IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME -
the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
At his expression – and his greeting – Locust snorts. Better, she supposes, that his disdain is obvious, and it has been obvious since she met him. (It isn’t as though she feels any differently.) On the sea, the worst kind of crew that you can have is a crew that you do not know. Better a group of traitors or mutineers, for you know that they will be traitors and mutineers, and you can plan accordingly; between a man like Vercingtorix and a man who seemed loyal, she would choose Vercingtorix every time. She knew exactly what he wanted from her, and he knew exactly what she wanted from him. The rest was irrelevant.
Death is always painful, he says, with a smile and a tone that strikes her as patronizing. The response strikes her as foolish. Maybe the question was, too – what did it matter if it was painful or not? Dead was dead was dead, and if it meant that he would be given no more opportunities to turn people against their will, all the better. It wasn’t as though their singular interaction, on the shores of that strange island, had been enough to grow a grudge. (She does wonder what the kelpie did to make Vercingtorix kill him in such a way that she’d already heard about it – what was the point in making a statement of his death?) But she does want to know his answer, and not for anything good. Grim self-satisfaction, at best, and something worse, darker and deeper and sharper, at worst.
“How would you or I know that?” Locust knows enough about pain to know that it only matters if it persists. Death is death; it is finite, not continuous, and that, she suspects, is why it is sometimes considered preferable to living. She tosses her head, looking back at the crates. She hopes it was quick. But she knows, of course, that it wasn’t, that he is too full of something with just as sharp of teeth as a kelpie’s to ever do it quick, and at least she can take some small solace in feeling like she is better than him over it. She might cut them up for parts, but she has never been able to stomach drawing out the kill. Even for the ones she’s hated the most. Perhaps, she thinks, perhaps if she ever finds that opalescent little fish who stole her daughter away from her – perhaps she would hate that one enough to make it painful.
(That was the one she wanted to ruin. All the others were only symptoms; but that little, pale fish with the scales that gleamed every shade of the rainbow, even in storm-dark waters, that was the one who’d ruined her. All of the others were pitiful grasping at something she couldn’t quite touch.)
She still isn’t looking at him. “Why’d you go after him, anyways?” She couldn’t complain, no matter the answer. The grey was dangerous, and it was better for everyone that he was dead, and Vercingtorix hated kelpies as much as she did. Still, he was hardly charitable – and still, she couldn’t think of a good reason why she’d heard about the death of one particular kelpie when they seemed to be showing up in Novus in droves lately.
He asks her if she’s leaving, gesturing towards the crates. Locust shakes her head, a thick strand of her white hair falling loose from its pearl-wrapped bounds and threatening to fall into her eyes. (She tucks it back up absently with a flick of her telekinesis.) “Only for Solterra,” she says, simply, tracing his stare towards the crates, “and not for long. Just making some deliveries.” And then she is looking at him again, ocean-dark eyes narrowing by fractions. “Why? Trying to go somewhere, Vercingtorix?” He’d hardly seek her out because he wanted to – he disdained her, and she disdained him, and that was fine with Locust -, so his presence here probably meant that he needed something.
Locust couldn’t say why he trusted her ship to carry him where he needed to go; his dislike for her was clear enough, and a pirate was hardly trustworthy company besides. Perhaps it was simply their shared hatred of kelpies, shallow as it was – a murderer finding company with a fellow murderer. (Hunter would be kinder, but Locust was neither naïve nor foolish enough to delude herself into believing herself to simply be a hunter in any convincing manner.) Still, so long as he needed her, she could tolerate him. So long as he paid. And so long as he helped her deal with any sort of trouble they met along the way.
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"Speech!" ||
