Closed Wright is Left(ing) [Philomena]

[Liminal]

Charm drew back just a little – she was unused to physical contact from anyone at this point in her life. But almost instantly, she relaxed and let Minnie touch her face. Had it been almost anyone else, she would have slapped them, but she seemed to recognize what it meant coming from the socially-challenged professor.

”That’s a beautiful verse, though I can’t say that I recognize it. It's not from Edwin Masthead's piece for the twentieth anniversary, is it?” the Captain said. ”But don’t spare any pity for me. I’ve dreamed my life and lived my dream, and in these broken times, that’s more than anyone can ask for. As for Kena, I think in their own way, nearly everyone knows it. It’s part of why her memory burns so brightly. We needed a hero, and she became one. We gave her money, fame, whatever power we could, but we couldn’t give her the healing that she needed. And so when she vanished, on some level, we understood that we’d done it to her, and our joy in her life is all mixed up with our sorrow for what it all cost her. Or maybe I’m just thinking too hard, projecting my own feelings. I’m not much for metaphysics or knowing what goes on in people’s minds. I’m just an old sailor.”

She set the empty teacup down again, this time making no move to refill it. ”Once, maybe a year and a half after she got back, we went walking in the foothills, not that far from here. And all of a sudden, she sat down and put her face in her hands and just started sobbing. I asked her what was wrong, and all she would say was, ’She was right, she was right. You can’t unsee what’s been seen, you can’t undo what’s been done, and the remembering, the remembering…’ I couldn’t get out of her who ‘she’ was, or what the rest of it meant – she just cried for a solid half a bell, and then walked home with me without saying a word.”

Charm shook her head sadly. ”The last two years were the worst. I’d started my apprenticeship, and was gone a lot of the time, but she just hid in that damned manor house. When she’d come out, like on the anniversaries of the voyage, she’d give her speeches as if she were fine and nothing was wrong, but…”

She gazed at the opposite side of the room. A portrait of Kenabelle was there, done in oils, half-shrouded in darkness, as the lamps on that side weren’t lit.

”You know, she told Stephie Brooks that she was going to sail back to Sunberth, and Stephie didn’t even believe her until she was gone. And I wasn’t there – I was off on a run and didn’t get home until days after she’d vanished. My sister. My friend.”

A laugh, this time, a mirthless, rueful sound. ”Kena didn’t make friends easily, you know. People liked her, and I think she liked people, for all that, but she wasn’t good at turning that into friendships. Gods, she only had two real friends on the voyage – Bethany and Plankman – and she watched them both die. Hannah and Stephie didn’t really get to know her until the journey was almost over, and though she respected Doug Stone, they weren’t close. “

The old woman shook her head again. ”But I’m rambling, Minnie Lefting. I want you to look at this and tell me what you make of it.” She stood and pulled a piece of paper off of the mantle, then pressed the sheet into Philomena’s hands.

The whole thing was covered in some sort of writing, but nothing that Philomena would be able to read. There weren’t even any recognizable letters, just boxes, triangles, and oddly jagged runic symbols. It didn’t resemble any of the standard scripts with which the professor might be familiar, and there were no clues on the sheet that would help one to untangle it.

[Philomena]

The question about who wrote the verse started Minnie, just perceptibly to someone observing her closely enough - a slight dilation of the eyes, the slightest twitch of the neck, the lips parting just slightly. Minnie remembers herself, perhaps for a moment - that's the problem with stories, one forgets, perhaps, that one is not in them, one forgets that one's actions reverberate outside of them. She likely will never know if Ms Wright continued on in the story, simply because the question was an aside, or because the old captain's keen weather-eye sensed that the question stirred a discomfiture in the professor.

But either way, Minnie took the opportunity to demur to answer, leaving the question open, unless pressed. Her hand, now reminded of its purposes, quietly takes the stylus up and begins to scrawl again, still keeping the woman's eyes - until Charm quotes Kena's own words, her little moment of 'eli lama sabachthani'. This story stirred Minnie, now quite perceptibly. Sympathy, empathy, these were present the entire story-telling process - what is the gift of the listener but an uninhibited sympathy, anyway? So it is not that, it is something else. She frowns very hard, her brow curling into a deep, furrow. Her face churns, she looks, for a moment, almost nauseous. Her eyes fall away from Charm for that moment, struggle with the pattern on the rugs, the stitching in the upholstery. Then, she recovers herself, nodding, slightly. It's very quick, perhaps ten seconds, but very real, a punch in the mental gut.

The rest of the story, her eyes maintain a certain mental disarray, even as she listens. And then, there is the paper. She takes the paper out of surprise, but immediately lays it down, shutting her wax tablet to give her a known clean surface. The insertion of something familiar - examining a manuscript - gives her sufficient purchase to reassert the necessary mask of everyday interaction. She reaches then into her satchel to draw out, carefully, a pair of thin white cotton gloves, which she pulls carefully, meticulously on to her fingers, before pushing her glasses up her nose, and taking the paper up in her hands, delicately taking only the unwritten margins in her fingers. She is silent a moment, staring at it, and when she finally speaks, her voice has the excited irritation of the scholar presented with a new enigma.

"I… dont' recognize this at all. I mean, clearly, its orderly or structured, so.. well, I mean unless its just some sort of lorum-ipsum, I'm sure it has SOME meaning. And I can't imagine you showing it me if you were in doubt as to whether it had meaning at all. Have you shown it to a cryptographer? Or a linguist? But… I don't know all the languages in Mizahar by a far cry, still I would think I'd… recognize their alphabet…" she raises an eyebrow, "Do you know who wrote it? Perhaps its some sort of academic shorthand. There really isn't a standard one, I mean…" she flips open her wax tablet to the her page of indecipherable notes, "If you found a page of my notes, if I inked them, then you'd probably find them fairly indecipherable as well…"

[Liminal]

Charm noticed Philomena's reaction to her recounting of Kena's despair -- it was hard to miss -- but she called no attention to it. She knew that Minnie could be remarkably emotional, and that one simply had to accept that if they were to accept her as a friend.

She made a noise, something between a laugh and a grunt, that was parseable as an expression of pure frustration -- not with Philomena, but with something larger. "Why yes. Yes, I know who wrote it."

Again, the despairing head shake. "What you're holding in your hands is, I think, the answer to a question that I always had, one that I even asked Kena, though she never gave me anything like a real answer -- why is the Account so petching short? She spent almost six years writing it, and even in the scholarly fifth edition, with all of her maps included, plus the biographical sketches of every single person mentioned in the book -- even me, and I'm only mentioned in one conversation around the dinner table! -- it's not 200 pages long. Your own books are several times the length of hers, Minnie."

Now she heaved a deep sigh. "So, after Kena disappeared in 459, that confounded will of hers meant that I was in charge of her papers and such, most of which were in that damned house. But I was still in the middle of my apprenticeship, and I wasn't actually home all that much. Besides...I didn't much fancy going there. I didn't want to stand in that empty house and sort through whatever of hers was left. I knew the caretakers would make sure nothing was damaged, and for the time, that seemed like enough. And the years went by, and more years went by, and even when Edgar Workstone was working on the third edition and wanted to look at the old drafts of her book, all I did was make one trip up there, grab whatever was in her top desk drawer, and hand it to him."

For once -- perhaps the only time Minnie would ever have seen her this way -- the old captain looked vaguely embarrassed. "I should have taken care of this so much earlier, I know. But it wasn't until ten years ago, after I retired from the Guild, that I figured I might as well go up there and see what Kena had actually left."

Her voice started to shake again, but not from sadness -- it was a much more complex emotion, something with hints of both fear and perplexity in it. "I went up to her study, and gods, it was the same as it had been five decades before. I opened up the shuttered bookcases to see what was in there, and..."

She swallowed audibly. "...Minnie, there was notebook after notebook. At least a hundred of them, all neatly arranged in rows. And every single one of them is full of what you're looking at now. Thousands upon thousands of pages, all carefully inscribed, all completely incomprehensible."

There was more that Charm had to say -- there was obviously more -- but she paused here, both to catch her breath, and to see if Minnie had anything to say or ask.

[Philomena]

When Minnie was a child in the orphanage of Zeltiva, her best friend there had suffered from a longstanding infestation of a gut-worm of some sort, that left her continuously, gnawingly hungry. Many of their days - and nights sometimes - had been spent scrouning the dark corners of the city for the barest scraps, morsels, crumbs, to fill that aching need.

IF you had told that worm-ridden child, then, that in point of fact, there was elsewhere in the city a great storehouse of food, available to anyone willing to figure out how to uncrate it, she would have reacted in much the same way that Minnie, many years later, reacted to Charm Wright's description of books and books full of unreadable notes.

"That's... a hundred notebooks... a hundred... just... just waiting there... I... Charm, I.... I've tried to drag every scrap, every morsel of information of information ever written... about... about your sister, about the voyage, about... and... and if I took all I've written, and all the notes I thought weren't fit to publish together, I could fill, maybe... maybe ten notebooks. And three quarters of it is theory and supposition. Nothing else, none of Edgetower's research, none of Hannah's notes, none of... not even a complete navigation log. I..." her voice quivers, with something almost like fury, and her eyes bear a powerful shock in them. She stops again, and swallows, measuring her words carefully, "I am sorry, I... was surprised to hear you say that, I'm sorry to be upset. Please... tell me at least that they are well-preserved, that you've kept them somewhere... somewhere safe, and not too humid, and... Qalaya, Qalaya!" she spits out the name like a curse, almost, and sets the paper down again. "Did... do you know if she wrote them? If she wrote them, she would want them to be read, she would leave a key, somewhere, with someone, with you, I would think. Who was she trying to keep them secret from? OR whoever wrote them..."

[Liminal]

Charm let Minnie’s outburst pass without saying anything, or even reacting noticeably. Clearly, she’d expected to hit a nerve.

When it was all over, her face grew, if such a thing were possible, even more solemn. ”Minnie, I’ll answer all of your questions as well as I know how, but you have to understand something. I’m telling you things that I’ve never told anyone else, and I’m unburdening myself of them to you, because you’re the only living soul I think I can trust with them.”

She laughed, but this time, it was only a sort of footnote to herself. ”Most of my friends were Kena’s friends, because I could at least trust they weren’t just trying to get something out of me. You know, that’s why I married Joseph – not because I was attracted to him, really, but because I’d known him since I was a baby, and I knew that at least he liked me for my own merits. But he’s gone, and Hannah’s gone, and Stephie’s gone. Doug Stone’s longer gone than any of them – his story’s its own tragedy. As for the rest of my family, Jocylinda’s a good woman, don’t get me wrong, but she’s as cold as the northern sea. All head and no heart – as opposed to me, who’s only mostly head – and she wouldn’t treat this with the right respect. Teresa might someday, but she’s the kind of girl who takes her own sweet time in growing up, and I don’t have any more time to wait. Whatever might be said of you, Minnie, no one could say you don’t treat stories with respect, least of all Kena’s story. So listen, and listen well. And, if you can do it, hold any more questions to the end. I want to make sure I get this right.”

Now, Charm did refill her teacup. She drank her tea straight, not bothering to touch the cream. ”First of all, yes, the notebooks are all safe and well. Other than this spare sheet I showed you, and one other volume I’ll show you in a minute, they’re all still in her study, right where she left them. I’ve looked at every single page myself, and they’re all in excellent condition. The groundskeepers earn their money.”

She took one sip of her tea. ”Now, you’ve read her will, I’m sure – it’s public record, after all. Even for Kena, whose obsessive tendencies got much worse during her last years, it’s absurdly specific, and it made it patently clear that I was the only inheritor and custodian of any and all of her papers, notes, and so on. So once I saw what was in those notebooks, I didn’t dare show them to anyone – fact is, when I showed you that sheet just now, it’s the first time I’ve ever let anyone else have so much as a peek. I figured, like you just did, that I ought to have some way myself of knowing what all of this meant.”

The cup was set down with a tiny clink. ”But everything about them gets stranger and stranger.”

The log in the fire popped, and there was a crinkling sound as the coals readjusted themselves. ”I exaggerated slightly before – all of the notebooks are completely full of this stuff except one, the first one. That one looks to be her diary – not the official log, but her private diary – from the voyage. It starts out normally enough, without much in it that she didn’t include in the Account, except that she sounds even more worried in the diary, if that’s possible, and there are longer versions of some of the conversations she mentions. But right after an entry where she’s talking about the White Fever, the first of these coded entries happens.

“After that, it goes back and forth. Some of the time it’s in straightforward Common, some of the time it’s in this code. But after an entry in Common where she’s talking about trying to figure out where in Falyndar to land and look for water, it switches over to the code and stays there. Nothing in the rest of the diary is in Common, and there’s not a word of Common in the entire rest of the notebooks.”

She glanced once more at the portrait on the wall. ”I’m not a cryptographer, but I got some books out of the library – I didn’t have anything else to occupy my time, after all – and tried everything I could find or think of, or remember, to see if I could break the code. But nothing worked. Sometimes, it seemed like Kena was deliberately trying to make this as hard as possible – there aren’t any obvious strings of characters that are openings or closings, not even things that might be dates, and whenever she’s drawn pictures or figures in the notebooks – which isn’t very often – they don’t have any labels on them. I tried to think if she’d somehow given me the key years before, but again, nothing fit. Anyway, I hit a wall.”

“When that didn’t work, I wondered if maybe this was another language altogether. I hadn’t considered that before because, at least before the voyage, she couldn’t do anything in a foreign tongue except ask where the dockmaster was in laughably bad Arumenic. But I looked anyway, and I looked, and I researched, and I looked some more, and…”

Her voice shook so badly that she had to stop and compose herself before going on. ”Minnie, there are some adjustments in the orthography, sort of like the difference between cursive and printing, but this either is, or is completely based off…Azianth.”

She didn’t need to explain – as a scholar, Minnie would know the name, even if it wasn’t her field. A century and a half earlier, in a cave high in the Zatoskas, a forester had stumbled upon four stone tablets, each about three feet square. The tablets were inscribed in a script that didn’t resemble anything that anyone had ever seen before. The cave contained no other artifacts, and there were no pictures or other clues on the tablets that would explain what they might say, or what their significance might be. They’d been dubbed the Azianthan Tablets, after the name of the peak that was the cave’s location, and the script was usually referred to as Azianth.

Charm was still visibly emotional, but her voice was back under control. ”You know, I’m sure, that it’s sort of a rite of passage for linguistics students at the University to see if they can decode them, and a few poor souls have worked on them for their whole lives. But no one’s ever come up with an answer that holds any water – or at least not one that’s been published. But there are rumors, and the rumors are all around Bethany Edgetower.”

Her hand trembled a bit as she picked the teacup back up. ”And here’s another puzzler. Bethany was supposed to be the greatest linguist of the post-Valterrian world, no? But what’s that even based on? There’s a few dozen translations she did, most of which are of various scraps of pre-Valterrian poetry, and most of which are very short. There are the monographs on Vani and Denvali, which she wasn’t even really finished with, and a brief book on verb forms in Nader-Canoch. And…that’s it. According to the public record, that’s all there is.”

Another sip of tea, followed by a few seconds of silence. "I went to the library, didn't tell anyone about what I'd found, but asked to see the rest of Bethany's notes. The librarian at the desk insisted they didn't have any of them. The head librarian said the same thing. Finally, I ended up in a closed-door meeting with the entire Board of Regents. They demurred, and they hedged, and I finally said -- and this is the only time in my life that I've ever said anything like this, so don't think too harshly of me, Minnie -- I said, Look, I'm not some two-copper apprentice, or novice student. I'm Charm Motherpetching Wright, and your gods-accursed library is named after my sister, and I want to see her best friend's notes. And what did they do? One of them just handed me this."

She took a second sheet of paper from the mantle. This one wasn't in Charm's handwriting, and it had clearly been excerpted from a larger document.

Section 208-3825b:

Materials classed as Restricted (A) are not to be made available to the public, students, or faculty. These materials are not to be listed in the catalogue, and no list of documents and materials classed as Restricted (A) shall be made available to the public, students, or faculty. These regulations cannot be overruled except by the Head Archivist. No materials classed as Restricted (A) shall be reclassified except by the Head Archivist.

"I went all the way to the top and what did they do? They referred me to Cartsmith, as if I were a first-year student in need of a practical joke." Her voice was thick with disgust.

[Philomena]

Minnie swallowed her frustration, with a burst of shame - who was she to be upset? She knew what it was to lose a sister - in her way, anyway. She knew the ache of it, the way one avoided any reminder of the lost one. She did not speak, she could see, now, that Charm was having to wrk hard to get this story out - it was not simply tale-telling. This wasn't storytelling anymore. It was something like confession, almost. And Minnie, for a moment, felt the horror of the sincere confessor - the horror at one's own unworthiness to see someone else humble themselves before you. Her hand started jerking forward as the old captain's voice shook, but she stopped herself, only keeping her eyes on her, and taking careful notes.

Azianth, though! That was... that was unexpected. Azianth! Minnie was no social butterfly, of course, but one did not get far in the university without hearing the sorts of rumors the captain mentioned. But then, rumors in the University are like lice on East Street - common, unpleasant, and not particularly selective about their targets. Minnie tea lay curdling, forgotten, now. She scribbled on the wax with furious speed. Her mind raced - even if Edgetower HAD discovered a grammar for Azianth - a feat considering the paucity of comparable material to read it in - the language clearly was wildly, almost unnaturally different from Common. How could the Captain, a woman with no linguistic training, pick the language up quickly enough to be writing extended, apparently detailed notes in the language, and Kenabelle Wright, was as careful with her books as a sailor could be from what she knew, especially given a friendship with the thrice-marked Bethany Edgetower.

How careful? Minnie began to wonder. Was it possible that somewhere on the voyage, Qalaya had marked the Captain as well? Minnie didn't really understand WHAT the effects of a gnosis of Qalaya were, in spite of her long devotion to the goddess. There was so little said on the subject, in what she had ever read, she'd always half assumed that Qalaya asked her favored ones to keep quiet about their marks - the only exception to the rule she could remember coming across was Bethany Edgetower herself. The threads of this teased at her mind, even as she continued scribbling.

Minnie is emotional, yes, it would be wrong to deny this, at least around people she trusts. But even with that, the sheer breadth of intensity of emotion of the day was unusual even for her - understandably. She was finding herself ever deeper in a pool she had been trying to find for her entire adult life. But most of these emotions were simply intensifications of the emotional spectrum that defines her everyday existence: terror, affection, timidity, loneliness, fear, love.

The display of the 208-3825b card breaks this trend, for Minnie's face fills with a powerful, visceral hatred, the sort of hatred that one backs away from, the sort that is cold, and sharp, and hauntingly cruel. She conceals it quickly, but to one who knows her, the emotion is recognizable, and very strange.

"They thribbed you. Petching shytes. Mother-petching archives, my foot. That's not an archive, its a hidey-hole."

She caught herself, then, pulling the hatred down under her face, with a blush.

"Sorry... sorry. Go ahead."

'Thribbing' is not a common occurrence - which makes it all the more memorable when it happens. Getting a throbbing - the slang term came long ago from the Section code handed to those who nosed too far in the wrong direction. Minnie, as a scholar of the life of Kenabelle, had run into it, once, long ago. It had taught to know when to stop pressing, to feel, as it were, the shape of the upcoming thrib, at the edge of a query. And she avoided it, like the plague, for the word was that after a thribbing, the powers-that-be would go out to discover what threads led to the archive in the first place - and cut them off. Books, it was said, disappeared, into the Archives. People became silent. Sources dried up.

A thrib, then, was to the scholar what a bungled arrest was to a detective - not only did it produce nothing, it let the enemy know who you were, and what angle you attacked from. And to Minnie, the archives, that stinking hall where books and papers full of beautiful data were left to rot in obscurity, were a blasphemy to the very power of Qalaya - were a target, almost, for holy war, if she were ever to fight one.

[Liminal]

There was a small, rueful laugh. "Yes. That's not a word that I knew before, but that does seem to be the gist of it."

The old woman heaved a sigh. It seemed to be almost too big for her body. "And that's the end -- or almost the end. I never got to see Bethany's notes, and I've never come any closer to the mystery of what's written in Kena's notebooks. If this was a test, I've failed it, and if I was supposed to be able to figure out the secret, I haven't done it. Though it's occurred to me that maybe I wasn't supposed to be the one to read them. Maybe I was only supposed to keep them safe until someone else could."

She took one more sip of tea to empty the cup. "But there's one more thing. It's in the last of Kena's notebooks, on the last page but one." Again, she pulled something off the mantle; it was a notebook of perhaps a hundred and fifty pages, neatly bound in leather. She opened the volume to the page before the end. "Here, have a look."

It was a map, drawn in the careful hand that Philomena would recognize as Kenabelle's own. It seemed to show a bit of Mizahar's eastern coast, as well as the entire island of Darva. No words in common were extant, but Darva's interior was covered in several sets of characters.

"It's not surprising that Kena mapped Darva -- it's harder to find a bit of Mizahar's coastline that she didn't chart. But what in the gods' names is that on the island? How could she possibly be labeling things on the island? She never went there, and no one who did ever came back, right?"

Only when Minnie was completely finished looking at it did Charm take the book back. "And there you have it. I'm an old woman now, and I can feel my body slowing down. I'm healthy enough, Minnie, but age catches up to all of us, and it's taking my energy and my strength. I don't know how much longer I have, but it isn't all that long. So I've decided to follow the one clue I understood. I'd rather die having one last adventure than hiding under my covers in my house, and if that adventure is trying to puzzle out my sister's riddles, then so much the better."

[Philomena]

Minnie pulled her gloves on again quickly, and pushed up her glasses, but looking at the book, she did not touch it, now, frozen the moment she saw it, deep in thought. After a moment she murmured softly, "Darva." And sat back in the chair, this time forgetting to pull the gloves off. She pulled her knees up to her with an absent lassitude, matched only by her stare.

Charm spoke. Minnie heard, but she did not look at her anymore, her eyes glazed, her hands still, the tablet forgotten. When Charm finished, Minnie was silent for a moment. Then she finally spoke, very softly.

"When... when your sister left... when she died. When she died... she said she was going to sail to Sunberth. They never... they never found the ship, but then... then, once she was past the bay, who would know if... if she... turned north. Or... south..." she turned now to look at Charm, her face so overwhelmed as to be unreadable - intensity was clear, its moment less so.

"You... you have wondered, perhaps... perhaps... if she had this, she could tell... tell no one. She would... she would not announce a trip here, because... because the University would know that she knew..."

She swallowed, "You hope... do you hope you might find some word of her, there?"

The tangent is hard to follow, she stammers through it, and clearly the last sentence is less a question for Charm then a deflection of her own thoughts. Her eyes burn, now, hot, with confused tears that won't quite fall.

When Charm begins to speak, unless she stops Minnie in some way, Minnie's eyes close for a moment, then reopen, and she speaks again, interrupting the old captain even, "Captain, if... Captain have you ever been in love? I... not as a scholar, I don't ask, to write it down, I..."

But she says nothing else, and does not even look at Charm, pale as a ghost. Her good hand goes to the neckline of her dress, to finger absently at the miza she keeps there in a hidden pocket, the one Charm herself gave her, many years ago. The broken hand, still unwrapped, lays slack. She stares it with an intentness that is difficult to unravel.

[Liminal]

"I don't know what I hope, Minnie, but I..." The old woman's answer was broken almost as soon as it began by Philomena's interruption.

Charm opened her mouth, closed it again, and took a halting breath. For a moment, it seemed almost as if she were going to chastize Philomena for the interruption, but when the Captain found her voice, it was low and quiet.

"No, I don't think so -- or at least not in the way that most people think about it. Joseph was a good man, and I respected him a lot, but I don't think I was ever in love with him -- and, to be fair, I don't know that he ever was with me. I've had friends like Hannah and Stephie, I've loved my daughter and my granddaughter, and I've held close to my memories of Kena, but there's never been anyone else. I grew up too early, Minnie, and I held my heart close. Maybe too close. Who can say?" Her face was worn and tired in the flickering lamplight.

"I don't know if I expect to find Kena, or any word of her. But I hope that maybe I can see what it was that she was seeing, that my time with her books and her memory won't have been entirely in vain. There's not much else that's interesting to me at this point, or at least not interesting enough to seem like a good reason to stay alive." A self-deprecating half-smile played at the corners of her mouth.

"But Minnie -- " Her voice was now unexpectedly serious. " -- Minnie, if I go, I have to leave custody of her papers with someone, someone who will respect them. Someone who's maybe Qalayan enough to figure them out, or at least understand their significance. By Lhex's Office, I'd like to leave my own papers, as unimportant as they are, to someone like that."

She looked directly at Philomena. "To someone like you."

[Philomena]

Charm's words clearly had an effect on Minnie, all of them. But then, with all people, there is a sort of emotional event horizon, beyond which the mind disconnects from the body, and leaves the face untouched. Minnie sat when Charm finished, keeping eye contact with the woman. She was crying now, and her brow wrinkled through an incomprehensible war of two emotional poles. Fear, shock, honor, love, most of all love, these stood on one side, and on the other... it is love too, though not for Charm. A different sort of love, bleaker, less immediate, empty and hollow and with a touch of hopelessness. Almost.... almost a resentment to it. In this, she sat still and quiet for a moment, and in that moment, a great deal changed, not dramatically, not even, perhaps visibly at first, simply quietly. Irrevocably. With a gentle finality. The bleakness lost its resentment, a humility ran through her eyes and set it gently in its bed, and drew teh honor and love foremost. And Minnie, then, ceased being the child that fetishized over a copper penny, with Charm, and became, instead, a woman. A professor. The piece of her that was the Qalayan took hold, and... to call anything grace in Minnie's carriage is perhaps unexpected, but there is, to her crabbed hands and narrow-nosed birdy face, a certain grace, a sort of divine grace, the grace, perhaps, simply of a supplicant. The slow, quiet grace of Qalaya, distilled imperfectly into a pudgy, tiny human woman's lips.

She closed her eyes, once, and opened them again, and when she spoke, the nasality of her child-voice faded, perceptibly, and the whistling alto of her mother-voice took hold instead, "I will keep them, Charm Wright. I could say it is a duty, but it is an honor more than that. I would... ask you, if you would, to keep your diary through this season, until the day you leave, the very day, please. I will come to the docks, and see you off. I will come to the docks, and bring you a new journal to keep the journey on, I... I would like to do that. And then, even if that book never returns to Zeltiva, we will have that, we will have you right up until you push from the wharves. That will be enough. I wish... I wish people to remember you, Charm Wright. To read you, if you understand, what that word means to me."

She thought for a second over this request, her mouth still open as if to continue. Then she shuts, it and nods, decidedly, reaching into her bag, to draw out a few sheets of loose parchment, to lay them on the table, wordlessly.