Alanna kicked her in the ankle and kissed her before the crowd.
Rating: PG
Length: 590
Round: 3/A
Competitor: Alanna
Summary: Kel knows the chamber too well for the usual sorts of fear
They all waited.
Not an easy wait, but a necessary one. The seats in the Chapel a hard and a cold that her back and thighs remembered. Damp from the flagstones snuck into her knees and spine, and she could not help but remember an old man in furs, determined to watch the realm’s second female squire take her first steps alone and uncorrupted.
Her hand still tingled, just a little, from Alan’s last grip, his own skin chilled and sluggish, all traces of the ritual bath and the old words either dripped away or absorbed into himself. His Knight Mistresses suspected it was the latter. Every breath told her so.
“My brother Anders told me it was a gem cutter,” she’d said to him. “That is both inaccurate and the only description you’re going to get. If you ever succeed where I have not, and ask why we have to be mentally hazed to prove our worth, then please, let me know.”
His stricken look was unfeigned and fair, and she had hugged him.
“Take the question up after your ordeal, love. During, just...remember that worth isn’t all the same, and, if we have to continue the ridiculous metaphor, there are different types of gems.”
“Different grades.”
Kel had groaned, and cuffed him. “Don’t get caught up in all the mess, Sakuyo-dancer. I’ll be waiting for you.”
She waited, now. She felt the tension of the other onlookers like a small, shifting group of suns, Alanna somewhere behind her left shoulder, full of love and rage and, Kel knew, all the silent screams she had kept back during her own unspoken time; all the screams Alan was not allowed to loose now.
The Chamber twisted and crippled and dropped the ground away, and she did not try to guess at the horrors the son-of-her-heart was witnessing, helpless and hapless, because those she did not already know would be all the worse for speculation. But she did know the Chamber’s withered old face, and its glass-bowl world, and she knew that Alan would not be lost there. He knew gods; unlike his family, he knew how not to talk to them.
Heat on her back. A soft, agonised noise at the back of the hall. It will be all right, her body cried, but she knew it could not speak over distance.
It will be all right. I know the Chamber. It is petty. It is small. Our boy is more than him.
The door creaked.
She stood, and Alan was there, upright and pale, his hair as shocking as his father’s relieved sob was in this place of gloom and wait. She stepped forward.
He hugged her close. His body, shaking and drenched, obeyed him. Her hands were hard on his body, her lips brief on his hair. “Go to your mother,” she whispered. “If you can make it.”
“Just about. Were you even worried about me?”
“As Neal told me once, “said Kel, remembering with fondness her friend’s late-night tales of a younger Alan of Pirate’s Swoop, ‘stealing from his mother’s hapless victim’, “You’re multifaceted enough. The Chamber didn’t exactly have much to cut.”
Kel stepped away, and Alanna was there, throwing her arms around her son, George behind and unashamed of the tears on his open, trickster face.
It was undignified. It was appalling.
It was perfect, as Alan reached out a shaking arm, and pulled Kel into the warm, babbling midst of them, where Alanna kicked her in the ankle and kissed her before the crowd.