[Bronze Wood] Only my Wit is Sharper than my Dagger (Eris)

[Tyuru]

After watching the squirrel dart away into the trees, Tyuru turned back to Eris who she realised was grinning at her. Realizing what she’d just done, Tyuru gave a nervous laugh and played with the intricate dagger in her lap. Distracted like a small child. She couldn’t decide whether to be embarrassed or to laugh.

The question made the smile fade from her face, replaced with an expression of slight befuddlement and a bit of sadness.

‘I’m sick of being weak,’ she said, still looking at the dappled light glancing off the side of the dagger. ‘I’m tired of being defenseless and helpless. I’m getting help so I can be strong. Then I can go find Issak.’ She looked up and a small smile crossed her face at the thought of him. ‘He’s somebody I lost some time ago, and I’d like to find him before anything bad happens. He needs to know I forgive him for something he did, you see. Otherwise he might spend his days in perpetual guilt… and never pass on when he dies. I’d hate to be the reason for the creation of a ghost.’

Her expression brightened and the self-confusion was gone. ‘But what about you? How did you learn to use a dagger so brilliantly? What about your family?’ Tyuru asked bluntly. Tact escaped her completely, but she didn’t notice the lack of subtlety.

[Eris]

She listened to the girl’s story with interest, wondering whether it would be terribly impolite to ask her who this Issak was. The girl is looking for someone she’d lost and I’m looking for someone’s I’ve never had. When Tyuru asked her own question, Eris felt her eyebrows raise slightly. Well, so much for politeness.

“I have never met my father and my mother died when I was eleven years old. After she died, a man claiming to be colleague of my father’s showed up and took me on as an apprentice. He taught me a lot of what I now know about using the dagger. After I left Joel two years ago, I figured I might start looking for my father. So, I travelled a lot and picked up some more skill in the area along the way,” she said matter-of-factly, leaving out a lot of the gory details.

Deciding that since the girl was so liberal in asking about her past, she had the license to ask about Tyuru’s. “A very noble cause for traveling. And who is this Issak that he has earned such close attention? A brother? A lover?”

[Tyuru]

Tyuru took Eris’ story in stride. Unfortunate tales were known to her and she didn’t want to show pity – the matter-of-fact tone Eris told her story in was not the tone of a person wishing to inspire pathos. With a sense of embarrassment she realised she’d been tactless. She decided on a simple nod to show she understood, but her mouth moved by itself, forming, ‘I’m sorry you never knew your father. I didn’t mean to pry.’

Tyuru hid her horrification at her runaway mouth. Instead of apologizing for apologizing, she answered Eris’ question. ‘He, uh… I wouldn’t say he was a lover. He was the one person who I could talk to, but I don’t think I realised just how much I talked and how little I listened. Issak was a passionate type,’ she smiled faintly at her own memories, ‘and I suppose I should have noted his passions instead of focusing on my own so completely. He lost control of his passions one day, and he had to leave.’

A frown creased her freckled forehead momentarily, but passed as quickly as the leaves in the breeze blowing above the tops of the trees, making their tips bend and sway as if in a hypnotic dance. ‘But as I said, I’ve forgiven him, so I have to find him to tell him so. I think he might be looking for me as well. At least, I hope he is. I’m searching for him in the hope that he’s searching for me.’ She looked up at Eris, a strange expression on her face, somewhere between confusion and a need for understanding. Childish insecurities showed in the way she worked her hands in her lap and reached over to wrap her cloak around her shoulders as if she were chilled, even in the sunlight now streaming in from overhead. ‘Does that sound crazy to you?’

[Eris]

A nerve just above Eris’s eye twitched in irritation. She despised pity and she was pretty sure that was exactly what the girl’s comment was meant to convey. But she decided to let it go for now, the calm spring breeze smoothing away the crease in her brow.

“Sounds romantic, a tad foolish, but not crazy…No, defiantly not crazy,” Eris said with a sad half-smile. “Sometimes, it is good to believe that whoever you’re searching for is putting in as much effort in searching for you. It makes the whole endeavor feel a little less impossible.”

As soon as she had spoken, Eris felt terribly weak and hopeless. Sitting before her, Tyuru suddenly looked much too young. Too young to be taught to fight, with the possibility of killing - to young to know what it felt like to twist a dagger in someone’s flesh. But you were younger when you first learned. The voice in her head sounded bitter and accusatory. With some effort, Eris chased it away from her mind. Now wasn’t the time. She was here to do a job and all that should matter is the money she would receive.

[Tyuru]

‘It’s good to know I’m not mad. Or maybe I am, for wanting to learn this.’ Tyuru couldn’t help but give a cheeky grin as she said this. She couldn’t quite decide if she wanted to laugh or cry at her strange decision to learn to kill.

Unsure how to continue the suddenly awkward conversation, Tyuru played with her hands in her lap again, weaving her fingers together in a position her mother had taught her warded off evil spirits. She linked her thumbs together and held out the rest of her fingers like wings. The shape was supposed to be an eagle, and if you had a good imagination it could be, silhouetted against the burning sunset sky of Tyuru’s sienna skirt. Something Eris had said struck her and she let her hands fall flat, the traces of an eagle’s screech echoing in her ears.

‘Are you searching for somebody?’

[Eris]

“My father,” Eris said, her words almost a whisper among the rustling leaves.

For a second, she thought some powerful emotion was going to overpower her, but the feeling passed as it so often did. She knew that the reasonable thing to do would be to cut off this…little heart-to-heart. But for some reason, she remained still, unwilling to stand and return to an all-too-familiar fighting stance. Her fingers absently traced the thin indentation running across her right palm, running over the line again and again and again.

[Tyuru]

‘There’s a short saying my mother taught me,’ Tyuru offered, wondering how to make the silence okay. ‘“You can’t weave baskets with stiff grass”. She said it after I refused to tell her something that was bothering me one time. She meant that I should cheer up if I wanted to try and make a difference. I should allow the universe to take its course with me, because it has a grand purpose that I can fulfill by not attempting to fulfill it. All the sour thoughts and memories need to be let go in order to let the grand plan take its course. You need to throw out rotten milk before you can refill the pail with fresh, creamy milk. You can’t weave baskets with stiff grass.’ Unaware of the danger she might be saying anything wrong, Tyuru looked up at the light filtering through the trees, illuminating the leaves from above and making the boughs appear to be hung with thousands of glittering emeralds. ‘Or perhaps she was just trying to tell me I collected the wrong kind of grass for weaving.’

A laugh tumbled out of her that she found she was unable to stop. Out poured the endless weeks of seemingly hopeless travel, the expectations that had been dashed like a shipwreck against the rocks, the disappointment that she knew was perpetual because she could never live up to her own standards. It all left her body in one rush, leaving her relaxed and clean and new, because she was finally letting it all out instead of keeping it in.

Eventually the laughter subsided and Tyuru wiped the tears from her eyes, breathing hard, the same sense of exhilaration flooding through her again. ‘I feel much better. In fact, I feel excellent. I feel like running the length of the Suvan Sea. I feel like flying.’
She stood and flung out her arms, stepping into the sun as if to embrace it. ‘I want to be the grass that bends,’ she told the sky.

Sobering, but still panting like she had gone through with her impulse to run the coast of the Suvan, she lowered her arms and looked at Eris, the traces of her laughter still bubbling on her lips. ‘What happened to your hand?’ she asked, genuinely curious in the possibility of sour milk and the potential she had to replace it with fresh milk.

[Eris]

Eris listened to Tyuru speak, the girl’s words washing over her like warm summer rain. Summer rain isn’t unpleasant like the biting winter hail, but it still makes one wet. The girl spoke of family and basket weaving and milk… It all sounded so foreign to Eris – as if Tyuru had come from a completely different world. “Your mother sounds like a wise woman, even though I do not know the first thing about basket weaving.”

When the girl began to laugh, Eris had assumed that it was a polite kind of laugh meant to break tension. But then she went on and on…an on. At one point, Eris was sure that the girl had taken leave of her senses and had finally fallen into hysterics. When she sprang up, Eris started a little – surprised at the sudden burst of energy.

“I caught a dagger in my hand once – blade first,” Eris said, standing as well and bending backward to stretch out her back. When she straightened, she added, “It was my first kill, actually. An unfortunate affair all around.”

[Tyuru]

“My mother saw only what she wanted to see,” Tyuru said, her voice a shrug, the words indifferent. “She never saw what others saw. I don’t blame her. Sometimes it’s better not to see everything. Other than that, she’s a loving woman, as well as my mother, so I’ve never been able to see any evil in her.” Again, Tyuru half-formed her hands into the eagle but let her fingers droop like limp feathers. “As for weaving, I was never particularly good, either. I always ended up tearing the grass.”

She watched as Eris stretched. “You talk about it like it matters very little. Like killing is just something to do to pass the time.” There was no accusation in the words. Instead, Tyuru sounded curious.

A childish question burst from her before she could stop it. “Is it easy? To kill somebody?”

[Eris]

Eris regarded Tyuru for a minute before responding. “No. It’s not easy in the least. No matter how good you are at wielding the dagger or at making the death as painless as possible… It’ll always be the hardest thing you have to do.”

“But if you look at it the same way a butcher looks at killing a chicken, it becomes easier,” she added with a wave of her hand, as if dismissing the ominous, somber air that had curled itself around her.

Suddenly, she seemed to realize something and her eyebrows rose in surprise at her own thought. “As a matter of fact,” she said. “Have you ever killed something? I don’t mean a person, per se. Ever slaughter a farm animal? Put an injured pet out of its misery?”