*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
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Sacrifice.
This is the payment of change, the debt of victory. The blood coursing down this old man's face is one sacrifice set to pay for a greater purpose.
Ben doesn't like this, doesn't thirst for it the way some others do. Pain has never been a thing he has enjoyed giving. For the most part. But Ben needs one of two things: where the bow is or who has the bow. And the answer to that riddle lies somewhere inside the man strung up in front of him.
"It doesn't have to go this way," he murmurs, setting the thin, metal tool down on the table beside them.
The old innkeeper doesn't say anything, but he spits blood at Ben's feet.
He can respect that.
His quarry, the man he has pinned up, is part of the Order, that much he knows. He had suspected with that preening, all-knowing but always unconnected Ruben and then guessed with the other, strange man with the blackened fingers. He knows it now. Knows it from the way the man hangs, limp but unyielding. Knows it from the way he will not give up the ghost.
It's strange, when the shadowy figment of words and dreams is, in reality, a handful of dottering old men.
The Order of the Quail, he thinks to himself, gazing upon this second bird caught in his net, plucking from the man's opened shirt the small rock that dangles on woven twine. Nothing but dying relics of an outdated age.
Ben works backwards.
If I want to understand where the bow is now, he reasons, I must understand what was sacrificed to hide it back then.
He turns the pendant in his fingers, examining the familiarly carved, reptilian eye that contains, within its beady iris, another eye.
Ben wants to learn from history, not repeat it.
Besides, there are more ways than one to pluck a bird.
It starts with a straw doll in a torn skirt, dangling by a broken arm. He mends it in the candlelight, setting careful stitches along new seams, dripping wax along frayed edges. This is a domino, a die set against the board.
He rolls it.
The girl can't be much more than eight, wide-eyed and staring in that animal, frozen way.
He sets the bread and cheese on the end table beside her, and then the mended doll. He watches as she fixes on it, inspecting but too afraid to touch, wondering in her own simple way where the snare is.
"I didn't have extra straw so I used wax," he tells her, gesturing to the doll's arm. "I hope this is okay."
She only picks it up when the silence between them grows too long. Her dirt-caked hands turn it over and over, as if she is a master craftsmen judging Ben's work.
When she looks up the suspicion in her gaze has eased into wariness.
The second step is food.
Ben remembers how it feels to be hungry, to feel that low ache with no sustenance to appease it. He was not much older than her when he became even more intimately acquainted with it, when there was no longer a net of loved ones to shield him from it.
Food is the strongest play on this board.
He sits with her at her meals. First they talk about her day, how she likes the camp, what she's drawn with the paper and pencils he had found for her.
She works up enough courage to ask him on the ninth night.
"Can I see Granpapi?" she requests, snatching the loaf of bread, as if afraid he will take it away.
"I wish you could," Ben answers, "but he's got a job to do right now, and the sooner he does it, the sooner he can come see you."
He pauses, and then adds: "He's a very clever man."
The girl nods, her wavy brown hair bouncing on thin shoulders.
"He'll do good," she tells him. "He can do a lot, even if he doesn't look like it."
Ben pauses, watching her stubborn expression, the touch of defiance in it.
"There's much more to him than he lets on, isn't there?" he asks and he smiles at her conspiratorially as she nods.
"He likes it," she says, hand darting to snatch the chunk of cheese off the plate. "Granpapi says it's good people don't know any of it, they don't see him coming."
Ben murmurs, a low, skeptical noise at the back of his throat.
"Maybe, but he's so old," he protests. "I could take him."
But the girl is shaking her head, so certain, so sure, a granddaughter raised on tales, who knows better than the foolhardy man who would challenge her grandfather.
"Granpapi has taken on dozens of you," she tells him without any guile. "Granpapi has taken on much worse, people you'd be scared of."
Ben smiles.
"Really? Like who?"
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A/N: Little girl, did Granpapi never talk to you about stranger danger?!
I know, everyone's favorite character, but I've dropped something very important in this chapter that you might want to take note of for future chapters... AHEM. ;) The arc of next two chapters should shed some light on certain questions and dangling threads for my eagle-eyed readers... I'm debating on giving you the next one today or tomorrow because this one is so short.
Chapter notes: The Order of the Quail is first mentioned by Ruben in Partisan's "Clear Air;" Ben interviews Balder in Prodigal's "Clever Little Trinkets."
