Post by Liessel on Apr 2, 2024 12:39:20 GMT -5
They were inside a corkscrew, and a tight one.
When they left the dimness of the church behind, they would for a moment be in shadow. Slowly, as eyes adjusted, a soft ability to see took over. It was so gentle, that it was a stretch to call it a glow. It was a light that threw no shadows--so was it light? Liessel would soon realize that she could rely upon it.
And unless she stopped, or Adam did, they would find their descent a very long one. Around and around and around; down and down and down.
The darkness seemed never ending, it went on and on and her steps were blind and clumsy until she started seeing edges of the next stair she was stepping down onto. At first, she thought it was her eyes adjusting, but there was better definition for her and she could see slightly more than she would have thought in a place so tight and dim.
Her steps became less cautious without the need to find the next step with her foot before committing her weight to it, but she did not quicken her pace. The further down they went, the easier it was to take the next step, however by the time they reached the bottom Liessel had slowed considerably.
"Be very careful with Missus White."
Adam's whisper was barely that.
In any other space but one so cramped as this, with them so close as they cautiously made their way down, it might not have been heard at all. It was to whispering what Liessel's contact was to touch.
"Don't say too much."
It did strike him as odd that he'd felt the need to say that, when she was the one who'd come with fresh news. But it only struck him thus after it was too late to stop the warning.
Liessel drew in a breath. In that soft light her shoulders rose with it and then dropped as she slowly let go of her exhale.
She heard. Adam's warning had been like the brush of touch. In that close space, it was caught like the flutter of a breeze, "I will remember," She promised him just as quietly, "Be cautious as well, Mister Larrow, whatever your business with her may be."
"I will."
She'd asked him to talk to her as they went down, and as he sensed she was disinclined toward the topic of caution and Missus White, he wracked his brains to come up with something else. If he could hatch one single thought in that tight, endless turn, he'd be grateful for the distraction.
It was not so easy to make conversation unrelated to where they were, he found.
Every topic felt thin.
He went with the very first thing that he came across that felt fractionally less thin.
"Temmis wants to teach your father chess, so he'll have someone to play against."
Liessel had settled into the same kind of quiet for a moment, wracking her brain for something to talk about other than what was ahead of them. Something to take the shift away from the steep, slow descent.
What she settled on, what was easy enough to pull from her thoughts as she took the stairs by the light of that all too gentle glow, was a story. She opened her mouth, drawing in a breath only for that to be sidetracked slightly as Adam beat her to it.
"Chess?" She wound up asking, not daring to throw a look back over her shoulder like she wanted to, "What does my father think about that? Has Temmis talked to him about it, yet?"
"He told me before I went down to find the Dame, earlier," Adam told her, "so I don't think so. I think Temmis is worried that your father will get bored on the hill."
"I think it would be good for him," Liessel's small voice, to her, felt like it was echoing off the stone around them a little bit. She resisted the urge to quiet herself further because there was no way to stop and turn, there wasn't enough space to be able to look toward Adam and direct her voice there, not while they were still going down, "It would be a good way to get him active while he is still largely unable to move on his own. It would get him using his hands and arms, and thinking, at the very least."
"And Temmis is good at it," Adam said.
His voice, like Liessel's, was clamped in very close with them. This stairway had to worm down deep under the Tor. That is, of course, if Missus White's hollow was by any practical definition actually beneath Glastonbury Tor, and not someplace else entirely.
Adam remembered the exact neckache, this precise cramping, from when he'd come down this way the first time, and the second. And from when he and Aurelia had emerged, too. Not scraping his head on the sloping stone above him was as much a challenge as not imagining just how much weigh was atop them now. But the glow was with them and though he was one-eyed the challenge here did not lie in navigating anything treacherous.
At least not in the sense of his physical footing.
"Are you doing all right with this? It's like this all the way down. You'll smell water before anything else changes."
And Temmis is good at it.
Liessel felt herself smile, and then she felt that drift away as Adam brought attention to where they were, and what they were doing. It was then, at that moment, that her hands had been shaking since they started their climb down. "I think so. If I were alone, I probably would not have gotten this far. I do not mind the depth, or the steepness. It would have the lack of light that would have turned me around."
"It doesn't affect you? You don't have light?" That startled him. He could see well for such a place.
"No, that is not what I meant. I can see, down here. Up there, when we started, I could not." She couldn't turn to face him, but she did turn her head toward her right shoulder just enough to barely catch sight of Adam's figure there behind her before she had to turn her head back and catch herself from miss-stepping on the next foot-drop down, "If I were alone, and doing this for the first time, I do not think I'd have been able to come this far."
He accepted that. This passage made lesser talk hard for him, he'd found, but thinking about her, about how this might have turned her back... "I think in some places I've seen with my friends of the Bells... that perhaps there's some test or trial in the form of them. --Nothing's like this, but you have to think... You can't be the only person in centuries to have thought about abandoning the descent. How many other supplicants or initiates started down this way... only to flee?"
"It certainly is a good test of courage," There was a little laugh, but it was not entirely amused, "and I can certainly understand how someone would turn back and forego the passage for the familiar. These other places you've been with your friends from The Bells -- why form something into a hidden test, or trial, if that is what they are? Is it to measure strength of heart and mind -- or maybe body and spirit?"
Sight for Sight.
Don't bring that here, Adam.
"That's the answer I would have given you then," he told her honestly.
How long? How long? How long?
"And maybe what you said is still right, even if what they're testing is your willingness to do things their way."
"Testing boundaries, then, as well as those other things: mind, body, heart and strength. I must admit, though I am sure it will come as no surprise, that I had never heard of such a thing before I came here -- to England, that is. Such tests -- we do not have them in Harroway. At least, I'd never encountered any."
"There are no secrets to be kept?" That was the context in which Adam Larrow understood such things.
Secrets, for those deemed worthy. Secrets, for those who reached mastery.
"There were plenty of secrets, but not of the type you speak of. Nothing at all like this. Our secrets were our history -- where we came from, and how we came to be there. The Surveyors were the keepers of them. They kept everything away from us, The People and Sisters alike. There was no attaining anything for The People. What could be gained was gained within the Sisters and the Surveyors. The Sisters were the voices, the link, to the Guardians. The Surveyors -- protected -- while we led and cared for The People."
Adam had heard some of that, but the blatant statement that there was no one who might have attained knowledge, who was not already in through the door, had not occurred to him in so many words before Liessel said it. Not even when the topics he'd heard now obviously, in retrospect, had hinted at precisely that. "I suppose... it could never be thus here," he said carefully, "... with a need to have others carry on the traditions. Even with long-lived friends like the Dame, an end would come one day."
He kept thinking he started to see the soft shift in the hue of the light, and he kept being wrong. He kept thinking the sound of their footfalls was different, but no. At least he remembered the same tricks being played by his mind when he'd been in here before.
But there--
Not suddenly, but within a turn and a half, there was a growing sense of blue along the walls. Nearly nothing at first, and cool after that, but there--yes--that warming aqua hint, as if they neared water flashing light toward the creamy stone of the corkscrew stair.
"Things are structured differently here," Liessel heard herself say. She'd given up on keeping her steps as soundless as possible some time ago. It was energy she might need ahead, and so she conserved what she could, "The traditions that have been shared and passed down, they are priceless. They are to be protected, and so they are freely given -- well, perhaps not so freely -- but their existence is preserved. For us, it was the Sisters who carried the larger burden of the traditions of my people. The People, themselves, celebrated them but it was always by looking to us as we handed them down, mother to first born daughter."
She found herself squinting in the dimness. There was a faint thread of blue spidering against the walls, like liquid reflecting light but was faint. She blinked, thinking perhaps the soft glow they'd been traveling in was taking its toll on her eyesight.
"-- You said there would be the smell of water, right?"
Liessel's question was answered as her own pace took her around the past turning, and at once fresh air was there with her, and after the final step her foot at last found floor. The tight confines of the stairs widened away at once and a wide chamber was revealed, drawn all in white stone and water.
The dance of the light off the water of the pool ahead of her was everywhere above her head, full of motion of that shifting blue-green.
There was room here, between the foot of the stair and the scalloped edges of the water. Room enough for many refugees. Liessel had heard the stories.
King Arthur had been in this room, when first Aurelia Dumitru had laid eyes on him.
There was just one other being in there now, and her eyes were already on Liessel.
They were pink, those eyes. The woman was white, with hair weighed down, draping across her shoulders and hiding her breasts and the rest of her. The white hair fanned out everywhere in the pool, floating, lazily reaching and curling on small ripples and lapping currents. The pool did not look deep, but in it her dimensions were entirely hidden.
Liessel had not realized that the movement of catching step after step had become automatic for her until she hit the last step, found floor, and scraped the sole of her boot against it with a slight jarring of her foot. There were no more stairs? There were no more stairs!
The end of that notion set in body deep as she looked around the almost cavernous room. She remembered what she had heard of the place, and she could imagine well, now that she was standing there, how so many people had fit.
Her eyes settled on the white woman standing in the water, even as she felt as if her heart had slowed several beats. Her head bowed low toward the pink-eyed lady and then she was shifting aside to give Adam some space to join her. That small shift came as she made the motion of hand to forehead, hand to heart, in the direction of the white-haired stranger.
There was something about this room they had come to. It niggled, like a faint itch.
Standing in the water? Was there any standing going on in that low pool? Impossible to know, but that was unmistakably Missus White, and if it was a truly shallow pool then she had to be seated in it.
Except that Liessel had heard part of the story, too, where other aspects of Missus White had been shared.
Adam was there, his breath catching softly at the sight of the woman, even though he'd been very close to her indeed once.
Missus White was covered in a delicate pink tracery of lines, from face to throat to the backs of her hands.
The room picked up her strong, patient voice, and so did the water, adding a resonance to it.
"You've brought the Pearl home."
What had she imagined of Missus White when she had been told those stories? Standing there, Liessel tried to remember what her previous idea of Missus White had been. Whatever it was, it was gone now but it hadn't been anywhere near what she was seeing. Of that, she was sure.
It was not a bad thing, but she did find herself recalling what Aurelia had told her. She had to brace that thought against the beauty she was seeing. There was danger here, and she needed to not forget that.
With that in mind, Liessel turned to catch a glimpse of Adam beside her to take him in. This was where it had happened for him -- where he had lost his eye to a pearl.
"No," Adam said firmly. He wanted it to be firm, at least. There was the slightest waver on the note at first before he caught it.
The woman in the pool did not rise and did not recede. She did not so much as arch an eyebrow. Openly, she looked him up and down, and then gave Liessel Erphale the same.
"Come forward," she said.
Their talk of tests of courage from moments ago was ringing through her head as she watched Adam give his answer. This was not something she would have ever chosen to put someone else through, it was not within the teachings of Eidole, but this was not her world and there were rules at play here with which she was not familiar. The most she could do for him now was stand there and let her presence be a reminder that she was with him, and he was with her.
When Missus White bade that they move forward, Liessel turned her attention back to the woman, reaching up to shift her bag around to her side again from where she'd settled it toward her back while taking her first step toward the scallop edged pool, and the ancient woman.
The light here was strange in the same way that it had been in the stair. It did not seem to emanate from anywhere in particular. The water reflected much, but the radiance remained unpinpointed. Perhaps it was the woman in the pool herself.
Her white hair and her white arms and face, were soft with it, lacking the sharp definition brought by shadows and sources, so that her beauty was akin to that of fog and mist. Yet the closer Liessel drew, the more her eyes might try to tell her that there was texture there to Missus White's body, not just smoothness.
It was something about the light, that niggling sensation told her as she drew closer to Missus White. But, then again, maybe not. Maybe it was the water. Maybe it was Missus White, herself, that was the cause of it. The feeling itched within her mind. It wriggled like a worm trying to bury itself in soil. But what did it mean?
Liessel couldn't tell. Her senses were too preoccupied with trying to pick up on the things she looked for first when meeting new people. But the substance of this woman was not at all like anything she'd seen before.
Beneath all of that adjusting, beneath the attempt at trying to see Missus White beyond the form she saw standing there, Liessel heard herself say, "Blessings be upon you, Lady."
Missus White's smile came slowly. "Whose blessings?"
The energy here was like that of the spring, like that of the Fens, as if these buzzes, these hums, these sideways feelings were all one and the same family.
Perhaps that was what it was. That dizzying sense of the world around her. The heartbeat, the thrum, the body of power that pulsed through everything. Here, it was less of a discordant sensation than it had been in The Fens. It did not make her feel so ill, so knocked completely off her balance.
The feeling, as it had in the spring, did mute her voice a bit. It did make her feel as if she would have been better suited coming in her vestments than wearing what she was.
Her answer to Missus White took a moment, because her first inclination was one of habit. She was in the presence of someone far longer lived than she was, though, one who had seen more than what her young eyes had. The answer she gave, then, was, "The blessings of any who would be kind to favor you."
"How nonspecific," mused the woman in the pool.
Adam was there at Liessel's side as a presence, but for the moment it was Liessel who had Missus White's attention.
It was to Liessel that she said, "Come closer yet, that I might see your mark."
Come closer yet…
There was a great need to bite back the caution that flared up within her. She was close enough for her comfort, but distance like that was not going to get her answers. It would only be rude.
A glance was cast toward Adam, just brief and lasting only half a second before she shifted the weight of her bag again and stepped toward the edge of the water, "It is the mark of the Seven Sisters, a symbol that I serve the Guardians."
Adam glanced at Liessel and went with her, though he had not been bade thus. He stuck to her side. If Liessel was hiding her caution because it might be rude, he could be rude for both of them. What he did not do was interrupt. He stood there--really, what would he even do?--and watched, ready.
Missus White's eyes were on the little moon shape as Liessel approached her. "It is not your Guardians' blessings, then, that you offer?"
"They are included, certainly, but I have come to learn that there are many here, while in my land we have only The Guardians. I do not know which of them touches your heart, so I was attempting to be kind." Liessel told White, her voice barely loud enough to even cause so much as a ripple on the water that surrounded the woman she spoke to.
"Bear by mouth, bear by hand, bear by heart," said the woman in the pool, tilting her head very slowly to the other side, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Who are you, and why have you come to me?"
"My name," Liessel answered White after a breath, "Is Liessel Erphale. I have come because I have been told that you might know something of the past of my people, the people of Harroway."
"The Harrow Way?" Her eyes glittered as she leaned back slightly. "It has been long since I've heard that spoken."
"No, Lady," Liessel's correction was as gentle as her voice, "Not The Harrow Way. It is Harroway, that is the name of the village from which I come. While I believe there to be a connection between the two, and while there is proof of that connection, all I have is pieces that tie the two together."
Adam stood close enough to Liessel that when he nudged her with his arm it did not require an obvious motion from him.
At the same time, Missus White stirred the water slightly as she said, "I sense that you have a tale to tell."
"Not so much a tale," Liessel barely moved from the nudge that Adam had given her arm. The indication that she gave him was a slight dip of her chin. It could have been a nod, but it was slight, "But a list of names."
She knew the paper was likely soaked through from the journey through the spring, but she paused to undo the flap of her bag anyway to retrieve it. It was a good thing, she thought in that moment, that she hadn't brought that precious notebook that Gerold had given her. She had come with a new one for this, its binding untested as of yet.
"And I have brought you gifts." She added, tearing her eyes away from the work of undoing her bag's straps in order to look Missus White's way again.
Adam hadn't been sure she'd understood--she hadn't so much as looked at him--but he relaxed when he heard her transition to the gifts.
Missus White didn't react as much as he did, but a little expectant delight colored the way that she watched Liessel. She waited as if Liessel's tone promised that she was not finished.
Within moments of working with the damp fabric of her bag, Liessel had the flap open and was drawing from within a red apple, a green apple, and a pear with skin of brown while she glanced Adam's way with a silent thank you for his reminder, "It is my hope that you find these to your liking," She offered with a small smile, looking back toward White with the fruit balanced haphazardly in her small hands.
Missus White raised an arm from the water, a graceful hand at the end, her own hair hanging from her arm like a silver veil.
But she was too far from the edge to take the fruit.
A splash of water spiraled up from the edge of the pool, foaming tip spreading wide before Liessel.
Liessel watched the water rise in answer to Missus White's bidding. It made her think of her uncle who had carried the heat of Emburu within him. It made her think of the other Guardian touched souls. It made her think of Cyrus Singh, and Marnie, and those who had suffered under OLYMPUS.
It made her think of herself, who had more than once, recently, spoken of the water within her. Her affinity with Aquarren.
The fruit was placed, but before the water could recede Liessel reached back into her bag and plucked out the leaf she had brought as well. This she placed with the apples and the pear, "this," she said as she did so, "Is for the water."
It was a small and broad leaf, oval in shape and ended in a sharp tip with many little veins running out toward the edges of the leaf from the central vein that came from the leaf's stem. It was healthy, and dark green in color.
"Ah!" Clearly pleased by either the offerings or what Liessel had just added, Missus White drew her arm back toward her own breast. With the gesture came the water, though it receded, sliding apart at the base, becoming one with the pool again just as it bore the gifts to where Missus White's hands could take them up. At once, she brought them to her nose and inhaled.
Her smile spread. "They have the sun in them," she breathed happily. "And I feel your touch through them, upon them... and the world above."
She closed her eyes.
"And now I see your home."
When they left the dimness of the church behind, they would for a moment be in shadow. Slowly, as eyes adjusted, a soft ability to see took over. It was so gentle, that it was a stretch to call it a glow. It was a light that threw no shadows--so was it light? Liessel would soon realize that she could rely upon it.
And unless she stopped, or Adam did, they would find their descent a very long one. Around and around and around; down and down and down.
The darkness seemed never ending, it went on and on and her steps were blind and clumsy until she started seeing edges of the next stair she was stepping down onto. At first, she thought it was her eyes adjusting, but there was better definition for her and she could see slightly more than she would have thought in a place so tight and dim.
Her steps became less cautious without the need to find the next step with her foot before committing her weight to it, but she did not quicken her pace. The further down they went, the easier it was to take the next step, however by the time they reached the bottom Liessel had slowed considerably.
"Be very careful with Missus White."
Adam's whisper was barely that.
In any other space but one so cramped as this, with them so close as they cautiously made their way down, it might not have been heard at all. It was to whispering what Liessel's contact was to touch.
"Don't say too much."
It did strike him as odd that he'd felt the need to say that, when she was the one who'd come with fresh news. But it only struck him thus after it was too late to stop the warning.
Liessel drew in a breath. In that soft light her shoulders rose with it and then dropped as she slowly let go of her exhale.
She heard. Adam's warning had been like the brush of touch. In that close space, it was caught like the flutter of a breeze, "I will remember," She promised him just as quietly, "Be cautious as well, Mister Larrow, whatever your business with her may be."
"I will."
She'd asked him to talk to her as they went down, and as he sensed she was disinclined toward the topic of caution and Missus White, he wracked his brains to come up with something else. If he could hatch one single thought in that tight, endless turn, he'd be grateful for the distraction.
It was not so easy to make conversation unrelated to where they were, he found.
Every topic felt thin.
He went with the very first thing that he came across that felt fractionally less thin.
"Temmis wants to teach your father chess, so he'll have someone to play against."
Liessel had settled into the same kind of quiet for a moment, wracking her brain for something to talk about other than what was ahead of them. Something to take the shift away from the steep, slow descent.
What she settled on, what was easy enough to pull from her thoughts as she took the stairs by the light of that all too gentle glow, was a story. She opened her mouth, drawing in a breath only for that to be sidetracked slightly as Adam beat her to it.
"Chess?" She wound up asking, not daring to throw a look back over her shoulder like she wanted to, "What does my father think about that? Has Temmis talked to him about it, yet?"
"He told me before I went down to find the Dame, earlier," Adam told her, "so I don't think so. I think Temmis is worried that your father will get bored on the hill."
"I think it would be good for him," Liessel's small voice, to her, felt like it was echoing off the stone around them a little bit. She resisted the urge to quiet herself further because there was no way to stop and turn, there wasn't enough space to be able to look toward Adam and direct her voice there, not while they were still going down, "It would be a good way to get him active while he is still largely unable to move on his own. It would get him using his hands and arms, and thinking, at the very least."
"And Temmis is good at it," Adam said.
His voice, like Liessel's, was clamped in very close with them. This stairway had to worm down deep under the Tor. That is, of course, if Missus White's hollow was by any practical definition actually beneath Glastonbury Tor, and not someplace else entirely.
Adam remembered the exact neckache, this precise cramping, from when he'd come down this way the first time, and the second. And from when he and Aurelia had emerged, too. Not scraping his head on the sloping stone above him was as much a challenge as not imagining just how much weigh was atop them now. But the glow was with them and though he was one-eyed the challenge here did not lie in navigating anything treacherous.
At least not in the sense of his physical footing.
"Are you doing all right with this? It's like this all the way down. You'll smell water before anything else changes."
And Temmis is good at it.
Liessel felt herself smile, and then she felt that drift away as Adam brought attention to where they were, and what they were doing. It was then, at that moment, that her hands had been shaking since they started their climb down. "I think so. If I were alone, I probably would not have gotten this far. I do not mind the depth, or the steepness. It would have the lack of light that would have turned me around."
"It doesn't affect you? You don't have light?" That startled him. He could see well for such a place.
"No, that is not what I meant. I can see, down here. Up there, when we started, I could not." She couldn't turn to face him, but she did turn her head toward her right shoulder just enough to barely catch sight of Adam's figure there behind her before she had to turn her head back and catch herself from miss-stepping on the next foot-drop down, "If I were alone, and doing this for the first time, I do not think I'd have been able to come this far."
He accepted that. This passage made lesser talk hard for him, he'd found, but thinking about her, about how this might have turned her back... "I think in some places I've seen with my friends of the Bells... that perhaps there's some test or trial in the form of them. --Nothing's like this, but you have to think... You can't be the only person in centuries to have thought about abandoning the descent. How many other supplicants or initiates started down this way... only to flee?"
"It certainly is a good test of courage," There was a little laugh, but it was not entirely amused, "and I can certainly understand how someone would turn back and forego the passage for the familiar. These other places you've been with your friends from The Bells -- why form something into a hidden test, or trial, if that is what they are? Is it to measure strength of heart and mind -- or maybe body and spirit?"
Sight for Sight.
Don't bring that here, Adam.
"That's the answer I would have given you then," he told her honestly.
How long? How long? How long?
"And maybe what you said is still right, even if what they're testing is your willingness to do things their way."
"Testing boundaries, then, as well as those other things: mind, body, heart and strength. I must admit, though I am sure it will come as no surprise, that I had never heard of such a thing before I came here -- to England, that is. Such tests -- we do not have them in Harroway. At least, I'd never encountered any."
"There are no secrets to be kept?" That was the context in which Adam Larrow understood such things.
Secrets, for those deemed worthy. Secrets, for those who reached mastery.
"There were plenty of secrets, but not of the type you speak of. Nothing at all like this. Our secrets were our history -- where we came from, and how we came to be there. The Surveyors were the keepers of them. They kept everything away from us, The People and Sisters alike. There was no attaining anything for The People. What could be gained was gained within the Sisters and the Surveyors. The Sisters were the voices, the link, to the Guardians. The Surveyors -- protected -- while we led and cared for The People."
Adam had heard some of that, but the blatant statement that there was no one who might have attained knowledge, who was not already in through the door, had not occurred to him in so many words before Liessel said it. Not even when the topics he'd heard now obviously, in retrospect, had hinted at precisely that. "I suppose... it could never be thus here," he said carefully, "... with a need to have others carry on the traditions. Even with long-lived friends like the Dame, an end would come one day."
He kept thinking he started to see the soft shift in the hue of the light, and he kept being wrong. He kept thinking the sound of their footfalls was different, but no. At least he remembered the same tricks being played by his mind when he'd been in here before.
But there--
Not suddenly, but within a turn and a half, there was a growing sense of blue along the walls. Nearly nothing at first, and cool after that, but there--yes--that warming aqua hint, as if they neared water flashing light toward the creamy stone of the corkscrew stair.
"Things are structured differently here," Liessel heard herself say. She'd given up on keeping her steps as soundless as possible some time ago. It was energy she might need ahead, and so she conserved what she could, "The traditions that have been shared and passed down, they are priceless. They are to be protected, and so they are freely given -- well, perhaps not so freely -- but their existence is preserved. For us, it was the Sisters who carried the larger burden of the traditions of my people. The People, themselves, celebrated them but it was always by looking to us as we handed them down, mother to first born daughter."
She found herself squinting in the dimness. There was a faint thread of blue spidering against the walls, like liquid reflecting light but was faint. She blinked, thinking perhaps the soft glow they'd been traveling in was taking its toll on her eyesight.
"-- You said there would be the smell of water, right?"
Liessel's question was answered as her own pace took her around the past turning, and at once fresh air was there with her, and after the final step her foot at last found floor. The tight confines of the stairs widened away at once and a wide chamber was revealed, drawn all in white stone and water.
The dance of the light off the water of the pool ahead of her was everywhere above her head, full of motion of that shifting blue-green.
There was room here, between the foot of the stair and the scalloped edges of the water. Room enough for many refugees. Liessel had heard the stories.
King Arthur had been in this room, when first Aurelia Dumitru had laid eyes on him.
There was just one other being in there now, and her eyes were already on Liessel.
They were pink, those eyes. The woman was white, with hair weighed down, draping across her shoulders and hiding her breasts and the rest of her. The white hair fanned out everywhere in the pool, floating, lazily reaching and curling on small ripples and lapping currents. The pool did not look deep, but in it her dimensions were entirely hidden.
Liessel had not realized that the movement of catching step after step had become automatic for her until she hit the last step, found floor, and scraped the sole of her boot against it with a slight jarring of her foot. There were no more stairs? There were no more stairs!
The end of that notion set in body deep as she looked around the almost cavernous room. She remembered what she had heard of the place, and she could imagine well, now that she was standing there, how so many people had fit.
Her eyes settled on the white woman standing in the water, even as she felt as if her heart had slowed several beats. Her head bowed low toward the pink-eyed lady and then she was shifting aside to give Adam some space to join her. That small shift came as she made the motion of hand to forehead, hand to heart, in the direction of the white-haired stranger.
There was something about this room they had come to. It niggled, like a faint itch.
Standing in the water? Was there any standing going on in that low pool? Impossible to know, but that was unmistakably Missus White, and if it was a truly shallow pool then she had to be seated in it.
Except that Liessel had heard part of the story, too, where other aspects of Missus White had been shared.
Adam was there, his breath catching softly at the sight of the woman, even though he'd been very close to her indeed once.
Missus White was covered in a delicate pink tracery of lines, from face to throat to the backs of her hands.
The room picked up her strong, patient voice, and so did the water, adding a resonance to it.
"You've brought the Pearl home."
What had she imagined of Missus White when she had been told those stories? Standing there, Liessel tried to remember what her previous idea of Missus White had been. Whatever it was, it was gone now but it hadn't been anywhere near what she was seeing. Of that, she was sure.
It was not a bad thing, but she did find herself recalling what Aurelia had told her. She had to brace that thought against the beauty she was seeing. There was danger here, and she needed to not forget that.
With that in mind, Liessel turned to catch a glimpse of Adam beside her to take him in. This was where it had happened for him -- where he had lost his eye to a pearl.
"No," Adam said firmly. He wanted it to be firm, at least. There was the slightest waver on the note at first before he caught it.
The woman in the pool did not rise and did not recede. She did not so much as arch an eyebrow. Openly, she looked him up and down, and then gave Liessel Erphale the same.
"Come forward," she said.
Their talk of tests of courage from moments ago was ringing through her head as she watched Adam give his answer. This was not something she would have ever chosen to put someone else through, it was not within the teachings of Eidole, but this was not her world and there were rules at play here with which she was not familiar. The most she could do for him now was stand there and let her presence be a reminder that she was with him, and he was with her.
When Missus White bade that they move forward, Liessel turned her attention back to the woman, reaching up to shift her bag around to her side again from where she'd settled it toward her back while taking her first step toward the scallop edged pool, and the ancient woman.
The light here was strange in the same way that it had been in the stair. It did not seem to emanate from anywhere in particular. The water reflected much, but the radiance remained unpinpointed. Perhaps it was the woman in the pool herself.
Her white hair and her white arms and face, were soft with it, lacking the sharp definition brought by shadows and sources, so that her beauty was akin to that of fog and mist. Yet the closer Liessel drew, the more her eyes might try to tell her that there was texture there to Missus White's body, not just smoothness.
It was something about the light, that niggling sensation told her as she drew closer to Missus White. But, then again, maybe not. Maybe it was the water. Maybe it was Missus White, herself, that was the cause of it. The feeling itched within her mind. It wriggled like a worm trying to bury itself in soil. But what did it mean?
Liessel couldn't tell. Her senses were too preoccupied with trying to pick up on the things she looked for first when meeting new people. But the substance of this woman was not at all like anything she'd seen before.
Beneath all of that adjusting, beneath the attempt at trying to see Missus White beyond the form she saw standing there, Liessel heard herself say, "Blessings be upon you, Lady."
Missus White's smile came slowly. "Whose blessings?"
The energy here was like that of the spring, like that of the Fens, as if these buzzes, these hums, these sideways feelings were all one and the same family.
Perhaps that was what it was. That dizzying sense of the world around her. The heartbeat, the thrum, the body of power that pulsed through everything. Here, it was less of a discordant sensation than it had been in The Fens. It did not make her feel so ill, so knocked completely off her balance.
The feeling, as it had in the spring, did mute her voice a bit. It did make her feel as if she would have been better suited coming in her vestments than wearing what she was.
Her answer to Missus White took a moment, because her first inclination was one of habit. She was in the presence of someone far longer lived than she was, though, one who had seen more than what her young eyes had. The answer she gave, then, was, "The blessings of any who would be kind to favor you."
"How nonspecific," mused the woman in the pool.
Adam was there at Liessel's side as a presence, but for the moment it was Liessel who had Missus White's attention.
It was to Liessel that she said, "Come closer yet, that I might see your mark."
Come closer yet…
There was a great need to bite back the caution that flared up within her. She was close enough for her comfort, but distance like that was not going to get her answers. It would only be rude.
A glance was cast toward Adam, just brief and lasting only half a second before she shifted the weight of her bag again and stepped toward the edge of the water, "It is the mark of the Seven Sisters, a symbol that I serve the Guardians."
Adam glanced at Liessel and went with her, though he had not been bade thus. He stuck to her side. If Liessel was hiding her caution because it might be rude, he could be rude for both of them. What he did not do was interrupt. He stood there--really, what would he even do?--and watched, ready.
Missus White's eyes were on the little moon shape as Liessel approached her. "It is not your Guardians' blessings, then, that you offer?"
"They are included, certainly, but I have come to learn that there are many here, while in my land we have only The Guardians. I do not know which of them touches your heart, so I was attempting to be kind." Liessel told White, her voice barely loud enough to even cause so much as a ripple on the water that surrounded the woman she spoke to.
"Bear by mouth, bear by hand, bear by heart," said the woman in the pool, tilting her head very slowly to the other side, eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "Who are you, and why have you come to me?"
"My name," Liessel answered White after a breath, "Is Liessel Erphale. I have come because I have been told that you might know something of the past of my people, the people of Harroway."
"The Harrow Way?" Her eyes glittered as she leaned back slightly. "It has been long since I've heard that spoken."
"No, Lady," Liessel's correction was as gentle as her voice, "Not The Harrow Way. It is Harroway, that is the name of the village from which I come. While I believe there to be a connection between the two, and while there is proof of that connection, all I have is pieces that tie the two together."
Adam stood close enough to Liessel that when he nudged her with his arm it did not require an obvious motion from him.
At the same time, Missus White stirred the water slightly as she said, "I sense that you have a tale to tell."
"Not so much a tale," Liessel barely moved from the nudge that Adam had given her arm. The indication that she gave him was a slight dip of her chin. It could have been a nod, but it was slight, "But a list of names."
She knew the paper was likely soaked through from the journey through the spring, but she paused to undo the flap of her bag anyway to retrieve it. It was a good thing, she thought in that moment, that she hadn't brought that precious notebook that Gerold had given her. She had come with a new one for this, its binding untested as of yet.
"And I have brought you gifts." She added, tearing her eyes away from the work of undoing her bag's straps in order to look Missus White's way again.
Adam hadn't been sure she'd understood--she hadn't so much as looked at him--but he relaxed when he heard her transition to the gifts.
Missus White didn't react as much as he did, but a little expectant delight colored the way that she watched Liessel. She waited as if Liessel's tone promised that she was not finished.
Within moments of working with the damp fabric of her bag, Liessel had the flap open and was drawing from within a red apple, a green apple, and a pear with skin of brown while she glanced Adam's way with a silent thank you for his reminder, "It is my hope that you find these to your liking," She offered with a small smile, looking back toward White with the fruit balanced haphazardly in her small hands.
Missus White raised an arm from the water, a graceful hand at the end, her own hair hanging from her arm like a silver veil.
But she was too far from the edge to take the fruit.
A splash of water spiraled up from the edge of the pool, foaming tip spreading wide before Liessel.
Liessel watched the water rise in answer to Missus White's bidding. It made her think of her uncle who had carried the heat of Emburu within him. It made her think of the other Guardian touched souls. It made her think of Cyrus Singh, and Marnie, and those who had suffered under OLYMPUS.
It made her think of herself, who had more than once, recently, spoken of the water within her. Her affinity with Aquarren.
The fruit was placed, but before the water could recede Liessel reached back into her bag and plucked out the leaf she had brought as well. This she placed with the apples and the pear, "this," she said as she did so, "Is for the water."
It was a small and broad leaf, oval in shape and ended in a sharp tip with many little veins running out toward the edges of the leaf from the central vein that came from the leaf's stem. It was healthy, and dark green in color.
"Ah!" Clearly pleased by either the offerings or what Liessel had just added, Missus White drew her arm back toward her own breast. With the gesture came the water, though it receded, sliding apart at the base, becoming one with the pool again just as it bore the gifts to where Missus White's hands could take them up. At once, she brought them to her nose and inhaled.
Her smile spread. "They have the sun in them," she breathed happily. "And I feel your touch through them, upon them... and the world above."
She closed her eyes.
"And now I see your home."