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Raining Old Women and Sticks
Mar. 14th, 2011 07:54 amKiller-Kate and Luke Lackland: 360 words. Tiger talk, in flames of red and black. Fiery Younger Sister draws the people horribly, heroically in.
Wherefore Bonecold Refugee - small, timid, maimed in mind and body - takes up her walking-stick against a sea of hostility, and blows them out again. Because Bonecold is not a hero. She is more like what Katy Elflocks might have been, had chance and wickedness smashed Katy down like a bug in her very first chapter. And she gets why even the poorest and most levelling hero, born to song and power and freedom, is more like a lord than a peasant. She knows what Younger Sister's fires will leave as they burn out.
Silent and ice-hearted, she speaks because she must, to save people she can no longer like or even very much care about.
Fiery Younger Sister is the last person in the world who will ever understand this. So this is it, seen closer in: this is where Kate finds the speech that wakes the dale, for love of Luke and Katy and - the boar-spear's stabbing point, now - of Bonecold Refugee. Not the old speech of the story's roots, too much of which Younger Sister has made disastrously already. Not the old hero's speech, ironically turned about to serve an unheroic side. But the old woman's words who, alone of all here, knew Katy in her youth, and has learned at last what she really was, and who else is really like her. And today - becomes something like her at last.
Not Bonecold's move, setting the cynical tinder to Kate's furious spark. The other way: Kate, clashing flint and steel in her rush to Bonecold's aid, when nobody else knows how.
Let Bonecold finish now, and Kate Fireguard come to her side. Can I tell that tonight? Then tomorrow - the chapter's final conflagration, and with it the Rising's...
Wherefore Bonecold Refugee - small, timid, maimed in mind and body - takes up her walking-stick against a sea of hostility, and blows them out again. Because Bonecold is not a hero. She is more like what Katy Elflocks might have been, had chance and wickedness smashed Katy down like a bug in her very first chapter. And she gets why even the poorest and most levelling hero, born to song and power and freedom, is more like a lord than a peasant. She knows what Younger Sister's fires will leave as they burn out.
Silent and ice-hearted, she speaks because she must, to save people she can no longer like or even very much care about.
Fiery Younger Sister is the last person in the world who will ever understand this. So this is it, seen closer in: this is where Kate finds the speech that wakes the dale, for love of Luke and Katy and - the boar-spear's stabbing point, now - of Bonecold Refugee. Not the old speech of the story's roots, too much of which Younger Sister has made disastrously already. Not the old hero's speech, ironically turned about to serve an unheroic side. But the old woman's words who, alone of all here, knew Katy in her youth, and has learned at last what she really was, and who else is really like her. And today - becomes something like her at last.
Not Bonecold's move, setting the cynical tinder to Kate's furious spark. The other way: Kate, clashing flint and steel in her rush to Bonecold's aid, when nobody else knows how.
Let Bonecold finish now, and Kate Fireguard come to her side. Can I tell that tonight? Then tomorrow - the chapter's final conflagration, and with it the Rising's...
