Only so many people can need you

[Emily] There is a place in the forest. There is a place in the forest where the black paths kiss. They kiss, and turn away, like lovers, like lovers spurned, like lovers parting, parting but ever yet intertwined. There is a place in the forest where the black paths kiss, and the leaf litter is a carpet of wonders, and the frost crackles new and bright each morning, and the river is side-long, and slow, and mosies its way alongside the banks. There is a place, and the water is thick with chill, and it is slow, and slowing, and sliding toward freezing a little more with each moonrise and each sunset.

And at this place, this little hollow between lips, where fingers grasp and hold tight, this place that is a moment, this moment that is a place, there in the hushed and quiet of it all is a tree, a fallen oak, a sleeping King. He slumbers with an arm cast upwards, like a flagpole, like a coatrack, like an uncomfortable back to a throne of kings (for a King of thorns?). And there are places, here, along his armour of bark, where the black-scorch remains and tells tale of his falling. And there are places, here, where the white wood shows through, like whittled down ribs, like bone-bright.

There is a blush-red, a blood-red, a crimson and gold and tawny color to the world, and it is threaded through with the feeling of Sanctuary, with the cry of Loneliness, and this is the place where the Orphan and the Singer and the Hermetic have made their Court.

There is a box in the belly of the beast of a tree. A heart box. Emily does not draw it out to see what new things rest inside it. What secrets have been shared in her too-long absence. She rests there, with her legs crossed before her, and her arms across her middle, and her head slightly bowed. There's a dark blood-crimson-red scarf around her neck, the pale of an ivory sweater, the deep blue of her jeans and the black of her her leather jacket. She is a smudge, a shadow, a contained bit of brilliance in the mid-morning light. Her messenger bag rests beside her feet, and there are gifts there, as is their custom.

She waits, still and quiet. And keeping still is harder than keeping quiet.

[Ashley] Of course Hunger would find this hollow, tearing along the dark paths to the place where they meet and intertwine, settling into that space like she's meant to be there. Like those paths long to push closer together, pull until they are one, and that longing makes the space between all the more prominent. Emily can feel her approach long before she has arrived in the Court.

Her cheeks and nose have been bitten red, making the blue of her eyes stand out stark and sharp in the middle of her face. Her cargo jacket is buttoned up, the collar flung up around her neck like a gorget to deflect the wind. Her hands are in her pockets; her left arm she holds a little stiffly, and she's ginger of her movements. Her messenger bag, too, has found a place to hang over her shoulder.

Fortunately, Ashley does not have to keep still, as Emily has on occasion been accurate in her judgment about the Hermetic's inability to do so. There's an energy in her step, though she hasn't quite broken into a full run.

Ashley arrives in the Court around the side of the fallen oak, and with some effort pulls herself up to perch along his ribs. Her shoes are the color of her flushed skin, the color of the maple leaves that have fallen to the ground like a carpet rolled out to welcome the King that now lies among them. "Hey, Emily," she says, as though the Singer wouldn't have already noticed her approach, or the noise she made in scrabbling over the tree's bark.

[Emily] And it is, in many ways, like they are closer to their truest selves here. Here, Hunger, and there, Grace, sitting by the riverside, wearing the road dirt of the black paths on their soles, wrapped up in the loneliness and the wonder and the waiting. Emily glances over when the noise of Ashley's footfalls fills the Court with the crunch of dried leaves and the snap of twigs. She lifts one hand to wave. Her cheeks are pinked, her nose touched with the chill. She's paler now for all the distance Autumn has put between this place and Summer.

Emily vaguely remembers early Summer. Maybe that's why she hasn't spent much time out here since the Apple Book and all of the goodbyes. Even the Apple Book seems quite a long time ago, now. The year pulls like taffy, shiny and sinuous and oh-so-inconstant when viewed from the right angles.

"Hail," she says, keeping the customs though Candle, that Brilliance, is not with them today. "And well met." The Rowan-haired other is absent, and Emily does not ask after her. She is not ready to add Kage to the list of people who have gone, have taken their paths to new terminals, have left.

"I brought clementines and dark chocolates," she tells Ashley, but does not bend to rescue her messenger bag from its place beside the King. She is not hungry just now. Even sharing a seat with Hunger, Emily is not hungry just now.

"I haven't been out this way in awhile," she observes. Her voice shapes the words like wonder, leaves them to hang in the brisk air like baubles, like orbs, thought-things, idle and fragile.

[Ashley] Ashley doesn't mention Kage either. The Orphan's absence weighs on her in a way she doesn't want to admit; when Kage is around, she is more stable, she is less apt to draw away into herself and present an air of callous stoicism to the rest of the world. Ashley doesn't even like to think that she needed Daiyu, who is gone. It's difficult for her to consciously accept that others give her things she couldn't simply Will herself, even if some level of her has done so, even if it's proven to be true time and again, even if it was a large part of how she overcame her Jhor taint.

So she doesn't allow herself to think of the last time she met Emily out here at the Court and that there was another with them. She'll get by on her own because she always has.

"I brought apples," she says. "And some tea. In a thermos. I hope you don't mind sharing." She hasn't had very many friends who were uncomfortable with the idea, but Emily strikes her as the sort who might be. Still: she withdraws the thermos from the bag and the liquid is still warm within, enough to breathe steam into the air when the cap is unscrewed.

"I come out here a lot," she says, with a look toward the hollow in which the heart box resides. She was here quite a few times last month. "More people are coming."

[Emily] Ashley brings out her gifts and so, in keeping, Emily must as well. She gathers the small orange orbs from her messenger bag, withdraws a small clear cube filled with gaily wrapped chocolates, and sets them all carefully beside her on the tree's breadth. It takes a moment to still them so that the fruits will not go rolling off, but they are not spherical; there is always some bit or oddity that can be used to stabilize them, and the girl is patient with this task.

"Oh?" she asks, as if she is not immediately sure whether she likes the idea of more people coming out this way. It takes the Court away from being their secret clubhouse; it shares the Sanctuary with more people. After a moment's pause, she settles on the thought that it is a good thing, but also that she will be less freely giving of her thoughts with the heart-box. It's one thing to give anonymously, or to be known in the tightest circle of friends. It would be another, say, to share the loneliness she's felt with the community at large.

Emily still feels apart from most of them, after nearly a year.

"Maybe it's good for more of us to stretch our legs, now and then," she says, for not everyone can stride as Ashley does. Most must made the arduous walk up the black paths, and time their excursion so as not to be left in the woods in cold of night. The drive is sizable. It is a pilgrimage, truly, not just a quick out-and-back outing.

"I spoke to Wharil," she says. It's light. There's nothing yet to color this as worrisome, save that which she would be speaking to Wharil about. So when Ashley offers her the thermos, she takes it and drinks. Emily does not mind sharing, not with Ashley, not here. "He'd like to go see Nico in hospital."

[Ashley] Ashley tucks her legs up against her chest while she sits there on the ribs of the King, almost catlike (if battered and scarred - a tattered one from some dark alley, without Jarod's sleek grace). Her messenger bag comes to rest on the trunk next to her, though she doesn't lift the strap from her shoulder.

"Kage showed Nathan where it is," she says, "and I met him here. He gave me chocolate." Maybe she means that Nathan is observing the courtesies of the place too, bearing gifts. Maybe an offering of food is just all it takes to kindly dispose her toward someone. "And I've met a Verbena out here a couple of times. No one anyone else knows, I don't think." And Kage, of course.

Ashley takes a sip from the thermos after Emily takes that initial drink. There's something odd that follows: she tips it a bit after the metal lip of the thermos has kissed her own, lets a bit of amber liquid arc toward the ground and splash among the leaves. There's no explanation before she recaps it; it seems to have been done without thinking.

"Israel and I are going to go see him, too," she says. "I'm sure Wharil can give him some good advice, if he does have Jhor." There's nothing in Emily's voice that suggests that this is worrisome; Ashley does not treat it as such, either. Wharil is a Euthanatos, and this is his job.

[Emily] Emily watches the splash of liquid, but doesn't comment. It is out of place with what she understands of Ashley, and it doesn't follow the usual rituals she has seen for honoring ancestors or spirits. She used her thumb to trace away any lingering drips before drinking, and does not comment on the little digression.

"I don't know how up for conversation he'll be," Emily says, and there's the weight of memory behind it to lend a little gravity. "He's pretty seriously hurt, and the energy for healing, at that point, is pretty much all one can manage. But maybe Owen will be there, and you can speak wit him."

She passes the thermos back, again, and takes up one of the small citrus. Emily works the peel with deft fingers as they talk.

"Ashley, I noticed something, in talking with Wharil, and maybe this isn't the best time to bring it up, but he seems withdrawn. We don't see much of each other, he and I, but he's different even since the last Emissary meeting. It's been a trying year, I know, but there seems to be little left of the man I met so shortly after waking up. Do you think he is alright?" she asks.

She offers Ashley half of the clementine she's finished peeling. Emily stacks the pieces of rind against her side on the tree trunk. She will carry them out with her when they leave.

[Ashley] Ashley, too, picks up one of the oranges and begins to peel it, trying to tear it away in a spiral, so that it stays all in one piece. She looks rather intently at the rind, holding it in both hands in order to accomplish this. Some of the deftness has, at long last, returned to her fingers though, and she's had more practice with fine movement lately than she's had in the past ten years.

"We'll see what we can do," she says. "Israel just wants to look at him, I think, but he doesn't know her. He trusts me." Her statement of this is flat: a fact. Ashley's manner is often so blunt and lacking in deception that it can be easy to forget that she's calculating, makes these easy assessments on some instinctive level.

When Wharil's name surfaces again she lets out a little sigh, pausing in the tearing away of the orange's outer shell to look up and over at the Singer. After a moment she looks back at the orb in her hands and returns to the task.

"I know," she says after a moment. "He's been getting worse and worse since last winter. Kind of keeping to himself." What she says is offered up with hesitation, because really, it's Wharil's to tell - except that she knows that he won't. "He was tested this summer for admittance to the Albireo, and he failed. They wanted him to come forward and involve himself in spite of a threat to his life, and he hid himself away while everything was going on and ignored the Nephandi to try to pursue the threat. So they judged him unfit."

Her tone is a bit tense, but it's hard to judge what, exactly, that tension comes from. "He took it pretty hard and I've only seen him once since, when I helped bring Gregor back, and he looked like shit. I want to help him but he won't let me."

[Emily] "As long as you know."

Emily lets that hang there, between them, as she segments the small fruit and places one wedge between her teeth. She chews slowly, swallows down the sweet-tart juice, stares out across the water for awhile.

"He asked me how I feel about all of this, and I didn't answer. Since then I've thought that maybe I should have. He liked to teach, this time last year. Maybe I should have let him listen, even if I didn't want to speak. It could be good for him, maybe, helping with Nico. Or it could make it all worse."

She glances over to Ashley out of the corner of her eye. Just for a moment. Not quite furtive, but not openly either.

"Being Awake is a little like being drunk, isn't it? Takes all the usual bother of being, and cranks it up to eleven. Same with the good times, but I was never good at this comforter and confidante thing to begin with."

[Ashley] "You aren't obligated to offer him anything," Ashley says, and it's neither an agreement or a disagreement. Simply: if Emily judged it worthwhile to allow Wharil to listen, to trade her own comfort for something that she thought might help the man for whatever reason, she should; if she doesn't, she shouldn't. To Ashley things are often just this straightforward (or maybe she just wishes they were, and there's a willfulness to her wishing.)

The rind of the orange finally peels away as one whole, and she looks at the little spiral in her hand before letting it too fall to the ground. She pulls away any flakes left from the inside of the peel before breaking the sphere apart into two halves, tearing away the spongy core.

Ashley isn't looking at her when she glances in the Hermetic's direction. Her eyes are directed outward, toward the wood. They don't seem to be focused on anything in particular.

After she's raised one of the fragments of orange to her mouth and mashed it between her tongue and her upper palate, letting the juice roll over the surface of her tongue and down her throat. She crunches what remains of the pulp and then swallows, letting a huff of air through her nostrils.

"I've never been good at it either," she says, "but you sort of have to make sure everybody holds together. People like us get to be a liability if we fall apart. It's just smart to keep an eye on everyone else, you know?" A beat, because to some extent it echoes Hannibal's words to her in February, and Ashley is speaking of these things the way she would to another Hermetic.

She peels another slice away and raises it to her lips without eating it. "It's hard. Knowing when you're helping someone and when you're enabling weakness and hurting them."

[Emily] Ashley talks to Emily like she might another Hermetic. Emily talks to Ashley like she might another Singer. There is a friendship that underlies these conversations, and maybe that's where it comes from, the comraderie across Traditional lines. It must help, in some ways, that Ashley met Emily when she was yet an Orphan. As if being an Orphan was a thing she had transcended, which is not entirely true; this is not quite how Emily sees it.

She sighs a little.

"So you're holding your cabal together, and I'm trying to hold mine together. How about, when it all gets to be too much, we find each other and go do something fun? Like football, or going away for a few days, or staging a snowball fight on the Chantry lawn. Not as a responsibility but as a vent of sorts. More's the better of we can get some of the others to go, but if not... Well, I'd like to have a partner in crime who won't whinge about whether I've a sweater on or not."

Her smile crooks, lopsidedly, for a moment.

"I don't know how to handle Owen, just now," she tells Ashley plainly. "I understand why he went after Nico; I'm grateful that he did, with all that happened to them. I'm thankful that he's alive and well. I'm worried about this Jhor taint, and I want to help, but I also don't know where I stand. And it's the wrong time to ask. And I can deal with it, put all of what I'm feeling aside and just handle the situation for what it is, but I'm not sure that what I've felt for him would survive that sort of compartmentalization. And if it doesn't, then I do not want you to hold me to what I said in the Chantry that night, about telling him about the Labyrinth. He has enough to shoulder just now. He doesn't need anything more."

[Ashley] Ashley's brow furrows when Emily says that they're both holding their respective cabals together; Ashley has more than a little frustration when it comes to the Society. When it comes to what she wants from a cabal and the reality of the thing. When it comes to what she's had and what she'd hoped this one would be. Wharil, in particular, is a sticking point: this is not that well hidden.

"I think that sounds like a good idea," she says. "We should keep doing the football. I used to...I used to do things like that a lot, with Justine and Bran." There's no crooked smile in return, just a pensive sort of quiet that deepens as she finally pops the segment of orange into her mouth, as she listens to Emily talk about Owen.

She isn't sure at first what Emily is confiding. Whether she just needs to voice her thoughts and wants someone to receive them, or whether it's leading into something (though she soon figures it out, when Emily brings up that night after the Labyrinth.) It causes her a moment of disquiet: what if Emily expects her to reciprocate in kind?

"I'm not sure it'll help him if you just kind of put it all aside," Ashley says. "I mean, overcoming Jhor is about living. You're doing both of you a disservice by not figuring that kind of thing out, even if it'll cause trouble. I don't mean just with what happened in Prague. I mean just...you should figure things out. Being a martyr isn't going to be helpful to either of you."

[Emily] "I don't know, Ashley," she says, but there's still a detached fondness in her voice. She still has feelings for the other Singer, has hopes however thing they're drawn just now. In the heart-box there's a small scrape of paper that is quickly turning dry with age. It said, once and they were happy for awhile. Emily's thought of taking it away, but it seems wrong, somehow, to rescind a gift.

"I wanted him to come back, but maybe that was just me. He was here for awhile, before I found him at Nico's bedside in hospital. Maybe for a week or more, and he didn't say anything. He didn't come by. I don't think he wanted to see me, and now he'll be rightfully busy with seeing after Nico. And we'll be all tangled up in sorting out his Jhor. It doesn't leave space for figuring out the rest of it, and I don't just mean Prague. With what you said they've been through, I do not want him knowing about that, just now. It can wait. It is not as urgent, or as immediate."

She pulls off another small wedge of orange.

"It was a long time ago, and there are things right now that need seeing to. There are important things that need seeing to. He needs to get better, and Nico needs his friendship. I just, I don't think that I fit into that as more than support staff or someone to run errands and marshal resources."

Instead of eating the little wedge, Emily flings it out of the clearing with a note of exasperation.

"Though I'm getting better at running errands and marshaling resources. This Emissary thing comes in handy now and then." She offers Ashley a weak smile, then pulls of a wedge to eat.

[Ashley] Whatever it was that Emily said there at the end makes Ashley roll her eyes, and the Hermetic's gaze suddenly snaps in her direction. "Oh, for fuck's sake," she says. "If you put off ignoring what you want because there's some problem to deal with, do you really think there's ever going to be a time when it's right? Jhor isn't something you get over fast, and it's something you get over by living. Fighting and figuring out where things are and progressing a relationship - those are all things that are going to be good for him."

Ashley pulls another wedge off of the orange and puts it in her mouth, chomping down on it viciously. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Emily. Either talk to him or don't and write him off, but the martyr attitude really doesn't suit you. But if I were Owen I'd be pissed that you were just kind of assuming what I thought, or wanted."

Should the Singer stay long enough to hear the tirade, she'll stay long enough to see Ashley's expression soften, the tension along her shoulders relax. "If you're just going to decide that you're here to run errands, why the hell did you wait?"

[Emily] "If you were Owen and you were pissed at me for assuming what you thought, then I'd tell you you could always have damned well told me for yourself," she snaps, right back. Emily slides off the fallen king and back to standing, keeps that momentum going as she stoops to pick up her messenger bag. The clementines go tumbling. The little box of chocolates falls, breaks up, and spill across the carpet of leaves.

"For once," she tells the Tytalan, "I wanted to have something that wasn't just about fucking, or whatever the hell happens after that when you both know you haven't any time at all. Don't you give me shit for the one time I have ever taken things slowly enough to try and figure them out."

There is something hurt and raw and angry in what she tells Ashley, but there are no tears. And the flicker of anger in her eyes does not lead all the way back to her soul. They're cut off, closeted, even in this.

"And no, I will not take all of this stupid insecurity and worry to his doorstep when his best friend, the person who is like his family, could die in that hospital. He has already lost a sibling, Ashley. God damnit, I am not going to give him more to deal with right now. Not on top of that. No matter how hurt or scared I feel about any of this."

There is a line between what Emily will and will not do, just now. Perhaps it's been drawn in the worst place possible. Perhaps it hurts her more than it needs to. But it's firm, and she believes it's there for the right reasons.

"Only so many people can need you at any given moment," she says, and the heat is falling away from her voice now. Emily doesn't think her need, or want, is as important as the other claims to the Singer just now. It's pragmatism, not martyrdom.

If the Adept doesn't try to stop her, she'll step back out of the Court and turn to leave.

[Ashley] "That's not what I'm giving you shit for," is all Ashley says to those raw and angry words. There's some contained ire in her own voice, a hot undercurrent that sparks on its way out of her mouth, as though she had more to say but can't find the words. Or has simply judged them to be untruths, not something she wants to spin into the physical.

The parting shot just draws a long look and a hard set to the Hermetic's jaw. There is no response, just something hurt and angry and, at this very moment, utterly impotent: there is nothing she can do to make this better. Whatever her thoughts are, though, she doesn't give them voice.

There's no call that follows Emily on her way out of the Court.

Ashley watches the Singer's dark curls as they grow distant and eventually merge into the dark path. She pulls another of the segments off the orange. There's a vicious bite into the flesh of it, a click of her teeth, and maybe it's just her, but this piece tastes a little bitter.