“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a spirit, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
She was not always so iron eyed or downturned about the mouth. She was a child defiant and sweet. She delighted in breaking soothing, interminable sameness: the silence of morning, still water, fresh snow. She was faithful to her principles: a mark must be made, a song brayed. She’d bob after her father on errands in a bright cloak, catching the eye like a finch in winter. Ever in hand with him, even when her stride began to smooth. It became a girl’s clasp for comfort instead of steadiness. Or so she believed.
Her family existed in the envious realm of normal and untouched by the inevitable until Rosalie was eleven.The smallest of three, Rosalie saw her eldest sister Ruth, called Rue, as a second mother. Ruth’s permanence was a thing understood, and taken for granted, like the surety of a chair or the coming of day. Her death brought terrible truth: the protection of youth, parents, and private wards were illusory. Chaos clenched Rosalie’s face in its hand and shook her until she knew her vulnerability to it.
Rosalie's dreams grew grim and strange, as her maturing mind tried to comprehend a world so profoundly changed, yet so horribly the same. The sun still rose in heartbreakingly beautiful colors, the stones of her house were just as sturdy as before, the clatter of wagons and calls of criers just as lively, but Rue was gone. Something so wonderful could vanish and little would pause to mourn it.
Rosalie began to dream of a black lake and a woman in gray beside it. The woman brooded over the scape striking and ominous as a great owl. Lonely, Rosalie would speak to her of the strangeness and pain of loss, before drowning in the seemingly infinite lake. It was always so: a moment of unburdening concluded in smothering terror, while the woman looked on indifferent. With each drowning, the terror lessened, until Rosalie finally gave herself over to it. When the water washed over her, she stopped struggling. It was then the woman intervened, lifting Rosalie out of the dark. She spoke for the first, teaching Rosalie that not everything was beyond the girl's control. One could lucidly leave the dreamscape. The woman walked with Rosalie, marking the paths between and pulling at the veil. It was the last Rosalie dreamt of that cold lakeside or the woman.
Two years after Ruth's death, Rosalie's father vanished in a cloud of his grief and ambition. Rosalie would have said his body left then. His joy had gone dormant when Ruth died, and nothing little Rosalie did could stir it. Their losses were shaped too differently to know the precise comforts needed.
Her father’s absence was tinged with rumor of treasons and profane magic, and the wife he left had married him young. Of the women that remained, a motherless niece, two daughters, and a young widow, there wasn’t a trade between them. Their father had left money in his wake, but it was picked at by the powers that governed and bribes to keep from belated persecution over his activities. The women began living separate lives and schedules in an effort to amass what funds they needed to live.
Rosalie wandered the furthest out.
One poor choice led to another. Each one was a rash attempt to establish her worth, and declare she would not be left again. Rosalie was in company with a highwayman and his fellows for several years. She adored him and he provided for her. She sat comfortably in this pit without knowing how dark it was. Freedom was traded for security, and dignity for affection. The crew would rob people on the roads just askance from the main ways, drawing their prey out by using their pity or greed. Rosalie would hold the Crossbow pointed at the victim’s heart while her love, Enric, and his men did the rest. If not holding their mark in place, she would serve as a lure, pick locks on chests, and comb through wagons for hidden compartments.
She was young, desperate, and in his thrall. Until. Until they robbed a woman who would not comply. Rosalie had never fired on anything bigger than a deer, so when Enric demanded she prove their sincerity, she quailed. Her hesitance was not lost on the older woman in front of the bolt.
“Why are you here with him?” the woman asked her calmly, and the question was a paring knife in Rosalie’s thoughts.
“Because he is all I have.”
“Hn.”
The curious syllable was the only preface to the mage-woman striking Enric dead.
“And now,” the woman said, “You don’t even have that.”
Her hand waved Rosalie off while Enric's corpse smoldered.
"Don't waste the freedom I have given you."
Loss had come again, and hollowed out every plan. But this time, Rosalie was grateful for it. She wished Enric still lived, but she also wished she'd left him earlier. A life of theft hastily abandoned, Rosalie made herself an old apprentice to a talented but temperamental tailor. Despite his skill, no apprentice would linger due to his angry outbursts. She worked for cheap and learned to pretend sweetness and docility whenever he or a customer threw a fit. It was not too unlike dealing with Enric in a temper, or a resistant mark. In honesty, she found the tailor's threats and tantrums comparatively mild. It was hard to be afraid of upended fabric and yelling when one had dodged thrown goblets, balled fists, and riding crops. When the tailor retired, many said so his angry heart didn't burst, he shuttered his shop. Rosalie had few illusions that he would leave it to her. She had mined all the knowledge she could from the catankerous tailor, and that was enough to send her on her next endeavor.
Hot Cycle
Arc 726
Now: Saun
76 days until the turn
