eachdraidh | Forge Three - (Audio/Action)

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Forge Three - (Audio/Action)

Bloody fairies never manage to get things right, do they?

[Like many, Gendry received his boon two days ago, but he hasn't gotten any closer to making proper use of it. Oh sure, walking back and forth through a set of mirrors is a jolly experience, but it's a pain in the ass if they're both in the same room. Though he won't deny he did have a bit of fun setting them across each other and walking through the portal over and over. But! That's not what he'd wanted!]

Seems if you want something decent, you've got to be specific. Seven hells... [He has no choice! He must do the unthinkable:] Stiles, you still about?

[Yes. He must ask STILES for help. That most dreaded of occurrences! Sure, there might be other people who could teleport him from Cothromach to Troichean Beinn in a blink of the eye. But those are other people and Gendry's faith in other people is roughly equivalent to his faith in this war ending amicably. If he's called a suspicious bastard, then it is a one hundred perfect accurate description of him.

But the locket is still in his hand and he realizes he's addressing both courts at large. Damn.]

... just, be careful about your boons, eh? The fairies like to be stingy, if you let them. [There. He's done the community at large a favor.]

[At the Cothromach]

backdated to 26th
When Gendry wasn't in his room messing about with a set of magic mirrors, he was hard at work at one of the forges. Though he wasn't officially apprenticing at any of the shops, one of the master smiths had agreed to hire Gendry on while he was in the city. So that meant keeping busy as he hammered tirelessly at some new sword. His Shard ached as he drew on its power to give superhuman blows. It was hard work and the sword wouldn't even be his, but he now knew enough about dwarven magic that he could finally give his uncle a good and strong sword. This is what he'd been doing ever since the battle had ended and he'd at last turned his work to other projects. This item was now nearly done and by evening, after he'd honed it to a razor's edge, he would find his uncle's home in the Cothromach to come knocking.

27th
After his message on the lockets, Gendry left to be at his normal routine. He was living in the Keeper's tower now and so he would eat his first and last meals of the day there. Other hours would see him in the market, working at one of the forges earning his wages by small commissions of tools or shoeing horses. Hardly work for an apprentice of Bordan Gret, but he did not seem to mind this simpler work. For those looking to find him or simply anyone in the city looking for goods, he was an easy man to find. His grumbling about boons aside, he was in as good a mood as he could be expected to be in.

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MOONRISE. MY SOLAR.

Such was the brief and cryptic quality of many of Sansa's messages to Ser Gendry in this fortnight. They were cryptic with a purpose -- brief simple messages naming a slightly different time and a slightly different place every night or so. It was a new level to the lessons she gave him in his letters -- the messages came a healthy twelve hours in advance of their appointed times, and she aimed to have him decipher the words so he might know where and when to meet her. Some had been more imaginative than this one; all had avoided the quiet study which branched off from the library's main rooms.

And although she taught him still, Sansa was certainly a more distant soul since that evening. Her demeanour was not marked with hatred or dislike, but she was guarded when around her student. Extra courteous, as though the armour might safeguard her from further deep-cutting injury.

Gendry didn't know when moonrise even was. Especially down in this underground city where it meant walking a mile or more to go out where you could even see the sky. But it was such a mild complaint because everyone soon learned other ways to keep time and Gendry, who had already spent months in Troichean Beinn, had long adapted. So he took moonrise to mean sundown and so knew how much longer until she would expect him. His answer was as typical brief.

YES.

If she hoped to make him learn from reading her lockets, she'd succeeded in that. But teaching him to use his writing was a greater difficulty, because he found little use for recording messages by paper or locket.

It took time to tidy her affairs of the city off her desk's wide stone surface. Although the legs were wood, the top was a fine-veined marble. And every evening she (alone; herself) folded each letter and closed each ledger and locked them up where they ought to be locked. It was not because she understood them perfectly -- often, she didn't. And often her day comprised of bringing people in who could explain the minutia to her. But she felt an overwhelming sense of care and duty, so much so that she was compelled to take stewardship over every piece of paper that crossed her desk. And tonight she had to file them all away and make room for another sort of care. Another sort of duty.

Out came her slim leatherbound book of legends and myths. Out, too, came the scrap-parchment that could scribbled upon and used up as desired. Out came a bowl of chalk and a framed slate. Out, too, came a utilitarian tea pot and two deep mugs. For lessons, she'd since abandoned the delicate china. All that lacked was her student, and so in anticipation of him Sansa left the solar door stood open. If she had to hear another knock upon it today, she would surely begin to ache behind her temples.

Gendry arrived after a day of hard labor. Had he come right away, he would have stank of sweat and metal. But he'd learned of a swifter means of making himself decent before these appointments. Rather than the tedious business of having baths drawn for him, he would simply toss himself into one of the underground rivers. The nymphs would laugh and taunt him for doing so in his work clothes, but he would ignore them and hide his blushes as he made the bath a quick and brief thing. Only afterward would he switch into a different set of clothing that was not quite appropriate for highborn company, but was at least something he never worked in. It was plain, but it was very much Gendry.

When he arrived, his hair still damp and a crude looking mess, the servants eyed him with familiarity, smiled, and seemed entirely too satisfied as though they had just been proven correct about something. He ignored them and stepped through the open door, not entirely sure if he was meant to knock. He didn't. So he used a more standard greeting. "M'lady."

"Ser," she answered. Because the door still stood open and because she could hear the bustle of keep staff just beyond her vision. And for that same reason, she bit back an all-too-familiar retort that he ought to consider having that travesty of a hair-style looked to. She taught him, certainly. But she did not need to be so thoughtless in her interactions with him. Not in this instant. But by the time she'd crossed the room and given the door a gentle nudge to shut it, all the fire had died on her tongue. But sequestered from the hall, she could negotiate herself down to a mild: "Gendry."

There were pleasantries which needed dispensing before she dared open a book. "--I trust I find you well?"

She'd heard his complaints about his boon. And she sorely wanted to know about it, but did not know how to outright ask for the information.

He had blustered about the boon, but had made plans around it and so found himself resolved to deal with it once the coming feast at Caer Glaem was done. So in answer, he nodded. "Well enough. Sore a bit. But I'll manage. And you, Sansa?"

This drab exchange was so common that it barely needed thought put into it. But it's how things were now and so he never gave the expected answer of simply being well and well alone. He looked about the room as he ran a hand through his thick tangle of black hair. He had a way of talking to her at times while somehow barely noticing she was there. The room just seemed to have too many distractions.

The plain use of her name still brought with a certain frisson. Not a terrible one. Not a perfectly happy one, either. Just the mere recognition that it was odd (novel!) and unanticipated even now. Somehow, crossing into this strange realm where barely-there impressions of her Lady Mother haunted the ground between them, she'd felt even less likely to be only Sansa to him.

And yet here she was. Sansa. So Sansa left the door behind and nudged two chairs side-by-side at the desk's audience-side. In the dwarven city, they'd worked elbow-to-elbow. In spite of all else, she saw no reason to change it now.

"I keep busy," she allowed. Day by day she was learning to answer as he did -- with a little more information than courtesy entitled him to, but which seemed to be the kind of honesty he expected from her. "As soon as I have some last details in order, I'll have announcements to make. I..." don't look forward to them. "I hope you'll still be in the city when they happen."

It would be sweet, at least, to present Ser Gendry with his cloak-pin in person. Though he had no proper cloak to go with it. Perhaps that, too, needed solving. But there her thoughts roamed! She gathered them all back to roost and (while not yet seated) plied open the hard cover of their book.

"We start a new tale, today."

A new tale was expected, so he merely nodded with his typical detached interest. He did not invest too much excitement in their lessons, because he could sense that things had been tense since they had spoken of Lady Stoneheart. He could not tell if she spoke to him still as a friend or if obligation bound her to his company. So he played at being unaffected by it all and behaved as though nothing had changed. It was a difficult act.

"Might be I will," he said airily. "I've a means to go between here and Troichean Beinn. Only the problem is, I need Stiles to help set it up."

It was no secret that Gendry disliked getting help and he seemed even more disdainful of needing to rely on Stiles's fledgling magic to do the trick.

Paper shuffled quietly below her fingertips. Page to page to page. They'd only tackled two stories so far, and so the third was not far in past the frontispiece. When she found it, she pressed her fingers hard against the curved pages so that they settled into place. Only then did she take her seat and gesture for him to do the same.

"Stiles's help!" She gave her surprise a loud tone, because to act was easy. "Why? How?"

Gendry was not fooled by her surprise, because he rather suspected she heard him asking for Stiles over the lockets. But he was decent enough to not completely deprive her of her performance. So he sat, leaned over the pages, and made sense of the title. Apparently it involved a rat.

"I need to be in Troichean Beinn," he explained. "Or rather, half my boon does. It ain't much use if both sides of a door are here."

"Is that what they gave you? A door?"

The tale was not about any mere single rat: no, it was a family of rats who stole aboard a great merchant ship carrying grains and spices. Sansa could tell that much from a meagre scanning of the first few sentences. It also helped, certainly, that the opposite page held a beautifully illuminated drawing of the very thing: one big curve-bottomed ship with rats scurrying up its lead-lines.

The picture was certainly cleverly drawn, but Gendry wondered if Sansa would even enjoy a story about rats. Certainly they were ugly and unlovable creatures, which Gendry knew well from experience simply having lived among them in the squalor of Fleabottom. The story did little to enchant him.

"Less a door," he admitted in embarrassment. "Mirrors, really."

This desk was not so ergonomic as the one back in the dwarven city. Sansa, propped up in her chair, found it easier to pull the book forward and let its spine rest against the desk's edge. Then, it could lean between them. Visible to both. She settled her fingertip beneath the first few words: once upon a shimmering sea. But she did not prompt him to read. Not yet.

"Mirrors!" She echoed. "How will mirrors help?" Unless, she surmised, they helped like Stiles's mirror-magic helped. But she feigned that ignorance as well, and waited for Ser Gendry to otherwise enlighten her.

Gendry knew those first few words already, for the past two stories had started just the same. He stared at shimmering, wanting to work it out even before he began to speak. First he had to recall the sound made when those first two letters were paired together.

"You can walk through them," he explained contritely. "No matter how far they're apart."

"And you trust them to take you safely?"

It had been hard enough (and not only for her, she knew) to trust the fairy rings. Mirrors, now! Either Ser Gendry put much faith in those mirrors, or else he saw it as an imperative that he could move between two places. These too places. The phrasing of his boon, then, grew predictably to her intellect and she was forced to lift her head. Look at him. He asked for a conduit from here to there. Oh, certainly, the here could be any here he chose. But for now, that here was the Cothromach.

"More than I trust that carpet," he said sourly. He would ask for Stiles's aid to fly about, but he would not be happy about it. He stared at the word again, then decided a guess at it. He read the first line, awkwardly testing at shimmering, but managing a close enough approximation. It was enough to see him to the end of the sentence.

Shim. Mer. Ing. She broke it up for him -- syllable by syllable -- and placed her finger's tip at the beginning of the sentence once again. A crude start, perhaps, but this had become an easy way to ease into learning on each new appointment. Indicating a sentence was not the same as demanding that he tackle it immediately, and until Ser Gendry felt prepared to move in earnest into reading each sentence one after the other, she would let the pair of them chat between attempts. The pace was Gendry's, she was merely its keeper.

"Would you prefer a bird?" She asked with a mild smile.

"I don't think a bird could manage it," he said wryly. At least not any bird he was familiar with! But with her definition deftly given, he repeated the sentence, this time more certainly. Then, he moved on to the next, which opened with a rat that had the misfortune to be named Robert, though Gendry thought it entirely too fitting and grinned when he'd sounded out the name and recognized it for what it was.

If Sansa had felt like smiling, this would have been the moment where she kept a private smile for herself -- one at the memory of flying upon a bird so large enough that it could comfortably carry her and Minister Tzilan. But smiling was once again one of those uncomfortable acts, and she was taken aback by his. At first, she wondered whether he realized it was still treasonous to grin over the old king in such a manner. And next, she wondered how he grinned at all.

Robert Rat, it seemed, was the very youngest in his large and eager rat family -- nosing about in the hopes that they should find a veritable paradise of grain in the deep sopping holds of the ship. His family was a family of hungry opportunists. But Robert Rat! Oh. No. See, Robert Rat was an explorer.

When she did not smile in turn, he self consciously turned his grin into a more settled frowned and instead grimaced as he tried to read again. He stared a long time at a word, before at last pointing at the second letter X.

"Which one is this?" He asked, because it was one of those letters that were scarcely found in words and so he couldn't recall what sound it made.

She said the letter aloud. Crisp and precise. And then she drew an imaginary line under the word: six. There were six rats, in total, in Robert Rat's family. And together they owned six hats. Six hats for the six rats of Robert Rat's family. A banal rhyme, but it did have the added perk of bringing that letter sharply into focus.

"Six. X. It's in tax, as well. And -- oh!" Her face split into two different expressions. Her eyes were pleased while her mouth remained disciplined. "There is an x in axe."

Gendry didn't know why rats would even need hats, but the picture showed that this was certainly the case. They wore no other clothes besides, for it was the hats that made them look different from the others. Robert in particular wore floppy hat that covered his eyes. But the letter itself was remembered and he didn't complain, because they had once spent an entire ten minutes where Sansa had to justify the existence of the letter to Gendry, who had been so near the end of the alphabet that he could not imagine why there needed to be more letters. (It hadn't been half so bad when an entire night had ended with him holding his ground on K and how it ought to bugger off. By the time that happened, he just sullenly accepted Q as part of the madness.)

"Oh. That one," he said in dull memory of having learned it already. "So this says here..." Ah! "Eex-plo-rer? No. Explorer."

Ah-ha! What did prompt her to smile (and could reliably bring a small smirk even from her coldest face) was that warm feeling of success whenever he worked his way through a problem. No matter how small a problem it was. It was not a selfless pride, though a grand chunk of it was reserved for him and him alone. But she felt remarkably good about herself in these thin moments where she saw learning taking place beneath her care. Oh, perhaps he'd have done just as well or better with anyone else. And perhaps she was little more than a means to keep him focussed upon the task. But it made her felt useful in a way more rewarding than marriages or politics had never achieved.

"One wonders why an explorer takes his family when he explores, but--" Rats, really. How was she to know their ways? "Yes. Explorer. And you see the way explore is there inside the longer word? Words build upon words, just as letters build upon letters."

"Aye, good and confusing is what it is," Gendry commented with his typical sullen reaction to these revelations. But this was at least something that he knew already from speech alone. It was confusing on paper, but it turned into sense when he spoke the letters. He might still be slow, but he was getting better at navigating his way round words. Her presence not just made him focus, but he felt motivated to impress her with the speed he learned, even if he did not always demonstrate it well. "What makes a man want to write down a bunch of words about rats anyhow?"

"Rats are common, I suspect."

Her interpretation of the author's intent was given mildly. Thoughtlessly. And only after a moment did she consider the unintentional double meaning behind the phrase. So, trying to regain ground, Sansa shook her head. "Common as in regular. As in -- all places, it seems, have rats in common. Winterfell had rats," she offered with a shiver. "The Red Keep had rats. And the Eyrie."

Rats were a fact. Unavoidable, even to the high-born. A man could write a story about a rat and every reader would know exactly what that rat might look like.

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