Ornature

[Kora] The evening is cool and damp, but no longer cold. Here in the northern midwest, it feels almost balmy after the endless darkness of winter. Still, the skies this April feel endlessly gray, as stormfront after stormfront batters its way across the great plains before slamming into the Appalachians.

No rain, not just now, but there is the smell of it in the air. It infects everything, sinks into the stone, settles into the cracks in the crumbling old mortar, perfuses through the slow-wakening tangle of weedy growth the encircles the abandoned cathedral. The structure looks empty from without, a great, haunted ruin. The few interior lights are not enough to illuminate the old stained glass windows, not even on the brights days. There's just the gleam of the old sodium vapor streetlamps across the glazed surface, the flicker of something from the interior when the heavy wooden doors swing open.

Virginia creeper, trumpet vine, and English ivy wrapped around the chainlink fence are leafed out fully, and screen more of the rambling complex from the street. Only the open gate gives a clear view up the marble steps, to the old stone portico. Damp drips down from the rain gutters and puddles pool on the broken sidewalk.

Kora sits slantwise on the front steps, a milkshake in hand, hood of her sweatshirt pulled up to conceal the bright flag of her pale hair. She is - heavier and more awkward every day, and looks - as she stands - like she might well go into labor at any minute. There's a certain gracelessness about her, now - that she no longer has the energy to conceal. When Rain appears between the sagging chainlink gates, the Skald pushes herself to stand. The physical effort is obvious, the hand with the milkshake braced on her knee, the other palm flat on the damp stone porch.

"Rain," Kora says, low-voiced as ever, lifting her chin by way of greeting, already turning back toward the church, reaching for the old wooden door. " - c'mon in."

[Rain] Rain has been away for weeks. At least it feels like weeks. She can't quite remember what day it was when she packed up her things and took up residence on the floor of Jackson's school apartment. When that transitioned into a suite at some hotel that his sister preferred. Easter Sunday she'd spent thirty miles away, passed out that evening on the Outriders' couch. Monday had brought her to the kin house.

Some would call it a blur, a dizzying whirlwind. For Rain, it merely is. It's what she was used to before this place, with its stout walls and its stained glass glories became her home. Before the sanctuary of that home was broken by Erek, and then troubled again by Starla and Fire Claws. It does not speak to safety to her now, the looming grey mass with its overgrown vine-sentinel outer-most walls.

The girl has changed, too, in her time away. The clothes she wears cut closer to her figure, excuse less in the sweep of lazy fabric. There is a measure more grace from the dance classes she's taking, a little more height afforded by shoes with a slight heel. Her messenger bag crosses her body, all the same, much as it always has before. Her brown winter coat has given way to a taupe raincoat. Her hair is better shaped, frames her features with less haphazard whimsy. Someone has gone about prettying up their songbird. It suits her, somewhat.

And she has never come to them empty-handed, so the heavy paper bags she carries will be no surprise to Kora. One is filled with glass beer bottles, and a jug of chocolate milk. The other with groceries -- meat mostly, but some aromatic things, too, to cook in with them. To gentle the smell of their meals and leave the kitchen smelling homey, like something more than a char pit.

"Kora." The girl's chin lifts in mirrored greeting. More than that: she smiles. It is a warm thing, despite the stresses they both lie between them. It spreads like lamplight in the dusky twilight between them. Rain makes her way up the steps without delay. Her shoulder brushes against the Skald gently as she passes; she looks up long enough to make a moment's eye contact.

"It's good to see you," she says, and the sentiment rings true.

[Kora] "You as well," the Fenrir returns, in her low alto voice. There is no regional accent to shade her tone, just the precision with which she employs words. Sparingly, and directly, without waste, without false sentiment. The edge of a half-smile is visible, curving the corner of her generous mouth. Maybe it's the shadow of her hood cutting across the strong lines of her features - but somehow the half-smile looks tired, worn. "You look well."

Then Rain meets her eyes, just a moment, and Kora's dark gaze sharpens with interest before it glazes with that animal light. Even chained in this too-human frame, there is no mistaking the animal inside her skin.

There is energy in the Fenrir woman's gait once she gains her feet; a feeding, restless sort of energy. The sort that sends zoo animals pacing the length of their enclosures, casting dark, baleful eyes at the strangers crowding through past the concrete moats and iron bars, the sticky-handed children and sweating parents. She pulls open the wooden doors with a certain vigor, and relieves Rain of at least one of her grocery bags as she gestures the kinswoman to precede her inside.

The great interior of the sanctuary is empty. The watery light of the late, gray twilight does little to illuminate the gloom. There's a faint gray light along the ribs of the roof, filtering in through the clerestory, but none of that reaches the settled stone floors. A few braziers set into the columns flicker atmospherically, and a camping lantern is a too-bright incandescent counterpoint in amongst the couches beneath the choir loft.

"I wanted to talk to you about Fire Claws and Starla," she says, stepping in after Rain, allowing the wooden door to swing closed behind her. "Let's take these to the kitchen. We'll have some privacy there."

[Rain] It does not steal away her breath the way it might have months ago, this animal thing in Kora's eyes, this hallmark of her otherness. Rain's posture shifts, but slightly. Her eyes do not widen in shock, but the warmth in them retreats subtly. She is not afraid, but neither is she naive to the threat resident in every fibre of Kora's gravid form.

As she looks away, she breathes out a little. The bag that Kora takes clinks with the upright bottles, nestled into their cardboard sleeves. The milk is Kora's, and comes pre-labeled with a Don't Even Think About it post it. Rain's hand, no doubt, differs than the Skald's, but the thought is there. The passing attempt at kinship that might not rankle the Warrior beside her.

She shifts the other bag to her right hand as the enter the church, and Rain takes a moment to glance around. As if she's forgotten, in less than a fortnight, how dusk clings to the rafters, and how the rain and snow melt come down in rivulets, or that there is always the smell of something burning mingled with the ash and soot of that truth. There is always fire here in the Jarl's hearth. There is warmth, if you're brave enough to stand close and claim in.

Their footsteps and voices echo in the expanse, giving the illusion of isolation. That there are no others, just on the periphery of Kora's mind through her packlink or even on the periphery of this room. Rain looks around, but she also looks up, to make sure no Rotagar is lingering in the shadows, waiting to pounce.

Kinfolk have long memories. Long memories and deep tracts of their minds are not gentled by forgiveness or forgetting.

The walk to the kitchen is not so long that Rain's quiet could be mistaken for reticence. When they get to the kitchen, she sets her grocery bag on the table, places her messenger bag into a chair and covers it with her jacket. It is Rain that stoops to fill the coolers, leaving Kora's chocolate milk out if she seems to want it.

"I heard a little," she says, as she nestles the beers into one cooler. "But from Milo. Starla won't talk to me," she adds, as if it were somehow important.

[Kora] There's blood in the stones, amidst the ash. New blood and old blood. Some is her own; most is not. The rafters are scorched here and there not just from the bonfires the pack burned to keep themselves warm in the deepest depths of the long, continental winter, but from the funeral pyres Sorrow has laid with her own hands, for kin the Grand Elder would not allow to be burned inside the protective cocoon of the Caern.

The Fenrir do not bury their dead. The smoke stains the stones, and carries the names on the wind to Valhalla.

Just once as they walk - quiet - down the worn aisles of the sanctuary, across the transept to the secondary structures appended to the church by later hands - just once Kora looks up, toward the rafts, pauses in thought, before continuing on. In the kitchen, she leaves Rain to put away the groceries, picks up the chocolate milk the kinswoman has brought her with a brief, ironic twist of her mouth, and tops off the half-melted milkshake with a good shot of milk, prying back the plastic lid and leaving it off, the better to stir the remnants with the much abused straw, after.

Kora does not sit, and when Rain says she heard a little the Skald stops her fidgeting, her pacing. Looks up from the milk, smoothes a long-fingered hand over the top of the cup as she settles the lid back into its grooves, then reaches up and tips the hood of her sweatshirt back from the crown of her head. Long pale hair is coiled at the nape of her neck. The messy bun is secured by a the shattered barrel of a broken pen and a red ponytail holder.

There is a steadiness to Kora's direct regard, then, across the distance between them. Rain remarks that Starla will not talk to her, and Kora acknowledges that with a faint, curt gesture of her chin. "What I mean to tell you is not meant to slander Starla," Kora begins, a certain thinning to her mouth at the thought of it. "And I trust that you will be discrete with her part in this. But I cannot leave her out.

"Roman brought two accusations to me. The first was that Fire Claws tried to compel Starla to mate with him. The second was that he attacked her and injured her. That's what you've heard, yeah?"

[Rain] The Fenrir do not bury their dead. Rain knows this. She knows that the fires carry them up, swallow them down, that the winds blow and ash scatters and they are no more body and everything soul. She knew this when she sent a sheaf of music to N.R.'s pyre. What she does not know is how Unicorns mourn their own.

She rather hopes that someone might care enough to burn her body. Or dig for her a deep enough grave that the rain will not wash away her grave clothes and whittle at her bones. Or may that, when she dies, she will be sunk in water deep enough to hide her sins. She does not dwell on these thoughts often, though, because there is no call for it. When Rain dies, she will be gone. And only then will she know whether Unicorn will keep an adoptive daughter as her own, if she will see any of them again in what passes for the Gaian summerlands. When her Family dies, they will be carried off to the place she cannot enter, by their brothers and sisters at arms. She can send songs for them, and speak of them in memory, but she cannot go with them.

Kora does not sit, and it is not long before Rain closes the cooler lid and stands, leveraging herself up with one hand on its lid. She wipes the dampness on her jeans, slides her hands back into her pockets. The Jarl's attention rests heavily on her and Rain's carriage shows she's aware of it. There is a solemnity in her eyes, and the set of her jaw. She seems older and at once more fragile. Stronger, but not yet fully tempered.

"Yes," she says. Then a pause, and a clarification. "Starla told me the same, about him compelling. I heard the other from Milo, but he wasn't certain of it." She breathes out a little, steadying her words.

"I will keep my counsel to myself," she says, to Kora's direction against divulging this conversation to everyone. "But I've talked with Jackson and August about the accusations, and told them that you and Roman were handling it. I thought it better that we hold our distance until it was resolved."

She doesn't challenge with them but neither are the words gentled. Rain wants to see her family safe, and that concern is aimed toward the other Gaian kin and then extended to the other kin who cleave to the pack.

[Kora] A moment's silence; Kora's dark eyes remain steady on Rain as she responses, her features largely still. The restlessness evident in her earlier has been subsumed, somehow, behind the surface of her skin. Swallowed back, held beneath, somehow subliminal. She nods once, when Rain remarks that she will keep her counsel; and then again, this gesture shorter, sharpened at the endpoint of the arc of motion, when she mentions August and Jackson.

"I will speak to August," she says at last, the curtness of the gesture insinuating itself into her tone. "If you need to clarify the details so that Jackson is not under operating under any misconceptions, I trust you will - " A brief, sharp gesture here substitutes for words. Kora closes her eyes, a feral halo of frustration overwriting itself across her open features, ending with a flat line of her mouth. " - do so without impugning Starla. What you heard was accurate, and not the whole story."
The flat shape of her mouth twists at the right corner, a flat sort of irony. "The first charge was that Fire Claws attempted to attract her to mate with him against her will. If that were the whole of it, he would no longer be my packmate.

"It was not the whole of it.

"Fire Claws wanted to feel what it was like to get drunk, according to Starla. He came home wounded from a hunt, and there was a bottle of vodka on the kitchen table. He started drinking. Starla apparently thought that he had had too much to drink and wanted to take the bottle away from him. Instead of coming to find one of his packmates to deal with him, she sat in his lap to play keep away with the bottle."

There is - still - a note of disbelief on Kora's voice on that point of the story. Nevermind that she had to pry it out of Starla; it seems borderline absurd, something out of a trash Ionescu knockoff.

"Fire Claws is a lupus. He has never before been drunk. The combination of lowered inhibitions, Starla's proximity - " here, Kora pulls up clearly short. "I make no excuses for him. What he did was wrong, and I have punished him for his weakness. Still, among wolves, that power of attraction is part of - mating practice. He did not mean to subvert her will. I hope you understand the distinction I am making. He was not stalking her. He did not take her unawares. He did not intend to fool her into his bed.

"And, moreover, he is aware of the weakness he showed.

"He is barred from drinking. And if there were a wolf kin with whom he might mate, he is barred from that for the next moon. Even should another kinswoman sit in his lap, there will not be a repeat of the incident."

[Rain] She does not lean against a wall or affect any other posture of indifference. What is happening between them, right now, it is imminent and heavy. That Kora takes the time to explain any of this to her, a small and fragile songbird, is weighty. Rain knows this. She shows the respect and attention necessary to reflect it in her posture and expression.

They are both adept in saying as much with their silences as they are with their words. The stories they know are scored into their bones, they hang like lodestones around their neck. Rain knows this heaviness. She knows it is rare.

Rain's silences say that she is listening. Then they speak to an incredulousness and wonder that should leave her slack-jawed, standing agape, like a fool in the kitchen. Instead her hands come out of her pockets, and then rest on the back of the chair in front of her. They tense a little, but do not go white knuckled.

The girl breathes out before she speaks. She tips her head down so that, for a moment, the sweep of her lashes obscures the shape of her eyes, such that she has to push a lock of hair back, behind her ear, when she tips her chin up again. When she says, level and a little too coolly:

"I believe you."

But more than belief, Rain trusts her. She understands that these things are handled in manners beyond her comprehension, and that the matters of wolf-born behaviors are beyond her. Her expression is riddled with other things, things that are not trust, and do not speak to safety, but the words she offers to the Skald are acceptance.

"Would I be out of turn," she asks, tentatively, "To say that I would rather not be alone with him, still? I do not understand lupus born very well. I do not want to... make the same mistakes in judgment."

And there it is, the subtle words underlaid with tension for her cousin-kin. Tension and concern. It's not a clear thing: Rain worries for her, Rain worries about her, Rain worries about what she may be getting up to. All this worry without resolution. Muddy waters. Her question hangs between them, likewise unclear.

[Rory] There are times when the metis born does not hesitate. There are times when she seems near fearless, and completely unaffected by things that would make even the most hardy of humans pale, stammer, stutter hesitate. Those times involve battle, and her duty.

This is not one of those times.

Which is why this is the Rory that so many people see, know, judge: She hesitates on the steps of the church, her pack slung over her shoulders, her curls damp from the rain, her blue eyes registering her wariness, her uneasiness, her worry. She chews on her lower lip, absently. She looks over her shoulder toward the street, as if considering a quick getaway...

And then she knocks anyway. Because there are few people -Human, Kin, Garou alike- who are really as resiliant as the redheaded Ahroun at the door to the Last Watch Church...

[Kora] "No," returns Kora, direct and clear-voiced. "You would not be out of turn. He has broken the trust I placed in him regarding my kin; broken the hospitality of my house. Regardless of the rest: he has to earn that trust back.

"But it would be wrong for you to let that idea crystallize. To let it harden. To let it become the only thing you know about Fire Claws. Lupus born Garou are wild; often full of anger and pain, and when they come to the city, it is often only because they mean to die gloriously. One last futile blow against the Wyrm.

"I've known those Garou. Burned them and spoken their rites; sent them on to Valhalla. Fire Claws has some of that anger scored across his soul, but he is more than that. Trust your instincts. Treat him respectfully - as you always do. And allow him the opportunity to earn that trust back, if he means to do so.

"Now," a brief pause, a flicker of a lifting look outward, a moment's attenuation. " - the second charge."

[Kora] Kora does not leave the kitchen to answer the knock at the front door. Not now. However, Liz shamelessly employs an NPC to do so. The knock resounds through the interior of the church, and a gruff one-eyed, one-armed man Rain has seen on odd occasions - Yule, perhaps - hobbles toward the door. The Fenrir blood in him is obvious. So are the old scars. In the Church, Erick does not bother with an eyepatch, and has left off his prosthetic arm while some ulcerations on his stump heal.

He's in his 30s but seems older; roughened by time and care. There's no denying the spark of interest in his eyes when he sees the lovely little redhead at the door, but he does not flirst. Just grunts, " - help ya?"

[Rain] "No one is only the sum of their past mistakes," Rain says, in agreement with what Kora has told her. The knock on the door draws her attention, but Rain does not turn her head or shift her eyes away from what is transpiring in the kitchen.

Kora tells her not to let this one thing crystallize, to not let it be everything she knows of the lupus born Fenrir. It is difficult, to be fair, to think of allowing him near her. Or trusting him. Rain does not give trust lightly. She has the scars and nightmares to back up her reasons; she has been to dark places and always learned to shine again. It would not be everything she knows of Fire Claws. It already is less than the whole of what she knows.

Kora will vouch for him, if with caveats and cautions. She does not condemn him. He is greater than whatever these situations have painted him to be.

She swallows a little, breathes in a bit, and nods. They soldier on, and Rain remembers when the deepest shadow cast between them was the suspicion Last Watch held for Eve. It was not so very long ago. Perhaps they would find their way back to that.

[Rory] Rory blinks, surprised though she knew someone would answer - while Lessa shamelessly laughs at Liz's use of an NPC to open the door. She wrinkles her nose, and lowers her head, her hair hiding her features, as always. She is many things - many more than most will ever know, but under it all is her innocent bashfulness that is a fundamental part of who she is.

She takes in the one armed Fenrir, quickly, meeting his eyes only briefly, before lowering them in respect. "I came so tee Kora... is he shere?"

Her voice doesn't waver, and she seems sure, for all her words are forever mixed up. Brave little redhead.... Sorta.

[Kora] "The second charge was that Fire Claws wounded Starla. That's also true. And also not the whole of the story.

"Let me begin by saying that if Starla had come to me after the first incident, I would have barred the two of them from being together and the second incident would not have happened. Starla had apparently decided that she wished to teach Fire Claws about the human world, because she believed she had a keen understanding of animals.

"So she took him to Chinatown for Chinese food.

"She said something to Fire Claws. He became offended, thinking she had called him a dog. She responded, apparently teasing him by saying that she would bring a leash next time. The moon was his moon, and the pair of remarks enraged him. He saw red; the edge of frenzy."

A brief, narrow glance away; past Rain toward the kitchen door. Past the door to toward the entrance to the church proper. Her rage uncoils under her skin without loosening beneath it.

"He would have frenzied, but he had the presence of mind to hold it back. To swallow it. He yelled at Starla to leave, knowing what he would unleash if she stayed.

"She did not move. So he pushed her away, and she fell. Finally, he came close to throttling her, trying to pick her up and move her bodily. Starla says she was paralyzed with fear and could not move. Finally, he had the presence of mind to leave her.

"I don't know if that is the truth of it. If she was paralyzed by fear, or bound by some foolish need to prove herself strong in the face of his rage. Or one, and then the other. She told Roman and I that she did not mean to bring these incidents forward, and would have told no one had Milo not ferreted out the truth of them.

"And she was wrong in that, too."

Kora grimaces, then. "Fire Claws lost control. He suggested that we perform the rite of the stolen wolf on him to punish him, but he did work to hold off the frenzy instead of giving in to the sweep of it. That's harder than it seems.

"And," a brief, spare smile, " - I don't believe that confining him to his wolf skin would teach him what he needs to know about the vulnerability of our human kin.

"So he is confined to his human form until the next full moon. He will fight in it. He will eat in it. He will sleep in it. And when the term is finished, I will take him to the Battleground realm, and we will track down the echo of that night amidst all the battles there, and he will live Starla's part until he understands her fear, her vulnerability, and his part in it."

[Rain] There is a point, about midway through, when Rain turns her head a bit to the side. Casts her gaze toward the ancient lumbering fridge rather than toward the Skald. Her hands have tightened on the back of the chair and her jaw is a tense thing. She is slight, but there is muscle beneath her skin and every bit of it sings with tension, is coiled, is tight.

And still she listens. Fear, and anger, and the confluence of both do not stopper up her ears. Rain has faced worse than these memories before, and she has had an opportunity to revisit them before this moment. To be prepared. That, more than anything else, is the mercy Milo afforded her in telling her.

Her eyes close, and she swallows back her first reply. Silences her second. Waits out her third. It's not wisdom that tells her biting things are not to be aired in this place, but rather experience.

"I do not understand her," Rain says. That her first words are not about Fire Claws, but rather about Starla should be striking. There are no contractions. Each syllable is weighted, meted.

"When it is done," she says, and her words are unsteady. Her eyes do not sweep back toward Kora when they do blink open. This is an uneasy thing, an unsteady thing. "When he has lived her place in this. If he would like to talk to someone, who is not Starla, but has also been there?"

Another breath. Another moment in which to reconsider this.

"I will listen."

[Kora] Erick is not the brightest man in the world; were Rory looking up instead of down, she might SEE the gears in his head moving as he works to figure out what the hell she means by that. The THINKING frown creases his brown for several seconds longer than perhaps it should, before he at least pulls open the front door to the huge old church.

"They're in the kitchen," he says, with a grimace. " - but it looked serious. I don't think right now's ideal. You can wait, though. Or leave a message." A pause, not quite flailing, as he glances back toward the altar. "There's beer if you want one."

[Rory] She peeks up at him through her curls, her eyes a vivid green behind the blood red... even if it weren't for the pull of her blood that the True can feel, it's isn't hard to imagine her Fianna. in fact, it's hard to imagine her anything else...

He pauses, thinks a moment longer, and it doesn't seem to bother her. She knows she makes mistakes, and cannot understand or fix them because she does not hear them. Some have told her translating becomes second nature after a while, and for that, she is grateful.

She is also grateful for the offer of beer. Her eyes light up, and she looks past him, hopefully, and then nods, slightly. "Ok."

She will wait.

[Rory] (thanks for letting me crash :) Rory will wait patiently, and Lessa is gonna sleep. :) night!)
to Kora, Rain

[Kora] There is a certain privacy Sorrow affords Rain as the kinswoman considers and discards her first reaction. Her second. Her third. The melting milkshake is long since abandoned. There are few enough other places to look, but just as Rain glances away, so does Sorrow - off to the side, a steady attention, that hint of distance, that measure of privacy, that silence in the interstitial places as Rain composes herself, eyes closed, swallowing back, silencing, waiting out each underscored urge.

Sorrow looks back only when Rain speaks, but in that moment her attention is immediate, steady and unyielding. Some of the liminal tension in her own face ebbs. A twist of her mouth, her curling smile like a ghostlight where it touches her eyes. "You should have been born to Fenris," quiet, that. Direct. So many different names for strength.

Then she exhales once, all at a go. "If she were my kin, I would send her home. Someplace safer for her. With family as a guiding hand. "

A brief lift of her chin. "Roman's forbidden the relationship with Simon, but she has her mind set on him. If he challenges for her, Roman will accept the challenge. I don't know how she imagines that Simon is safer than Fire Claws. He's not. He's more dangerous and less controlled, but that's not a lesson she's ready to learn. And you're not responsible for her. You can't fix her if she is not willing to speak to you. I don't know whether it's shame or fear or willfulness, but whatever it is is dangerous to herself and others."
From the bracelets wrapped around her wrists, Kora unlaces one. It is a narrow strip of braided leather, dark but stained by water, rainwater, saltwater, lakewater - all of it. Narrow enough to be unremarkable, but quiet and sturdy, with a certain - mmmm - to it underneath everything. "That's a talen. There's a spirit bound within it that will come find the nearest Garou should you break the binding of it intentionally. You just need to break it and will it, and the spirit will be loosed.

"Bring it back to me in a moon so that I can release that spirit and bind another. Its servitude is not meant to be endless."

[Rain] You should have been born to Fenris.

This lifts the corners of Rain's mouth in an odd way, part smile and part disbelief, warm in ways that are contrasted heavily with the tension in the room, though that is rapidly falling away, receding, curling out around their edges like smoke from a doused flame. She glances back to Kora, but doesn't comment on the quiet words she offers. Instead, Rain owns them silently, and keeps them as her own. It's another form of gratitude, of acceptance.

This is just a moment, though, and then they move on. To talk of Starla and Simon, which looses the warmth from Rain's expression again. Her mouth purses a little; she exhales through her nostrils.

"I will let you and Roman know if I hear of her putting herself in danger again," Rain says. It is not the same as offering to be her cousin's keeper. Just that she will keep Last Watch appraised, aware of what comes her way. It's the best she can do, that any of them can do.

When the bracelet is handed over, Rain is careful with it. Not ginger, no, but appreciative and respectful of it. She understands that there is a Spirit bound to it, but does not quite know what that means. She will worry, for a few days, whenever she bumps her hand into something by accident, that she may have upset the spirit within it. She will not take it off until that moon passes, and it is returned to Kora. It will sleep against her skin, stay close.

Rain fastens it around her left wrist, just loose enough to move with her, tight enough to stay.

"It's a fetch?" she asks for confirmation. Just to solidify the words and their attachments in her mind. It is dark against her pale skin, but does not seem out of place on her at all.

"Thank you." There's a little pause. Then she adds, "For this" and touches the bracelet on her wrist. "And for talking to me about this. I know that you don't have to, and I wouldn't understand if you chose not to, but I appreciate that you do. You and Roman have been good to me. If there's anything I can do to repay it, Kora, please just ask."

[Kora] "Mmm - " Kora's confirmation of the name - a fetch - of the talen is low, subvocal, the meaning confirmed by the reinforcement of a narrow affirmative nod. It's a fetch. There are a half-dozen or more similar bracelets on Kora's wrist, and a narrow twist of dark against her pale throat. What marks this one as different from any of the rest is difficult to guess, except perhaps, when Rain goes to cinch the worn ends together, pulling the piece snug and finds two small bone beads worked into the weave of the thing, practically invisible but for the faint bump against her skin.

"It's all reciprocal, Rain," returns Kora, a brief twist of her mouth. " - and you've been good to us, too."