Right, so, there’s been some interest in this? So here, this is like a 1.5K snippet that I wrote yesterday, a conversation between the main character (Brenneth) and Crispin, with a little bit of Krei (the Tall Tree Lesbian) at the end there. I think this is…pretty much self-explanatory, but here is the ‘Earth is where the trouble comes from’ novel explanation.
Crispin was in the last cell to the left of the door, with the wall beside him, and on the side facing the entrance—no windows. His hands were bound with fresh apas cord, the wrists pressed together tightly enough that he could struggle if he attempted to break free. He seemed in good health, uninjured from what I could see. His hair was even clean, the curls falling around his face like copper wire in the lantern light.
Crispin, I thought with a bitter rush of guilt, probably had not been given the luxury of fine soaps and a private bath.
He seemed to catch the thought on my face and pointed at me. “Hey, none of that,” he said in his most commanding voice.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I said automatically, and scowled when he grinned at me. “And don’t be an ass, I’m trying to help you.”
Crispin’s good humor faded, leaving a small, sad smile behind as he glanced me over, eyes lingering on the spike in my hair and the new belt around my hips. “They got you a sword,” he noted quietly, and my hand dropped to the pommel at my side, smoothing over the unornamented hilt.
The weight of the sword was a strange dual sensation—it was intrinsically familiar and reassuring to the part of my that had hated to walk unarmed for a decade and a half on Earth, but my muscles didn’t remember how to compensate for it, had never learned how to walk without bumping the scabbard with my leg. I was feeling the ache from the time I had spent in the training grounds, trying to force my body to accustom itself to the weight of a blade again, and I would pay for it tomorrow. My palms would blister and my legs would tremble. For the first time in years, I felt like a stranger in my body again, hating the way that my hands hurt from the hilt and the way my shoulders complained bitterly at me. The sword was a small token comfort against it.
“Yeah,” I said, letting my hand fall from the hilt. “They want to make me one, custom forged, by the finest swordsmith in the city, but for now it’s this one.” I had tried to make the swordsmith accept payment, or at least a promise to pay him later, but he had pushed the blade on me for free, insisting that it was his privilege. I didn’t want to think about it. “How have they been treating you?”
“Very well,” he said. “Particularly since I was expecting to be tossed into an otansa and forgotten about.”
“Don’t even joke about that,” I said, clenching one fist until my raw palm shrieked at me. I glanced down the corridor, to where Krei was at least having the decency to be obvious about her eavesdropping at the door to the guardroom, and switched to English. “How have they been treating you, really.”
“Better than I deserve,” he said with a crooked smile, reaching up to tug at one of the clean curls hanging into his face. I narrowed my eyes at him and the wry, almost rictus smile disappeared. “Really,” he said, solemn. “I’m not hurt, I’ve been fed and given clean water. The worst thing that’s happened to me is trying to wash my hair with both hands tied.”
I nodded and sighed, one shoulder against the wall beside his cell as weariness dragged at me. “They’re not sentencing you until the end of the week,” I said. “So that gives me eight more days to figure something out.”
“Brenneth,” Crispin said, moving down the cell until he was right in front of me and reaching through the bars again. He couldn’t quite touch my crossed arms, and I didn’t move closer, and his hands dropped. He lapsed back to Alleirai and lowered his voice until it was too soft to echo off the stone. “You need to take care of yourself first. I know what I did, and I deserve to pay for it. Please, just. Just let it go. If you get caught up in this–”
“Forgive me for not enabling your death wish,” I said, interrupting him and clenching my fists tight again. The abused skin on my palms screamed. “I just need something—I need a bargaining chip. Leverage.”
“Somehow,” Crispin said, dry and sarcastic, “I doubt that even being the Fireheart is going to save you if you–”
“I don’t care!” I shouted at last, and the quiet voices from the guardroom went silent as Krei glanced down the hall at us. Crispin almost recoiled in surprise, his face creased in confusion. I gritted my teeth and dropped my hands to my sides, closing my eyes as I tried to slow my heart to a pace that didn’t make my temples ache. “I don’t care,” I repeated, forcing my voice to reflect a calm that I didn’t—couldn’t—feel. “I won’t watch you die.”
“Brenneth–”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said as I opened my eyes, cutting him off cleanly. “I’m going to figure something out.”
We stared at each other for a long, silent moment, and my chest hurt, the false wound hollow and as visceral as it had been the day I received it. The electricity crawling up the back of my neck made it feel like my skin was peeling away, like I was being flayed alive and I was too numb to notice. My throat hurt, as if I’d been screaming. I felt sick, pulled in too many directions to hold myself together.
Crispin was a killer, a would-have-been conquerer, a monster with the blood of children and innocents on his hands. I had almost died to bring him to justice, and this trial, this sentence, this was justice.
Crispin hadn’t been in his right mind, broken into lethal shards by the endless demand to be a hero. It couldn’t be justice to see him dead for what he had done.
Crispin had tried to kill me more times than I could count. Crispin had protected my back on Earth. Crispin was my best friend. Crispin was a murderer, undeniably the villain of our story. Crispin was my anchor, my sanity, the one person who had been a fixed point through my life. I couldn’t let him die.
I couldn’t see him hanged out over the cliff any more than I could have put a knife through his heart when he came to me that night so long ago, when I was still one of those innocents myself. He had stained us both with so much blood. I would never forgive him if the last blood I wore was his.
He closed his eyes first, and leaned his head against the bars of his cell. “Please,” he said, ragged, as if he had been crying. “I deserve to die for what I did. This is the right thing to do, and I—I have to do the right thing once in my life. Please stay out of this. Please, don’t do anything.”
“Crispin,” I said—whispered. I stepped forward, wrapping my hands around the cool iron of the bars just above his hands, and waited for him to look up. He didn’t, keeping his eyes shut, and I hoped he knew that I was sorry for what I was about to say. “You can’t stop me.”
“Yeah,” he said, opening his eyes and looking down at our hands, just barely not touching. A faint and humorless smile touched his lips. “I never could.”
I didn’t say another word, just nodded and pulled my hands back.
“Will you be back tomorrow?” he asked, voice showing a trace of fragile hope for the first time as he finally glanced at my face again. I nodded again, and walked away.
The guardroom was still silent when I returned to it, and Krei tipped her head to me politely. The guards saluted us, and Krei opened the door without being asked, and I stepped out into the sunlight. It didn’t warm me nearly as much as it had before, the cool stone-scented air of the dungeon seeming to cling inside my lungs. I pressed one shaking palm to the skin showing through the unlaced collar of my shirt, over my sternum, and tried to breathe around the phantom wound in my chest as Krei closed the door behind us.
“Brenneth?” she asked quietly. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I tried to say, and my voice was thin, gasping and breathless. I was bleeding, my lung torn and my ribs broken, there was blood in my mouth and blood filling my lung and—
“Brenneth,” Krei said, and carefully rested both hands on my shoulders, steering me into a shadow out of the way. She released me almost at once, and I was grateful, the touch one thing too many for my brain to keep track of as I scrambled to anchor myself to the present moment. “Are you hurt?”
I coughed out a laugh at that, brittle and unlovely as it was. “No,” I said, my vision clearing even though my breathing still seemed to rattle in my throat. “Not anymore.”
“Would you like to return to your chambers?” she asked, still quiet and steadying.
“Yes,” I breathed, trying to swallow the taste of blood from my mouth. “Yes, please.”
Krei waited until I lowered my hand from my chest to gently touch my arm. “Can you walk?”
I nodded. “Yes.” I paused, taking a breath and feeling the way it hitched through my throat. “I’m sorry,” I muttered.
She smiled a little. “Don’t be. Come on,” she said. “There’s a back street to the gothkenla. It’s not far.”
