When
she staggers out of the treeline and into the marsh, still bleeding
from her arms and throat and chest, it is a group of Redbelly
Wasps—murderers and robbers all—who see her first.
(She
doesn’t know this on
sight,
of course. She sees their gray skin deeper than hers, sees their orange
and gold and crimson eyes, sees their haggard faces and rough
clothing, and she nearly cries with relief because they are
duskwights
and not
Wailers
and—)
—And
then her legs give out, and they have her surrounded, and she looks
into the nearest man’s face (braided hair, round glasses, a nose
like a hawk’s) and says
Help
me.
“We’re
Redbellies,” one says.
“We
don’t do help,
and even if we did—” another begins, and is cut off by his
comrades.
From
there an argument breaks out. They are on a mission, the Hive is
expecting them, there are traps to inspect—but the girl’s clearly
a fellow duskwight, and injured (look
at her blouse, Vorsie, she’s covered in blood)
and…there’s more, but Rinette Habelliard has just killed two men
and she is bleeding
and she’s a murderer now, she can never go back home and the forest
itself is going to destroy her.
When
she falls on her side in the mud with a cry of pain, it’s the
hawk-nosed man who reaches for her; she
tenses, but his hands are gentle as
he helps her sit up again.
“We’re
taking her to the camp.”
It
feels, she thinks, like she’s fallen out of the world and into a
dream. She is wrapped in a scratchy wool blanket, fed scrambled duck
eggs, and has a mug of weak beer poured down her throat—and she
knows that
part isn’t a dream, because it tastes horrible. The
Redbelly women don’t
ask questions; they just
surround her, blocking
her from the view of the men while they strip her to the waist and
inspect her wounds. The water they wash her with is freezing; this
too is not a dream. This is her new reality.
“Ah,
poor duck, this will need stitches…”
She’s
cold all over suddenly, and not from the water. She can still feel
Terremont’s knife at her throat, pain following the blade where
he’d sliced her shirt open and
jeered something about how your
brother won’t be so proud when he finds what’s left of your
corpse—but
there’s a woman steering her to a seat on an upturned bucket, and
the
horror looming over her shoulder turns its head away.
(She remembers grabbing the knife, remembers his blood gushing over
her hands, remembers how he dropped to the forest floor and could
never
hurt her again.
Horror
slinks slowly back into the shadows, and she remembers
to breathe.)
Stitches
hurt. By the time she can talk without screaming, they’re bandaging
her arms. The woman wrapping slightly-stained cotton around her
forearms has a tattoo she’s never seen before—a twisted rune on
one cheek almost like a tangle of roots, white and stark on her
slate-gray skin. She has to force the question out. “What’s.
What’s that? Your cheek. I’ve seen vines, but—”
“Ah,
this?” The woman—now that Rinette is looking, she can’t be much
younger than the mother she’ll never see again—brushes her
fingers along the inked lines proudly. “Old, old
Gelmorran symbol. Meant ‘protection’ or summat. The vines, now
those’re for resilience an’
new growth.
Why? Thinkin’ o’ gettin’ one of yer own, duck?”
She’s
never been allowed to; her
parents have always said that only criminals and ruffians tattoo
themselves so brazenly.
The iron clasps at her earlobes suddenly feel heavy. (Rinette,
you ought not to wear those so proudly, what will the neighbors say?)
“Mm.”
A
week later, she stands upon the road to Drybone with a satchel of
provisions and a battered bone staff that Dariustel swears will help
her channel her only known spell properly. She thinks about marks,
and how people earn them—how they are claimed and reclaimed, clawed
out of the blood and dirt.
One
year later, Ritanelle Soleil walks into a tattooist’s shop in Limsa
and sits down, and the white ink burns
but oh, how it’s worth it.
ffxivswarm 