As Taurina answered her questions, and chatted about tattooing, Rufio felt the tug on her flesh and a prickling pins and needles in her arm. Sweat was licking down her back, and she felt her temperature fluctuate in that nauseating way it does in fever. Hot, then cold, then hot, as if her body couldn’t decide which way to react to the tattooing.
Rufio closed her eyes, and took deep breaths, letting the air huff between her lips in long, drawn out breaths. The breathing tempered the pain a little, so Rufio could concentrate a little more on Taurina’s words.
“My work is not yet very good. The skin of long dead animals is what I practice with my needles on. It is better that I mar the skin of something dead than someone who must live with it for the rest of their life."
A smile ebbed into the grimace that had settled itself into Rufio’s freckled features, which had seemed to etch a light crease between her thick black brows and made her cheeks heavy with her frown. Taurina’s humour invited Rufio’s warmth, and she let her ochre gaze wander over the…Ethaefal’s…face. Rufio marvelled that the drykas woman who sat beside her was not wholly drykas. She wondered what ways Ethaefal were different to drykas.
The Wildmane resisted the urge—
“One day I would be honoured”—
—to blurt out her curiosity—
“to have your needles mark my skin!”—
—but, only just, before she murmured gently—
“The marks of a child of Leth or Syna…”
Realising herself, how her words might make offense, Rufio chuckled and glanced at Keil, adding a tactful compliment to soothe any pride she might have wounded. “I’m glad the Lilacwinds are good tutors.”
With that the drykas fell into a comfortable quiet, letting the burn of the needles ebb and flow with her breathing. As the bells wore on, she hoped the tattoo would be finished soon. Her chest and stomach fluttered with the anticipation and excitement of seeing her windmarks renewed. Her anticipation touched her voice, as she answered Taurina’s question.
“I’m a fortune-teller, as my mother was.” Rufio felt a self-deprecating humour lilt in as she named her profession, though there was a hue of respect there, too, for her own craft, as she elaborated on the ways she told fortunes. “I read meanings in cards, and, I cast bones.” future, past, present—gods give messages, complex voices, meanings, seasons to discern, novice—“Like you, I learn.”
Rufio hesitated as a wish made itself known in her thoughts, pushing its way up into her sign and her voice—“one day I’d be honoured to read your fortune.”
A hesitancy settled in the quiet chasing her words as she thought about whether she had the courage to tell an Ethaefal’s fortune, if Taurina ever came to her for a reading. To interpret the meanings and messages touched in the cards by Leth or Syna, or to cast the bones and work with which ways they fell to Semele, as Taurina had. It would be a true test of skill, faith and knowledge.
Rufio reflected on Taurina’s story, the deep ocean the Ethaefal fell into when she fell into the sea. The way the currents brought her to Endrykas, and Rufio here, to Taurina. Superstitious, the Wildmane was sure that she and the Ethaefal would cross paths again someday. As the fortune-teller sat for her windmarks, she watched Taurina work with warm admiration.
If she’d been the kind of soul to think on things consciously, Rufio might have considered the ways her feelings played into her faith. Rufio believed that she and Taurina would meet again—
Rufio hoped they would.
