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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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.

"Aye, all places have rats, just like they have commonfolk." He too had made the connection after she'd given it. Now when he looked at the page, he realized what the rats were meant to represent. His opinion on the story diminished greatly. "It must be easier writing for rats than lowborns."

Some highborn child reading about a family of exploring lowborns might accidentally feel sympathy for them.

Her palm settled flat against the book. Her fingers curled -- and for a moment she seemed as though she was truly considering abandoning the tale for today. In a wholly different voice than the one used for teaching, she asked him: "Do you know the tale of the Rat Cook? Do they sing that song in the South?"

Edited 2014-11-30 14:53 (UTC)

He nodded sullenly. "Aye, at least, I've heard of it. Tom would sing it, but I didn't ever listen to it whole."

The song, he knew, had become more practiced since the Red Wedding, however. Tom had hummed it once when they had ensnared a Frey into a trap upon the road. Gendry did not know the words, though. He knew the meaning less than that.

Upon many an occasion, Sansa Stark could be just as grim as him: "He is what I think about when I read the word." R-A-T. "Not commonfolk. Not anything else. But a giant white rat, eating its babies."

Another shiver. Perhaps of disgust; perhaps of good common sense. The topic tread a little near other honest problems, and so she pretended to brush a mote of dust from the page. "Explorer rats cannot be so terrible, though. They must be brave. Enterprising."

Thieves, she also thought. But did not dare to say aloud.

He gave her a look that conveyed he wasn't entirely convinced, but still relented in not pressing the issue. He turned his gaze back to the book and traced a finger underneath the next word. It took him awhile to make it through the next few sentences, but bit by bit he muddled his way through it. He read about how the captain of the vessel was a fat and cruel man and he stumbled over the word bilges, but by the time he had finished the paragraph, all the rats had been given names that started with R. There was Robert and Rosie, Rodney and Randa, Risky and Rook, and lastly Reese, who had arrived belatedly to the story as the 'late one'.

"Seven of them," he said. "Why is it always seven? Our last story, it was seven dogs. In the first, there were seven sisters."

Edited 2014-12-02 01:45 (UTC)

"Seven is a sacred number," she answered. Smooth and certain. As hollow as her faith felt, she knew the doctrines by rote. She knew them by heart. Sansa settled back in her chair and dovetailed into spiritual chatter with a practised ease. Alayne had been bound for the sept; such bleating was pivotal to the old lie.

"Sacred even here, mayhaps."

"What makes it so sacred? Because of the Seven? I ain't ever seen those gods to anything." So they were scarcely worthy of his belief. "I think it's because seven is all most folk can be bothered to count up to. It's why weeks are only that long."

Gendry had a much easier time believing in the deficiencies of people than in the sacredness of numbers.

"--Most people can count beyond seven," she countered. Her voice grew rich an incredulity often reserved for Arya Stark. It did not quite brush with the edge of calling him stupid, but it came perilously close. In either case, there was a spark of defiance in her face so often absent in any other conversation. But tonight she was the teacher! And him her pupil. Incredulity was her right.

"It's an attractive number. That's all there is to it."

Even Sansa wasn't really certain what she was arguing any longer. But it sounded witty. She thought.

"Eight is more attractive. It's got symmetry. See there?" He pointed to the eight on the bottom of the page. It was two elegant loops, unlike the seven on the opposite page. "That's elegant-like. Not like seven."

This, he knew, was not what she had meant when she called seven attractive. But he had taken refuge in being intentionally daft as though he could disguise his ignorance with even more ignorance.

"But it never ends!"

She complained. As though the sharp-cornered finality of a seven brought her more joy and settlement than the ever-looping eight ever could. And to demonstrate this fact, she leaned the slate against the open book and looped first and eight and then, next to it, a precisely cornered seven. She knew where the seven began and where the seven ended. But the eight! Its tail and head were lost in the connecting curve of chalk.

"So? Why ought anything need to have an end? There's too many things that have endings. Seems there ought to be more that don't."

He picked up his own chalk and took her eight and looped around it again and again and again until its edges were so thick that it looked more like a half formed snowman than it did a number.

"All things need endings. Stories need endings." She rattled the slate and the book together. Not hard, but just enough to prove to him that all the things they made up -- all the tales and arching descriptions of everything in this life and the lives hereafter -- needed shape. Structure. Beginnings, middles, and ends. Sansa was tired of living the middle of her tale. She wanted the final paragraph: where the characters retired into safety and happiness.

"Endings are awful things," he insisted. "It's all death and misery after that. Not like in these stories or in songs. I'd rather the story didn't end."

It was a cynical way of thinking to be certain, but it held its own optimistic slant of an unending story where the struggle was real, but the conclusion uncertain. It was like a summer that didn't end, but he didn't need the Starks to remind him that winter was coming.

She felt the fissure -- the canyon -- that stood between his belief and hers. Sansa sought out security and certainty. What, she, wondered, did Ser Gendry want? She watched him for a heartbeat or two. He was a puzzle, certainly, but it was no longer a simple question of who shared his blood and whose face his face brought to mind. Now there was the distinct impression that she puzzled over him. But only momentarily, and always before a curt shake of her head once she decided to give in, submit, and let the moment pass.

"Well," she began, and smudged her fingers across the too-thick eight. It was so drawn on again and again that it did not come free of the slate. The seven, however, was easily erased. And once it was gone she put the slate aside. "Our stories will have endings. Our seven rats. We'll have to reach them eventually."

And she now so fervently hoped the ending would be a happy one. Indeed, she lifted a few pages aside and seemed to be peeking ahead to read the last few lines.

"I'm in no hurry," he said mildly. But he returned to reading out loud again. He was not a quick reader, but his current pace promised he might finish this story all in one night. It was only a short story, scarcely a few pages long, and the words were big and bold for children to enjoy. But the story went on about the captain who kept the food locked away and how he ate a feast every night, but his crew and passengers suffered on rations. So the rat had a plan to not just feed his family, but everyone on the ship as well. It was a boldly defiant story, for the captain very much was set up to be a king-like figure.

By story's end, the captain's eyes had been poked out and he'd been tossed over the ship to be eaten by sea gulls. Whatever fairy tales might be when it came to happy endings, they were often barbaric in their lessons. Cruel captains were done in by the end of the story. Robert the Rat paradoxically even was elected as captain at the end, but turned the position down! But he and his family stayed on the ship afterward, closing out on a mostly happy ending. Gendry was not impressed.

"No one would let rats stay on a ship," he complained after the story was over and the candle's wax diminished by over an hour's worth of time. "Someone would swat them all with a stick and toss them over the side."

She kept her patient poise through the whole tale. It did not matter that often she'd read in her own head the paragraphs that would take Gendry some time to struggle through. Better, even, that such speed gave her the time to judge which obstacles would be forthcoming. She'd become capable of predicting where his problems would lie. At times, she'd pull the slate back into place and request that he write out a word that had bothered him. Commit it to heart. Never mistake it again.

By the end, the candle was guttering and her elbow was snug against his -- inched there with every subsequent jostling of the text or need to lean in close to point out the individual syllables of a word. They say in separate chairs, but they sat on the cusps of each others' personal space. The lesson had eroded some of that careful distance she'd insisted upon at the outset. Lingering hurt or none, she sank into tentative camaraderie for the lesson itself. "Hush," she implored. "Don't speak so cruelly! These rats have names! I don't want to think about them drowning."

Names, it seemed, made all the difference.

Edited 2014-12-02 13:45 (UTC)

Gendry didn't think names would matter, but then perhaps Sansa was a kinder soul than he was. She was certainly gentler, so he supposed that had to be true. In any case, the story was done and the effort had exhausted him. He sank into his chair, bringing him closer to her side so that elbow rested on top of elbow. A quick huff signaled he had little desire to argue the point.

"I ought to have you read next time," he mused. "It would go swifter."

"But what would you learn?" She asked with a light incredulity wending through her words. Sansa made no effort to free her elbow, though she now had ample opportunity to divide their chairs. "It would do you no good at all to sit and listen to my reading."

Sansa, curious on occasion, flipped a page or three ahead and considered the next few tales. Not for tonight, of course! It was clear that Ser Gendry had called an end to the lesson. But she wondered what would be in store for them upon following nights.

"I'd learn just to let you do all my reading for me," he answered even as he tried to tilt his head to see the pages that awaited them. "And my writing as well. It would save time, I think."

Only, it was perhaps too late for that. Even if he read poorly, he could in fact read. It was no longer a skill he was acquiring, but one he was honing into something practical. That was perhaps the most tiresome aspect of it, because it was not simply enough to know how to do something, but he had to work at it. It felt so much slower and clumsier than learning something by hand.

"I am the Lady Keeper of the Cothromach," she announced. And for a moment, it seemed likely she would refute his claims by title alone. But soon she dipped into a softer, more rueful explanation: "I have more than my fair share of writing and reading to complete every day."

Her head tilted in a minor gesture towards the ledgers and papers that lived on her solar's shelves. "Mayhaps it's you who ought to be saving my time! Next lesson I'll have you copy out letters. It will be terribly dull and you'll hate it."

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