10 Autumn 218
The Tide’s Song - Sav’s Study
Carter
Earlier that day, at mealtime, Carter had asked the witches if they couldn’t demonstrate some witchcraft. She had intended it as something to put the other Briarbirds at ease, to show them that witchcraft wasn’t always to be distrusted, that it was a tool that could be used for many things, an asset even, and something that the Briarbirds had on their side now.
The demonstration had been incredible - branches and leaves springing up out of dead wood, and the sound of birdsong…it had been like something from a dream. In the moment that table had made sense only in the way dreams do, with one thing colliding into another and creating something wholly strange and beautiful. But not all of the witches had agreed to the demonstration. The young pink-haired woman the others had rescued had commented about ‘party tricks’. Although Carter knew the statement was meant to chastise her, she couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t also because the young woman - Danica - had been concerned about showing too much, too soon…
Which meant there was more. Some of them had said as much.
Now Carter makes her way through the hold of the Tide’s Song, stopping briefly next to the infirmary where she had been once before - earlier that day, though it feels like a turn past.
Carter takes a moment, checking her reflection in the small basin of water someone has put in the corner of the room. A quick brush of powder over her face to calm the ruddiness of her excitement. A deftly placed spot of black, covering a small cut on her cheek. Her hair is twisted to one side, clipped into place with a brooch the size and shape of an oak leaf. She tucks another leaf alongside - this one taken from the bewitched table, and still soft and green. She has stowed Lark’s crossbow safely on her back, her own smaller weapons tucked into her gauntlet and thigh holster.
This would be good, she tells herself. The perfect thing to contrast the physical exhaustion of the day’s battle, and to distract her from her own losses.
Carter gives one last nod to her own reflection and then finds her way to what the crew here called the ‘study’.
She had only been in the infirmary for a matter of moments, but still, Carter expected there to be a crowd of crew and rebels outside the study door. Hadn’t Sav said she’d teach witchcraft to anyone who wanted to learn? And if it was something teachable shouldn’t they all take the lessons?
If Kelwin had been training his Swans to use witchcraft, the Briarbirds would be fools not to use it too. To miss out on this chance to even the playing field…it was tantamount to surrender. The rebels may as well admit defeat if they were unwilling to use every weapon they could, no matter how dangerous.
Lark hadn’t agreed with that, of course.
But Lark was dead now.
Carter acknowledges the thought, and the wave of grief and fear that comes with it, but it buffets against her and crashes back into nothing.
None of it would be worth anything if they lost this war. And she wasn’t about to miss this chance because of someone else’s foolhardy superstitions.
Carter knocks on the door.
Sav
The knock is answered by a cheerful burbling whistle tone and the door swinging wide, the creak of its opening lost in the general sounds of the ship bobbing lightly on the river’s sleepy waves.
Sav had long ago strung up a hammock in one corner of the study, for those late nights when stumbling six steps over and collapsing was easier than walking all the way up to the next deck with the crew quarters. She lounges there now, a book floating above her head and the pages tilted open toward her upturned face, as she takes notes in a journal propped up on her chest. The line between her brows and the vigor with which she dashes a line here and there suggests it isn’t exactly summer beachtime reading, though.
Glancing toward the door, she starts, Carter having not at all been the person she expected to see there. For a while, mired in the initial stages of cracking this journal, she’d forgotten there were new passengers at all. The book above her head falls with a thump onto her face and a muffled oath. She swipes it away, both journals vanishing somewhere about her person with a traveling magician’s deftness, and tumbles out of the hammock, bare feet thudding to the ground.
Giving a wild glance to Nurie’te, currently bobbing closer toward Carter and whistling in curious greeting, she glances toward a knapsack crumpled in the corner, toward Carter, back to Nurie’te, and presses her lips together. It’s too late to try and cover anything now. Months of traveling with just the crew and not having to hide what she can do has made her sloppy. She’d probably seen him just before the battle, anyway, when he’d tried to join in before Sav kept him back for fear of his existence leaking to the Swans.
“What d’ye want?” she asks, her surprise making her brusque.
Carter
Carter takes a step into the study, but not a second. Sav seems surprised to have company, though she was quick to open the door.
“My apologies if I’ve disturbed you,” says Carter. She bows at the waist. A mark of respect, something Carter would do to greet her governess or her tutor - the sort of polite, unconscious deference toward learning that has been drilled into Carter since she was a girl.
Straightening her back, Carter turns her attention to the…thing…floating toward her in the air. She smiles, and slowly, gently brings her hand through the air above it. “It’s flying,” she says - a breathless self-confirmation of what she can see clearly in front of her.
Carter keeps her hand out, palm up, toward the flying…creature? It reminds Carter of a curious pet, some kind of trained bird. But surely it was static. Mechanical. This was more witchcraft.
“I was wondering if you were serious about the offer you made at mealtime,” says Carter at last. She is trying to keep her eyes on Sav, to look at who she’s speaking to, but her gaze keeps slipping as she follows the gentle bobbing of the floating thing. Still, she came here for a reason. “You said that anyone can do it. The…witchcraft.”
A small shiver. Echoes of the voice of her governess and the childish fear of being caught and eaten.
Carter smiles, willing the fear away, and brushes her hand through her hair, her fingers landing on the oak leaf brooch. She picks the green leaf, the leaf from the bewitched table, from behind the brooch and holds it between her fingers.
“I’d like to learn, please, if you would be willing to teach me,” says Carter. She forces herself to lower her hand, to try to temper her excitement. She turns back toward Sav, but lowers her gaze, waiting for the response.
Sav
Ironically, the gesture of respect, meant as sincerely as it is, nevertheless puts Sav’s defenses up. Unaccustomed to receiving such niceties, she instinctively reads it as mockery. Even the members of the Tide’s Song, much as they might (or might not) like her, don’t tend toward the well-mannered.
The tension seeps from her shoulder blades when Carter reacts to Nurie’te with such unbridled delight; like any pet parent, the quickest way into her good graces is to coo over her wards. Nurie’te’s single circular blue “eye” fixes on Carter and blinks, before swiveling to face Sav. “Human? Friend?” he inquires in a whistle ending with a *brrp.
“Hm,” is all Sav says to that, studying Carter from head to toe. The lightly powdered face. A mole of some kind she hadn’t noticed before. The clearly-thoughtfully-coordinated outfit. This is not the kind of person she’d have thought would come to take her up on that offer, though truthfully she hadn’t really thought about just who might be interested; the offer had sprung forth, unbidden, in her indignant defense of a magic that goes beyond “witchcraft” and becomes more about describing the truth of the world. But then again, wasn’t she herself not the kind of ancient wise sage or demon-summoning heretic one might expect of a witch?
“I can lay out how tae do it, sure,” she says to the woman. “I cannae say ‘twill be easy or come quick. I know the path that I’ve walked, an’ ‘tis one that I’m fair sure anyone can follow if they’ve a mind tae, but I cannae push ye up that path masel’.”
Carter
Carter grins and steps into the study properly, her step bouncing, unable to even pretend decorum any longer.
“Thank you,” she says. “And I understand that some of it will likely be down to inherent skill, because there must be a physical aspect to it - I saw the Swans doing that, gesturing with their hands.” Carter imitates the movement, sweeping her hand down through the air, but nothing happens. “Is it because I don’t have one of those marks? Is that why your friend is so powerful? The one you all rescued from the Swans?” Carter gestures at her own face, now, “She had those marks everywhere, and it seemed like she was just glowing with witchcraft…” Carter trails off, her overeager questions quieted by a trill of musical notes from the floating thing.
“It looks like the Octurne,” says Carter, indicating the thing’s shape. “It’s that same odd shape, not quite a box. Same colors, too.” She’s peering more closely at the floating thing now, but still carefully, never touching it. “Did you…spin this up, from witchcraft? Did you make it?” The thing seems to respond to her questions, pulling away, seeming almost offended. Carter addresses the thing itself now, “You can’t be alive,” she says, softly. She laughs a little, as the bobbing light seems to contradict her. “You don’t have any flesh or…” glancing at Sav now, “does that not matter? When something is conjured up?”
She turns her attention to Sav, studying the…girl. Without the cloud of impending battle, Carter realizes that Sav is younger than she had appeared. Carter notes it. A question for later, perhaps. Every one of these witches seemed older than they looked. Young faces scarred and lined by constant stress.
“I’m sorry,” says Carter, after a brief silence. “It’s been some time since I’ve had a proper tutor.” She can feel herself blushing, and she’s glad she took the time to compose herself before asking for lessons. “I’m perhaps a bit overeager.”
“What should I call you?” Carter asks. “I know it’s Sav, but is that your surname? Is it Professor Sav…or…”
Sav
Sav frowns a little, unsure of where to begin with the torrent of words. Is this what it’s like to deal with herself when she’s gone full agallop into her idearing? “Some workins require gestures, aye,” she says. “I don’t know that inherent skill might play a part, as I’ve never attempted to teach another what I’ve learnt, nor met another who wrested the principles of the Stuff from study instead o sheer instinct. ‘Tis a possibility I cannae say aye or nay to.” As for the source of Danica’s powers, she doesn’t say boo about it. Those aren’t her secrets to tell; and truth be told, she’s not entirely certain she knows herself, beyond the obvious marks of the constellations that (almost) all of the Aelorean’s Crossing natives bear.
As for Nurie’te: “Magical item,” she says laconically, dryly. “He has a will of his own an’ the inclination tae use it, an that makes him ‘live enough tae me. I call him Nurie’te.” There’s a faint sing-song lilt to the syllables that doesn’t quite match her normal accent and carries shades of the whistling tones he expresses. Come to think—she had never actually asked him if he has a name of his own, from before. She files the thought away—
—to be sunk mid-file by the suggestion of an honorific, surprising her into a bark of laughter. She covers her mouth almost immediately, looking a little embarrassed, but the tremor of amusement rattles her voice as she replies, “J-just Sav.”
Carter
Carter looks back at the floating thing - at Nurie’te - and nods her head in his direction, “It’s nice to meet you, officially, Nurie’te.” The name is awkward in her mouth but she puts forth a decent effort, managing the syllables if not the whistle.
She turns her attention back to Sav. “What should we start with?” she asks. “Is there theory to study before practicing? Or a history of the process?” She tucks the oak leaf back into her hair, behind its golden twin. “I don’t know anything about witches except what the Church teaches, and what my governess used to tell me to scare me and keep me from wandering the grounds.”
While speaking, Carter removes her crossbow and places it gently on the floor. She lowers herself, cross-legged, down next to it, and begins to look through her satchel. She retrieves a pen and ink pot with a flourish and sets them next to her knee. A blank book with wide white pages and a narrow spine is next, and Carter places it, open, in her lap. Her fingers trace the spine, where the silk ribbon of the binding is still tight and new and the pages smell faintly of her brother’s study.
“I could also just observe, if you’d rather?” From her seated position, Carter glances around the room, empty except for her, Sav, and the floating Nurie’te. “If you perhaps wanted to wait for a larger group, or a different time?” She looks up at Sav from her place on the floor, brown eyes wide and eager.
Sav
Sav points at Carter and says, to Nurie’te, “This human is named Carter.” All but the name is said in his language, of course, though by virtue of being spoken after a string of Celestial words Carter’s name also gains a melodic overtone. She’s not certain if Nurie’te understands this, as he blinks and whirrs ambiguously at her statement, but giving him more information about who and what is around him can’t hurt.
She is still nonplussed and a little suspicious, but shifting rapidly to operate in this new reality - someone who seems eager and willing to learn about the Stuff, and in the proper way, not by stealing spitting, half-inoperable stars. Even if Carter was a Swan plant, or even just the rich dilettante she seems, spreading the truth about the fundamentals of magic little by little can only be a good. She needn’t actually teach her any truly harmful workings nor reveal anything the Swans didn’t already know.
She squats, loose-limbed and rangy, and pulls out a piece of chalk from her bag. “The first thing tae know is simple, but seems like foolin,” she says, answering the question by way of ignoring it. “Everything ye sight, all ye breathe, all the parts ye be, e’en the thoughts ye cog are made up of Stuff that ye cannae see but, if ye know it be there an’ how it works - whether by instinct or practice - ye can affect. ‘Tis that changin of the Stuff by will rather than natural effects that’s magic. Tak, f’r instance, a pebble…” Right on the use-polished deck of the study, she begins to draw a blob, then more blobs, with explanatory arrows and different lines as she lectures on.
Carter
Carter takes diligent notes, copying Sav’s diagrams into her own notebook, setting the ink with sand and a sheet of blotting paper before moving on to the next page. Every now and then she interjects, asking Sav to clarify a concept, or to provide an extra example. Carter is a good student, though. She resists the urge to ask endless questions about Nurie’te, the little mechanical creature, or about Sav herself. Carter recognizes the accent - the clipped syllables and missing consonants of the Spindlemark Quarter. The Spindlemark was Galoring’s arts and theatre district, the sort of neighborhood that could generously be called up-and-coming, and accurately a slum.
Lark had been from the Spindlemark Quarter, too, the burr of his accent becoming heavy with frustration as he’d corrected Carter’s aim again and again, only satisfied when she’d brought the crossbow against her shoulder, so close to her face that the bowstring had cut her. And always a chance to improve. She was fast but sacrificing accuracy. She was sighting a still target instead of leading it. She left those lessons with a bruised shoulder and fingertips red and raw and that Spindlemark voice in her ear.
Sav says something that Carter doesn’t quite catch, and before Carter can ask her to repeat it, she’s moved on, flourishing her hand in a way that somehow creates an apple in Sav’s open palm. Carter reaches out, unconsciously, to touch the fruit, but her fingers pass right through. An illusion.
Carter imitates the movement, but she can tell it’s not quite the same. Sav is more practiced, perhaps, or maybe it’s that she’s in tune with the stuff where Carter has so far only been an observer.
Still there’s…something. A warmth in Carter’s fingertips, and a tingling sensation. Like an itch, but not unpleasant.
Carter tries again, less carefully mimicking the movement of Sav’s hands this time, allowing her fingers to trail through the air in front of her. Carter squeezes her eyes shut, trying to envision the stuff that the air must be made of. Tiny invisible particles of something that could be turned into something else. That could be…affected. Changed by her own effort. Like threads she can pluck to make the music Sav sings. Or like a bowstring.
Carter catches something. Between her forefinger and thumb. She can’t feel it the way she feels the book in her lap or the cut on her cheek but she has it.
In her excitement, Carter opens her eyes and twists her hand. She feels something taut give way.
Carter snaps her fingers in frustration.
A shower of sparks springs from her hand.
It’s only for a moment. Enough that the brief, unsteady light source flares new shadows throughout the study, the sparks disappearing before they reach the floor.
Carter watches the sparks fizzle out, leaving her bare hand unmarked and unscorched. She looks over at Sav, studying her face for signs of anger or frustration. It was hardly the same spell she had demonstrated. But it was something.
“Was that…witchcraft?” Carter asks, softly.
Sav
The open delight on Sav’s face is a stark contrast to the shuttered, dour exterior she normally exhibits. It makes her look even younger than her snub face does, the suffusion of wonder restoring youth to someone who has perhaps not had much of a chance to be a child.
“Nay,” she says, equally quietly. “That was magic.”
Then, unable to help herself, she clenches her fists in the air in glee and giggles, thrilled that her estimation had proved out at least once - it is possible to teach this to someone else. A moment later, she plunges a hand into one of the myriad pockets about herself, pulling out a haphazard sheaf of paper pulled apart and at some point loosely rebound together into a pretense of a book. She’d pulled down her goggles a short time ago with a quick hum and a winching of a small wheel on the side of the frame, enabling her to sight the flows of actively-changing Stuff while Carter worked at shifting them, the better to correct her. What she’d seen of the way the Stuff flared around the woman’s hand had reminded her of one of the tricks she’d experimented with in her early days—
Aye, there. Stopping at the relevant page, she scans it, nodding once or twice to herself. The difference in gesture doesn’t bother her - from what she’s studied of how the others do their workings, they all seem to access it differently, even when the effects fall into the same or similar patterns to ones she knows. Perhaps it differs from person to person even when the same principles are being taught. Only one way to find out, though.
Looking up, she says, “Try it again. Grasp at tha tension wi’ tha same gesture ye made, focusing on an apple sittin’ in yer hand, th’ way th’ light in here would shine off th’ skin an how red an’ juicy it’d look, how ye wouldnae be able to see yer hand beneath it any more, an’ try it with the word abhar-a ke’di’vra.” She sings it out very slowly, making sure the pitch changes and the specific notes are apparent. She’s willing to repeat it again and again, the gestures and the tones she uses, explaining the principles that she’s figured out behind it and the methods of thinking about it that worked for her. While she can’t demonstrate it in that moment, she’s already thinking of how she can demonstrate the trick’s full capabilities tomorrow, after she’s had a bit of a rest and some time to get her mind in order.
So excited is she at this sign of such quick progress that she’s willing to drive Carter until the young woman is yawning and faltering. Only then does Sav realize how long it’s been and acknowledge her own body’s suddenly-overwhelming demands for sleep and fuel. Letting Carter go with a promise for more instruction later, should she want it, Sav falls into the hammock and is out instantly, one arm wrapped around Aloysius and a small smile lingering from the day’s discoveries.
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