After Hours (Kitsuné, Silver)

[Selah]

OoC: Shame that "evening", in the sentence "I'll have this up by this evening", can be roughly translated to mean "somewhere around 12 pm". Anyhow. Mikhail's link in my sig.



IC: The child with the lute takes her stories from the city of Nashmeir alone, and she sings her stories to the men trundling by, the women with baskets on their arms tramping through the drizzling rain past the old Pavilion. The men and women listen to her stories, and then they leave, blank and no less bitter of face than before they stopped to listen. Sometimes they toss her copper coins, coins for which she lives and breathes. She'll make her mama rich one day, when she has earned enough coins and put them in her mama's purse. They'll be rich, and she won't have to play her lute in the old, rotting Pavilion at the crossroads of Nashmeir City any longer.

But until then, she sits on a bench in the off-white Pavilion and sings heartily for the coppers and the people of Nashmeir.

Today she is singing for the boy who hides himself in a creamy-white cloak, who has sat across from her upon a flaking Pavilion bench for seven hours, listening to her play. He is content to gaze and smile and listen to her singing without saying a word or presenting a copper. She is beginning to suspect he is stupid.

She does not understand why he will not leave. She has sung her many songs, and sung too of Nashmeir's happenings: a new law, private taxes, two murders in the market. She expects an ever-moving audience: The Pavilion stands at a crossroads in Nashmeir City, and no one ever stays when they have heard all they wished to hear. But this boy stays, implacable as stone. She doesn't like looking at him, at the blackness of his eyes and the slowness of his smile, as though he wasn't really there, not really… present.

She was at first angered by his intrusion.

"You want copper, you go get your own," she snarled, setting her lute across her knees and bunching her fists over her copper purse. She would fight him, she would.

He seemed to find her belligerence amusing. He settled onto the old Pavilion bench and watched the city, smiling his gentle smile. He almost looked as though he were basking in sunshine.

She followed his gaze to the city after a long, long while. The Pavilion stood upon a hill tall enough for a beacon, and from it she could see the city of Nashmeir wrapped like a pastry around a spoonful of jelly. (The jelly was the Pavilion, though the Pavilion didn't resemble jelly in the least. Unless, of course, you saw jelly everywhere you went. She saw jelly everywhere she went. Sometimes. When she was really hungry.) The city was black from this height, with pinpoints of light and some jagged bits on its outline to indicate taller buildings. A person could either look at the city or at the countryside in which the city squatted: a dry, dusty countryside where everything was dead except the thorny plants, the cockroaches, and the sparrows.

Four roads wound from the east, west, north, and south parts of the city; they intersected at the Pavilion. From this vantage, the hill was deceptively lofty. But for all its apparent height, it was well traversed; it was the quickest way from one point to the other, and there was less chance a man would be murdered where there was such exposure to the wind, rain, and theoretical sun. Though there was never any sun. That's why it was theoretical.

But it was lonely here, away from the squat and sodden buildings that made up Nashmeir, buildings that seemed to sag on either side of the boulevards with the weight of damp and clothing lines and too much rain.

She decided, after some time, that the boy was all right, and she tried some conversation.

"You'll get your cloak all wet and filthy, y' know, 'less you hike it up," she says, when she has paused to rest her hands. "It'll drag in all that mud between these cobblestones, and that cloak won't be so fine anymore." She is vaguely jealous of his cloak; she tells herself she will buy one when she and her mama are rich. But he only smiles at her lute and then at her as if to say, "Play another song."

She does—a song old days and older heroes and some other such trash—but she is now starting to suspect he is an idiot.

"How old 'r' you?" she asks, setting down her lute. There's no one but this stupid boy to hear anyway, this late time of day.

He tilts his head at her. This is his only answer.

"I've never seen you 'round here before," she says, challengingly.

He smiles at her, and gestures to her lute.

"Did you know this Pavilion's haunted?" she says, angry that he won't answer her. Maybe she'll scare him, and he'll answer her. It always works on the kids who aren't hard and knowing just yet, down in the city. "You stay here after hours, and the rev'nants come and speak to you."

He is smiling at her lute as though it is the lute talking, not her.

"That's not so bad itself," she continues, emotions flaring with her story. "The thing that's bad is if you're up here with someone else, and the rev'nants come speakin' out of the stone to you. They won't share their secrets with more'n one person; no, they make you kill the other person whose with you, so's you learns their secrets the hard way. They'll tell you anything you want to know, my mama says, anything. Whether its from the old days or the days as hasn't come, or from now if you want. They'll tell you anything you ask. But if they come while there's more than one person here, they make you fight, and don't tell nothing 'til the fight's ended and there's one person living to hear their secrets. If no one's living, then the dead ones all become rev'nants. And if they're still living when the dawn comes, the rev'nants kill them all. That's what my mama said; that's how she said my grandpa died."

She is nearly out of breath when she ends her tale.

His smile has retreated into his eyes, and there are laugh lines crinkling their corners. But he looks as though he is thinking about something. She wonders, fleetingly, if he is considering her story. Perhaps he never heard a word she said.

She is irritable, and the sun is sinking fast, and she feels a sudden thrill of terror through her stomach: her story's touched her, thought it was only supposed to touch that stupid boy and scare him. She doesn't think the story is real—some big boys in the city said it wasn't, but you couldn't trust the big boys all the time; they liked to tease. All the same, she thought it wise to end her labour early, to take up lute and copper purse and leave the Pavilion.

"You shouldn't stay here," she says, craftily, sweeping up the tools of her trade, the purse with her earnings, and stepping from the Pavilion to the path pointing north down the hill. "The rev'nants'll come soon as the sun's as gone."

He looks into her eyes and smiles at her.

"But I think," he says, "that stay I will."

It is his voice, the voice he is not supposed to have—because she thought he didn't have one—it is his voice, and the smile in his eyes, that sends her running, tripping down the hill, heart thumping, eyes wide and tearing.

Perhaps he was a rev'nant.



And Mikhail sat, unmoved, by the terror of the little lute-playing girl running down the hill into her city, leaving him with the off-white stone that was the Pavilion roof, the pillars that were its walls, the broken cobblestone that was its floor.

Her terror, after all, was something he could neither help nor understand.