Part Tres

Pillory and fonts bearing the visages of proud animalia make their momentary impression on the Wizard and the Wounded. They, all of them, share a commonality in the connoted power and ineffability of the beasts depicted: lions, and stag, and to Aog's considerable bemusement, a dragon, winsomely-scaled and glowering from its position above the basin. The heavy-handed irony of a wyrmling spitting a stream of water at odd intervals reminds Aog of Illanora's mephitic antics. It draws one corner of Wizard Ridir's thin lipline below center-rest, not imperceptibly; few of the Great Injustices, by the man's reckoning, compared quite suitably to the consistent, irreverent, short-sighted deference to in-born talent as the misappropriation of Illanora's efforts to frivolous ends, both during their shared apprenticeships, as well as their successive careers.

Illanora. Wan-faced. Adaptable. Adroit. Superlative and unflinching and mercurial and dangerous. Aog's impression of her differed from that of the Accord's Counselors' only in that he'd known her personally since she'd scarcely donned the first grey robe of the apprentice. She'd been renowned and lauded for being a quick study -- especially vaunted was the potency of Illie's Quietus. Typhoons in the peak season, crashing the walls of their whorl-churning fury into shoreline palisades, could not stir the girl from her focus, even as she stood, lashed down while the storm imposed and leered and screeched into her face.

Aog blinks swelling disdain from his vision. He cared greatly for the girl, but couldn't help his foul temperament when the thought of Illie directing the daily rote and quotidians of a contractor's pellary in a little hamlet two hundred leagues from any meaningful civilization was stoked.

"I'd expect her to react just as seriously as she might, were she to trip over a root in the road." Aog's tongue pulls against the grain of the ridges in his palate, and he sighs. "No, no; that was indecorous of me, casting aspersions at a fellow of the Accord like that. Countess, I haven't had the first missive from her since I'd wandered through her purview, last."
Aog rolls the question about Lacey's lizard-faced font's continued existence about his liminals. Impertinent decor aside, he truly was curious about Illanora's well-being. Extensive separation had apparently welled his mentorly worries to a considerable swell. He adds, "I hope she fares well," the sloping of his inflection evidence that he'd prefer not to continue discussion on the girl.
The Countess almost regretted mentioning her-- she realized that, in truth, it had just been an attempt to slide their attention away from each other, Illie's name a bright window in the dank, dim corridor in which they figuratively stood (...especially figuratively in her case). In all honesty she knew that her inevitable meeting with Illanora would be a soothing balm, simple and mollifying and facile, and was quite likely to take place long after she'd have really needed anything of the sort.

And so she reluctantly slid her hand to hide the window behind a curtain and turned her attention to the figure at the other end of the narrow corridor, a corridor with no doors or furnishings. The light shining through the window had cast each of their features in an admittedly unflattering light, anyhow.

"...no, I suppose she'd not fret much about it." She squeezed his hand once, weakly. "I hope you don't arrive at the idea that I'd want her to...?" Lacey allowed herself a dim smile and glanced up to him. She considered the grotesques upon the wall, beasts and creatures at once both horrible and entrancing in the curve of their forms, an earthy rawness and a strange elegance in the power that they exude.

Her eyes settle on that one. "Do you want to see the tooth?" she asks quietly, not taking her gaze off it.
Without resetting his errant gawping from the rafters of his vaunted aloofness, Aog lets the acridity of Lacey's quiet inquiry linger on his palate for a beat. It levels a smokey, undeniably intransigent febrility on his tongue, causing the Wizard to suck at the roof of his mouth -- quietly, of course, to preserve the decorum of his visit to the noble fixture in the bewheeled apparatus at his side.

"You kept a memento," he sighs, a voice like the otiose slopping of gelid autumnals bearing no small fraction of weariness. He's not surprised, it seems, but in speaking, Aog connotes at the least some disapproval -- or maybe curiosity. Finally, Aog's eyes, unlit coal-lumps, return from the far-off pastures of hideous, scaled faces, as depicted by the clumsy relief-work of the Countess' contracted artisans, to rest on the disfigured woman's winsome face, weighted, if only inadvertently, by what the Wizard would perceive as moroseness.

"I would see it, then."
She dipped her head slightly, an affected smile slightly curling her lips. "Yes. A memento." Yes. She had. The woman shifts gently in her chair, the delicate and fussy task of maneuvering her thick counterpane relegated to an arm, while sure and stalwart, also quite lonely. Its abridged counterpart pawed and grasped at the edge of the fluffy coverlet to keep it from tumbling and those sable-stained eyes might catch a glimpse of a well proportioned, fine boned décolletage, and a fiber of glittering silver linklets 'round a willowy neck.

A finger and thumb pinched the necklace chain and tugged gently. Up across porcelain skin ascended a horrid, ragged, devil of a tooth, the color of dried mud splotched with unnerving darker maria, as of the moon. "I like to think we negotiated a little transaction-- our sort are terrible at bartering, you know." Lacey swallowed with some difficulty.
Aog hides the shock of the revelation, nearly lurid in the way its haggard, peatish mien befouls the cream of the Countess' skin, behind the esteem of pronounced reverie; the Wizard coughs, once, in the back of his throat, rasping in acknowledgment. The allure of the minute, silv'ry links, delicately interwoven in stark contrast to the uncouth indignity of the dragon's fang, draws the magician's fingertip nearly unto touch. No, no; instead, it only barely avoids alighting.

He recoils, finger-stalks recluding into the safety of his palm in momentary shame. "Sorry. I was, was compelled to feel it," offers Aog in explanation, hoping to rend the momentary discomfort fogging his mind. Was he really so familiar as to forget his stringency?

Trundling over his misstep, Aog's smile returns. "All steel, and no flourish. I know. But I'm still proud to have even the acquaintance of your propinquity, Count-ess."
Lacey out a breath, one faintly mimicking a laugh, through her nose. "It shan't bite you, Aog," she intones--almost in the tone of a mother soothing an upset nursling. "...I suppose maybe it is fairly unset'ling." She rolls the gossamer chain amid finger and thumb and the sinister fang twirls lazily, placidly.

"You are no stranger to such things, yes?" She holds out the worn tooth again from the shimmering thread, smiling impishly at him.
The baleful encumbrance on Aog's words evaporate with the acrimonious flaring of his nostrils! "What-- the nerve!" he simmers, taking the jagged curve of the tooth in his hand with a lurch -- carefully, of course, so as not to threaten the integrity of Lacey's trophy. He fingers its strangely-magnetic shapeliness, rolling it about an irregular axis, examining, tabulating, calculating.

"I am, of course," the Wizard eventually admits, letting the Countess' little fetish return to her chest and blanketure. "Do you look at it often? I feel as though I'd never peel my face from it."
She furls herself up again like the bud of a pale springtime primrose, with quilted petals and a peculiar stem wrought of rosewood and wheels and bronze rivets. She smiles meekly, as if embarrassed-- she rocks back and forth almost imperceptibly, chin nestled in the uppermost edge of her duvet. "Often... I suppose you could say. Everything aside, it's quite the peculiarity to gaze at."

Her lips purse-- subtly, dimples arrive near the corners of her mouth. It might not be evident to most, but to one as observant as he it's clear that she's reluctant to speak. "...it wasn't her fault, you know. It was mine alone."

"Her?"