The Mark and Spindle, Galoring
Early Winter 207
Lusira worked many jobs from dawn ‘til dusk, but even she had the occasional time off, though that often only consisted of one day every three grasps or so. During the day she would spend it attending to tasks around the home or caring for Sophronia, but come night, with Nia tailing her quietly or rereading one of their four books in the corner, she would often sit in the public house on the corner of their street, trading drinks and banter with the people there.
The clientele of the Mark and Spindle were, due to the presence of the Spindlemark Theater next door, more of a literary and dramatic lot, and Lusira would spend many of those evenings arguing the merits of one play and performance or another. Xanthipi was a regular of a slightly different stripe, though, who had once been a philosopher and tutor until she became too old to work regularly, and now subsisted on her grandchildren’s coin and the drinks bought for her by patrons of the public house who wanted a debate.
One of the last evenings Lusira would spend in the Mark and Spindle was engaged in friendly exchange on the nature of existence with Xanthipi, Sophronia drowsy on her shoulder. They could still remember their mother saying, “An’ how, if all we see an’ experience be truly a trick, can it be that oor own thoughts wouldnae be a trick as well? If we form a thought couldnae it be that someone is causin’ us t’ be thinkin’ it?”
“Indeed, ‘tis could be so,” Xanthipi acknowledged. “There are records of witches who are able to twist the very minds and hearts of folk against their own will, after all. But consider this—even if that thought you are made to think be not your own, the fact that there is something there to be made to think means that that thing exists. Even if everything you see be entirely an illusion, all you feel to touch and to smell, a trick cast by an evil witch, within your own head something is perceiving that, and that something has to exist to perceive. Who that is, well—that would be a different question, what it means to be you or me, to have an identity. But we can come down to the fundamental fact that even can I be unsure of anything else, I can be sure that I exist.”
“If that be so, then the effect o that would be that I must therefore be the most important being in existence, being the on’y hing I can be certain t’ exist, an’ aw the rest o the world made solely t’ be seen by me,” Lusira says over Sophronia’s head, and even half-asleep they can feel her smiling. “An’ I cannot haud tae that, wi’ a wean who is undoubtedly the most important bein’ in existence in my very own arms, droolin’ some’n sticky on my shoulder.”
“Pah,” Xanthipi scoffed, “Sentiment! Don’t bring up irrelevant emotions into the argument, girl, if you insist on being like that then I shall finish my drink and bid you good night.”
Lusira just laughed, and the conversation shifted to something else as Sophronia drifted deeper into a contented sleep, clasped warmly in the arms of the most important being in existence.
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