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Tissaia had always said there cannot be give without take— in magic, in anything, for every action there is an equal and opposite action. Basic, as far as concepts go really, when one considers it, Philippa remembers thinking at the first of many times she would hear it.
Transformation is painful, there is always a cost— collateral damage is innate to achieving progress and with enough tenacity anything is achievable if you are willing to weather the costs and the day Philippa arrived at Aretuza she remembers realizing hell is freezing and here they teach girls like her to become accustomed to permafrost and brimstone in equal parts.
“They come and steal girls like you—the witches—they come in the night. You cannot let them take you,” her parents had told her. She remembers some of the stories, spent more time in the libraries of Aretuza and Tretogor and all across the continent after she ascended searching for the pieces of those stories she could not quite remember as if it was not a fool’s errand—Philippa has been called many things in her lifetimes, but never a fool.
Home—the place she was from, born, where her ancestors stretching back generations were the protectors and keepers of the land, from which their bodies were formed from the clay and to which they would be returned in soil—this place, if she had not learned not to care about such things, Philippa supposes she would wonder whether or not she had the right to call it home anymore.
In the same way a person who abandons a child has no right to call themselves a parent, surely, she forfeited this right when she could not find her way back there. She still hears it calling, the place that was home, hears it calling in her dreams, feels the pull homeward inside her bones.
Perhaps only because her bones are the only things she has left of her body after her unmaking at her ascension—call it reforming, call it a mercy, call it desecration of all that is left of her home, the fact remains little remains of the person she was when she called the place home. At this point, if Philippa had not shrugged off the intoxicating pull of that sort of childish tincture of two-parts half-forgotten dream and three-parts hollow nostalgia, if she cared to try to recall—and she does not— she would no longer even remember being in that body, being in that place.
Yet still, she visits this place she no longer has any right to call home in half-forgotten glimpses in her dreams that leave her reeling and breathless when she wakes.
Survival is costly in ways those with the luxury of never having necessitated its ruthless candor cannot begin to fathom.
If Philippa were one for such careless idling, one to conjure up the past like it is not something dead and gone and pointless to dwell on, she would remember what she was always told, when the place was still hers to call home. Witches steal children, they said, and Tissaia certainly looked the part—all sharp angles, and high dark collars, ethereal against a backdrop of burning night.
Back when it still mattered, back when she felt that home might be a word she still could hold honestly, Philippa had wondered whether she had any right to the taste of victimhood that lingered on her canines. After all, she did not fight, cooperated, even, when she was at Aretuza. Threw herself into her studies and excelled far beyond any other girl in her class. She still remembers the glint of pride that welled up unbidden in the corners of Tissaia’s eyes and the way she both craved it and chaffed awfully at the way this was a betrayal of her home.
After all, stolen in the night, rescued from obscurity for bigger and better things sounded so damn similar rolling off the King’s Tongue—that is what they called it, the language, “Common”. As if speaking with the power of the king behind you somehow made any of this acceptable—stolen children, stolen families, stolen homes, stolen lives.
The desperation in her mother’s voice crying out for her to find her way back home still rings in Philippa’s ears on the nights when she still dreams.
What she is saying, Philippa cannot translate coherently into the King’s tongue for fear it will disintegrate to nothing in her hands if she tries.
She does not sleep much these days for fear of the moment when this last remaining testament to the things she once loved will be reduced to ash once and for all.
That first night at Aretuza, the first opportunity she saw, she had tried to run—did run, really— broke the hook clasp paneling meant to secure the shutters the second the lock on her room clicked shut behind her. Sitting on the ledge of her window as she stared down the task of negotiating her way down the side of the tower where it rose high about the craggy bluffs of sharpened stone below, Philippa never wished more than that moment that she knew how to fly.
When she finally succeeds at the impossible—manages to do what no one else in living memory had achieved, when Philippa polymorphed for the first time, she told herself this was why she took the form of an owl: it was necessitated by her desire to escape, to return home, even though it had been years that she remained in this place and they no longer locked her doors and she was powerful enough that the sea no longer constituted a formidable obstacle.
That first time she successfully shapeshifted, after weeks of sleepless nights, pouring over tomes, of falling asleep in the library, all this effort equal parts spite at being told she could not do the impossible and hope that she could reclaim some part of her heritage—back among her people, her home, she remembers bearing witness to this sort of magic, hardly impossible despite requiring strong medicine, more a proof of power and practice. None of these books speak of such things beyond a footnote, a reference to the savages who once occupied the wastes of Redania and the way their primitive legends spoke of polymorphy in overly simplistic terms, perhaps after bearing witness to a sorcerer who they worshipped as a god in their ignorance.
When no one is looking she burns the book.
The first time she successfully polymorphed, there was a moment of sheer ecstasy, the sensation of reclamation, that she was not succumbing to her own erasure for the first time in as long as she can remember—that instead, she was preserving oral tradition despite feeling her mother tongue slipping away from her with each day of disuse.
This body, her new form, felt alien and new but exhilarating—after all, one does not get to choose their form, it is a matter of familial ties to the animal in question, she remembers. Turning her head to and fro, she stretches out her arms—wings—limber and tawny, feathers cut for speed, a bird of prey. She tentatively stretches out her wingspan, hops, and soars, innate in this knowledge, even in its newness. Flitting, landing gracefully on the window ledge to peer at her new form, she feels her heart sink into her stomach.
She is an owl—the ghost of someone who has died a bad death, is cursed with liminality, trapped neither in this world or the next. They said the ridges around an owl’s eyes—Philippa’s eyes—are the grasping fingernails of the dead. She is a harbinger, an omen, a warning to others that comes on the sound of the flapping of wings.
She is a dead thing walking.
Indisputable proof that in her survival, she has killed the only remaining parts of herself that once belonged to her home.
Indisputable proof that in her survival, she has killed the last of her people.
A cruel irony, brutal in the realization that after everything she has given up in the name of survival, of obligation to her people, that she has no right to call those people, that place, her home because in her bid for survival she has abandoned them.
Only the damned and the witches, those who use their gifts for selfish and cruel things, never those with the magic that comes from good medicine, strong medicine turn into owls. She knows this.
Just as she knows she had made that selfish choice that first night, had only been deluding herself since.
That first night, staring down the 30-meter sheer drop-off from here window to the stone of the shoreline as she contemplated escape that first night at Aretuza, she had never wished more to have wings. Cruel, the memory, now that she had been granted what she wished.
Wingless and not yet damned, still Philippa had managed, somehow, and was picking her way across the shoreline outside the Tower when she was confronted by the reality that she had nowhere to run to. From which direction they had come, where her home was, how to get back, she had no idea. All was swallowed by the vast expanse of the grey wave caps of the sea. They reminded her of something burning—a home writhing and somewhere else as it fell away from the earth to the sky.
And is if by magic—surely, how could she be so stupid as to assume there were not magical alarms and fences and trip wires and all manner of caging to prevent exactly this in this hellish place—Tissaia had materialized beside her. There, where she stood on the bluffs, staring out across the relentlessness of all that water as it salted the earth of Thanedd infertile and lifeless, Tissaia had reached out, probably in an attempt to be comforting, and brushed Philippa’s hair out of the way to place a hand on her shoulder.
Philippa jerked away, shrugged it off her touch with a sneer, expecting some hollow words of comfort, an insincere apology or explanation of the reasons why Philippa would one day come to thank her, why this pain would someday be useful to her.
Instead Tissaia just sighed and said, “You are welcome to try what you were planning, Philippa, but I thought you were smarter than this.”
When Philippa didn’t even acknowledge that Tissaia had spoken, she simply continued as if she had answered her pleasantly, “It gets cold here, especially at night. Cold enough for the surf to turn to ice.”
Philippa turned to look at her, stare accusatory and unrelenting even back then, spat back at her, “So hell freezes over, does it?”
Tissaia sharply exhaled through her nose in an amused laugh, “A quick wit, indeed. Let me know when you’ve decided you want to be allowed back inside or else I will need to send someone out to collect your body come daybreak.”
Years spent in that place with its salted earth and frostbitten hallways—she had been right that first night.
Hell is freezing.
Hell is not knowing which way home went
Hell never unfreezes.
----
Triss, gods bless her—upon learning the fate Tissaia had met at Thanedd during the Coup, was adamant that the woman deserved some kind of memorial. Philippa bit her tongue and did her best to bite back her cutting reply, to stop herself saying what she thought.
Odd really, that no one but Triss coaxed this unfamiliar tendency to tread lightly from her, as though she had ever fared better from remaining silent.
A creeping voice in the back of her mind, not unfamiliar but all the more unwelcome, whispers that this sentimentality was unbecoming of a sorceress presented with the opportunities which lay before her—Philippa could be the one to right all the wrongs, she knew this. Knew she was damned, but knew this could be used to her advantage, everything can be used as leverage to gain the upper hand if you were clever enough, ruthless enough, strategic enough.
Maybe other people had to worry about facing their god in the end to justify what they had done in this life, but Philippa had made her peace with the fact that she was damned from the start, weaponized the knowledge that you cannot kill what is already dead. From this was honed her brutal efficiency, her reputation decades in the making that her heart was cold, silent, and unbeating in her chest. Yet Triss, in all her exhausting belief in the good in the world elicited something to the contrary—
This vulnerability, the belief that the world, broken as it may be can still be mended if one cares, if one tries hard enough, has the best of intentions, the kinds of vulnerabilities that nearly got Triss and Yennefer killed at Thanedd, would have if not for Tissaia, and lead to the latter’s demise, despite all of their abilities—Philippa knew she should be above them.
Philippa knew she was not immune to these foolish flights of fancy, even in her arrogance and weakness for a seductive smile and an invitation to a woman’s bed, but nor was she inclined to do much more than acknowledge and dismiss such wheedling intimacies. Foolish to put any one person before the world, but Triss was all but useless as both the coherent colleague and formidable mage she was when she got into this sort of state so Philippa bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood. Anything to prevent her from crying for the third time in as many hours since they had awoken this morning.
Triss’ eyes, already red rimmed and puffy, as they had been for some days despite the amount of time she spent applying various medicaments and makeups and magic to hide that fact since she had learned of Tissaia’s fate—awfully unbecoming of a sorceress to be worn thin by such trifling things as grief for the woman who had forced you into the role, Philippa wanted to sneer. Awfully pathetic to weep for the woman who had proverbially bore you into the middle of the night, in a new body, in a new life none of them had asked for.
But Triss mourned Tissaia like the only mother she had ever known and even Philippa could not turn a blind eye to the sentiment. Call it an effigy to the parts of her childhood still living beside and inside her, call it some kind of piteous affection for the girl, call it regret that she had left her own mother to burn with her home when she abandoned them, call it the most practical solution to sidestepping another fucking onslaught of endless tears, regardless, Philippa listened.
Triss wanted a funeral for Tissaia, sat on the edge of Philippa’s desk as she told her this despite knowing how much it annoyed Philippa when she did, staring down at her with pleading eyes as she tried to decipher whether Triss genuinely had lost her bloody mind asking her these things.
“I know how you feel—felt about her, Phil, really, I do. I know Tissaia, Aretuza, and everything to do with them are still things you’d rather forget. I promise I understand.”
She didn’t. How could she? Though hardly Triss’ fault, when Philippa had never really explained.
“But we owe her this much. Call it closure or call it a funeral pyre, I honestly don’t care how you choose to justify it to yourself but we—I can’t leave her to rot like I don’t owe her anything. Please, Phil.”
“And what is it you’d have me do exactly, Triss? You can’t honestly tell me you think they’ve left her body where she fell. Going back to Thanedd on the basis of decorum alone at this point would be foolish if you don’t have a death wish.”
If Triss wanted to find whatever pike Vilgefortz and his Nilfgaardian lackeys had strung up Tissaia’s body upon, to try to identify which fly-bloated, crow-pecked body was her former mentor, that was her prerogative, but Philippa did not want to deal with the inevitable emotional fallout which would follow. It would have made no difference to her if it had been any other of her overly emotional co-conspirators—Glevissig or Yennefer, she told herself—it made no difference that it was Triss, this was simply rational.
Liar.
“We could find her body, wherever it is, and at least bury it. Properly. No one deserves to die alone, much less to remain that way after death. You might despise her still, and I suppose I haven’t any right to question that, but without her I would have died alone there too.”
Triss is looking at her still, eyes begging her to meet them, pleading for her to understand. But Philippa would not even allow herself look up from the letters she had been reading over—correspondence from her allies, now dispersed on the winds of change that swept the continent in the days following the coup Coup—pretended she did not taste bile at the accusation in what Triss had not spoken but had still said clear as day.
Philippa had not been there—too early, just as she had been too late at Sodden Hill. But Triss is not Sabrina and is too kind to say such things. Guilt is not an unfamiliar sensation to Philippa, but she has not tasted its bitter salt quite like this in decades and the moment of recognition sparks a simmering anger deep in the pit of her stomach. Still, she does not react and Triss pushes on, eyes still probing Philippa’s profile for any indication of reaction.
“Please, Phil. If you won’t do it for Tissaia, then do it because what she did for me.”
Unspoken, again, what she means is “do it for me”.
-----
“She ought to have some kind of epitaph,” Triss turned to look at Philippa, a smudge of dirt streaked across her cheek where she’d wiped away at sweat trickling down her forehead, “something about her role in the lives of the girls who she taught at Aretuza, don’t you think?”
Standing above the grave Triss had insisted she wanted to dig by hand before burying what was left of the body of Tissaia de Vries, Philippa thought about all the things she had fantasized saying to the woman for all these years—one memory, shifting to the surface above the others—a line from a verse in a play Philippa would never have admitted to have read in her time at Aretuza. She should have held her tongue, but even Triss was allotted only so much decency.
“I am the shape you made me,” Philippa spoke flatly, “Filth teaches filth.”
Triss looks at Philippa like she slapped her and she feels an uncomfortable twinge half-adjacent to half-forgotten regret.
Regret. Another thing only allotted for the decisions she has made that affect Triss.
She could have said worse things, could have lied, though Triss would be foolish to expect Philippa to lie to preserve her feelings when she never has before. Philippa is well aware she is Tissaia’s biggest disappointment—suspects Triss knows it too even if she’d never say so.
And true, Philippa hated the woman—even still, a degree of credit was warranted. Admitting she was the shape Tissaia made her as much an admission of guilt as an accusation which Philippa both hoped Triss would somehow understand and wished she would misinterpret at the same damn time.
Philippa would never admit that much of what she had learned in her time was a direct result of Tissaia’s influence on her life. In her day, Tissaia had been powerful—there was no skirting the truth of the matter, Philippa knew this: she, the architect who had coaxed Philippa’s spine into its unbreakable shape was two-parts conqueror, three-parts god. There is a tendering sort of poetry in such things, but for as long as Philippa can recall, there has been too much blood in her mouth to speak them.
What did Triss expect her to say, really? How Triss had managed to stay so tender with so much blood in her mouth was something Philippa knew she could never understand in all her lifetimes past and to come.
Triss visibly bristled, and Philippa tried—though perhaps not as hard as she should have—to fight her all-consuming desire to roll her eyes at Triss’ particular proclivity for allowing nostalgia to corrode her better sensibilities. Triss was not stupid, Philippa was well aware, yet...
“I know how you feel about Tissaia, about Aretuza, but that place, those people, they were—are the closest thing I’ve ever had to a home. Surely I’m allowed some form of grief.”
Triss does her best to keep the indignance out of her voice, knows after all this time how Philippa loathes the way that timbre of self-righteousness creeps into her voice when she is angry—knows the way Philippa will zero in on it, though Philippa supposes Triss views her unrelenting efforts to force the girl to protect herself from the world in all its harshness because the world will not do it for it, must surely taste like unnecessary cruelty of Philippa enjoying the ease with which she can salt a wound and the reaction this elicits and not the attempt at reciprocated affection Philippa intended.
Triss would not be wrong in thinking so, after all Philippa has earned her reputation for ruthless efficiency and ability to cut to the essence of a person with her a single harsh gaze, but there was no need to cut away at Triss to reach the truth of her—it was apparent in everything she did but perhaps even more so in the way her emotions churned relentlessly in her eyes.
Sometimes it was difficult for even Philippa not to stagger under the intensity of Triss’ gaze.
Sometimes it was difficult to stop herself from staring into Triss’ eyes anyway, even knowing she would be overwhelmed.
Philippa did her damnedest to bite back the sneering retort she felt welling in her throat and schooled her expression back to impassivity which did little to quell the heaviness of emotion radiating off Triss in waves.
“Gods, Philippa, do you have a heart?” She must have meant it earnestly, as she stared down Philippa who still refused to meet her eyes.
“I left it at home,” Philippa answered sardonically, “Haven’t you heard that old adage, Triss? Home is where the heart is. Another reason for us to go back to Montecalvo rather than haunting this place any longer than strictly necessary.”
Triss blows her hair out of her face the way she only does when she is particularly exasperated, so usually only around Philippa, “Forgetting is incongruous with what I’d call your proclivity for fastidiousness—”
“And those who care less for me call pedantism. Spare me attempts to skirt around the issue, Triss.”
“I’m simply wondering if it truly is something you know you took a shovel to, know you buried, as you insist, then why can I feel the ghost of it— why does it dwell in the same room we sleep in and pace the halls with you when you work from dawn until dusk and until dawn again?”
“The growth of trees slows as the days grow shorter, the year older. Some things don’t make it to spring, there will always be those which give way to winter. Things grow out of what they were, we grow out of others. It doesn’t do to be sick with the past because there's no such thing as an unhaunted house.”
“And you insist you hate poetry because you have no time for abstraction,” Triss shot back dryly.
“And it does not do to be blinded by grief for what could have been. Let the dead rest, Triss.”
Philippa turns away before Triss can respond, moves a few paces away and opens a portal, confident Triss will follow.
She always does.
----
When they had returned to Montecalvo, Triss had made herself scarce for quite some time during the weeks that followed—locking herself away in some room Philippa seldom visited as she treaded the footworn pathway between her study and bedchambers as she worked herself to the bone, or curling in some long forgotten corner to cradle the wounded animal of her heart away from Philippa’s harsh gaze, ever incredulous at such displays of vulgar humanity.
It remained that way for some time—silent, still. Philippa no more aware of Triss’ presence than the quiet sound of gentle feet padding or the whispering of hem brushing past a closed door.
Yet even now, Philippa still finds Triss’ poetry sometimes. She is adamant has never understood poetry. Verse, like respinning shit into gold, creating an altar to the soul’s atrophy, like that sort of thing deserves this sort of trophy—why write a requiem to a life misled?
Back in the early days of this peculiar form of cohabitation neither of them ever fully acknowledged, the things Philippa would find on the scraps of parchment Triss left behind— abandoned, forgotten, maybe, but more likely requiem to truths missaid. Tucked between the pages of a book, tucked away in silence, in a corner, under a long-forgotten story, she finds these reminders of Triss’ limerence, like pin-pricks of light through blackout curtains.
No one ever talks about the downside of eternity
Like somehow it's shameful how much of a person I still am
Loving the things that are always ready to leave
I should crumble for better reasons
Sometimes Philippa forgets how much finding these little shards of truth—of Triss’ heart— reminds her of startling awake in suffocating sunlight.
There's loss in every awakening—eyes that do not wish to open, to remember again how the light stings.
Not all things can be restrung softly, some truths are indebted their scar tissue, like the one she finds today, smell of ink and perfume still gracing the page in an elegy undeniably Triss. On the back, she writes her reply and before she replaces it back between the book, though she is unsure Triss will return to see.
Our love’s much easier to stomach if you’d just remember you were never meant to survive
This is how you miss me
I am less deadly than the deprivation
As she turns the paper over again in her fingers, she idly traces the nail of her little finger along each strokes of the tight curling of Triss’ script.
Another mark of girls from Aretuza was their penmanship—another asset in their intended role as pretty, skipping phonographs largely ignored in the courts of many an inbred king too stupid to recognize brilliance which slapped him sideways. True, the technique was easily identifiable even without the cloying scent that somehow clung to everything Triss touched.
In those first few days of her presence in Montecalvo, the constant presence of the scent—some perfume which much have cost a fortune, something sweet and floral she would probably be able to name if she weren’t some 300-odd years removed from botany classes at Aretuza, and the lingering scent of the faint herbal bouquet of whatever potions Triss had been fiddling with that day.
Whatever it must have cost, Philippa was more than willing to pay her threefold to open a portal to anywhere else and toss the blasted bottle through to be rid of the damn lingering reminder everywhere she went. Frankly, she wasn’t sure why it grated on her nerves so much, nor why she didt just insist Triss be rid of it. After all, they were in her home, or the place that felt nearest to it.
There is no such thing as an unhaunted house.
If she were anyone else, if she had not spent so many hours with Triss, if Philippa were someone else who did not so intimately know the workings of Triss’ mind, she may have thought the conversation at the grave was finished for good, buried with Tissaia and so many other things she’d denied Triss in moments of impetuous vexation—but she knew Triss better than that.
Of her qualities which drove Philippa to exasperation—
The qualities most likely to get her killed—
Of these, few had ever been quite so tenacious, quite so difficult to kill as her endless belief in the hidden capacity for good in everyone, no matter how buried beneath the surface, and her stubborn refusal to be ignored.
But even Triss had a breaking point. Surely, Triss had long held her at this arm’s length for a reason, and Philippa had assumed she had finally begun to practice the type of wariness that ensures longevity in their line of work—what she had tried, perhaps futilely, to teach Triss as she mellowed with age. Yet, while something about Triss had hardened—after Sodden, after everything which followed, she remained loyal to Philippa. Followed her from coast to coast, scheme to scheme, even when she did not agree with what they were doing. And for what? Love? The expectation of reciprocity neither she nor Philippa herself could truly believe her capable of giving at this point?
But it seemed Philippa been foolish to hope the girl would learn to leave well enough alone when it came to this thing between them. Philippa was not made for the kind of warmth Triss radiated, the sort of goodness someone like her deserved, foolish as she was, for love of any kind, really—
Philippa has always been half hell and hell never unfreezes.
Like clockwork—like always— Triss appeared once again, silent at the start, like always, like she was trying to measure Philippa up, get inside of her head and know finally what was going on inside the other woman. Triss was there, again, as she had been probably a thousand times before and would inevitably be once more, leaning on the doorframe, intently staring holes into the back of Philippa’s neck.
“Triss, I’d thank you kindly to stop staring at me like that while I’m trying to work. If you’ve something to speak to me about, stop haunting the threshold like a petulant apparition and say what you must.”
Triss doesn’t respond for several moments and Philippa finally looks up to see she had been crying again. She feels a pang of something despite her best attempts to rebuff the naked honesty that exists in every longing side glance Triss hurls at her without meaning to and perhaps even more so in the words she speaks—all glancing blows when Triss gets like this. It is times like this when Philippa finds Triss both the easiest and most difficult to read.
True, she is a particularly apt in her capacity to identify exactly what is being left unsaid and perhaps even more so, the very weaknesses those who frequent the avenues of courtly intrigue with which she so often finds herself occupied, but something about Triss has always remained just beyond her grasp, no matter how she strains to reach it.
At first, she’d assumed this is what fueled her fascination with the girl—after all, Aretuza surely had taught her to recognize talent when she saw it. But Triss also had a magnetic pull for her in ways Philippa would rather not name.
Philippa heaves a sigh and turns to face Triss, trying to keep her voice impassive as always, “Triss, I’m buried here, if you wish to weep over your dear dead teacher with someone, Yennefer has both far more mixed feelings regarding the matter and emotional capacity than I do.”
And Triss begins to chuckle, a shallow, haunted sound that Philippa feels strike her fiercely between the ribs as Triss visibly strains to hold back the tears—a sharp contrast to the razor’s edge flashing in her eyes.
“You know, sometimes it feels like you genuinely believe grief is a luxury afforded only those who allow their backs to be broken under a boot. Like anyone who’s so desperately, pathetically human as to not stop tears welling up need only wait to hear the telltale snapping of their spine.”
A half-laugh barks out of her throat unpermitted, and she doesn’t miss Triss’ stifled flinch, “Honestly, Triss, didn’t Tissaia teach you anything? Only the foolish give others the right to decide what kind of victim they are.”
Triss stares back at her, something dark and churning and intensely cold in her eyes that Phillipa is acutely aware does not belong there and still she continues,
“Whatever relationship you had with Tissaia was little more than a testament to the power of fear. That’s all a sorceress can expect out of any relationship—an exercise in making these brutal things gentler, calling the thorns rosy, coughing up bullshit and calling it poetry in the name of falsified devotion.”
“Godsdamnit Philippa! You act like you’re above such tawdry human things, but at what point is it just cowardice because you’d rather not face the ground on which you’re founded? Trust does not always have to be a sugar blade! I know you assess everyone exclusively on their capacity to be deadly to you, but everyone isn’t me!”
It all comes rushing out in a single breath, and Philippa fights to keep her face from betraying her emotions and Triss at least has the decency to look scandalized as undoubtedly notices, but still contines,
“Philippa, you hold yourself like a tragedy—bloody but no one save you can remember exactly. Do you honestly think I’m so stupid that I can’t see you wear your past around your neck like an albatross as much as anybody?”
And all Philippa can think is how the hell is someone supposed to answer a question like that? Triss is full of questions and things which set Philippa off kilter in ways she’d rather not name or explain while she’s still bleeding from the outside in and for a second, she forgets to breathe.
There is a point in these sorts of conversations in which Philippa wonders if she is being unnecessarily cruel allowing this thing she shares with Triss to continue in this way. If repeating to herself, "I do not know what it was she expected— she has always been weak in the face of slender fingers and cruel mouths" is merely a means of excusing her own tendencies towards emotional anthropophagy because she has never tasted anything quite so intoxicating as the saccharine sweetness of Triss’ devotion.
There is a point at which she feels cannot bare to look at Triss directly—she is burning in a way that Philippa cannot seem to name or explain which makes her, as someone is never at a loss for words, extraordinarily testy for reasons she would rather not acknowledge. There is no denying that Triss has an effect on her, but Philippa would rather Triss did not know this.
Instead she foolishly allows herself to dance on this tremulous knife edge she ought to have forsaken for the sake of both herself and Triss ages ago. And yet, there is something intoxicating about the sort of intimacy Triss wields like a weapon and she feels them ever nearing territory she’d dare not venture into after all these years of sacred silence her past allows her in all moments excepting sleep.
“Not everyone has your particular affinity for existing in this way, Philippa,” Triss spat, her anger flaring once again, “like something distant, sharp as stars.”
Philippa knows what she is really saying: I know I told you I could bear it, but you’re just not worth the pain.
It wouldn’t be that hard, after all she’s well practiced at the art form of making people spill their secrets, she knows exactly how it's done having witnessed it happen time and time again. Surely if anyone in the world is deserving of a little reciprocity—a little honesty— its Triss.
Philippa could tell her the truth about her home, stop evading her like all the other times she's asked—she could make her understand who Tissaia is—surely, Philippa is more important to Triss than Tissaia. She could tell her that story of how she realized that hell is freezing—that it never unfreezes—that there is always so much more truth than Philippa ever admit in the things she says to Triss. She could make her understand, could open a vein and ask Triss to watch her bleed the same way Triss seems to do for her every time emotion surges in her eyes.
And Philippa honestly considers it for a moment—telling Triss where she comes from, where she left her heart all those years ago, quantifying the nameless pain of watching in the distance, her home, the place she lasts remembers her heart’s beat nameless and somewhere else, writhing as it fell.
She considers handing Triss this sacred thing far longer than she can even admit to herself.
But the only vow Philippa has made with no intention of breaking is that will not allow the King’s tongue to mutilate the only thing she has left of her heart.
And Triss has heard the story already—After all, Philippa talks in her sleep, if only ever in a language Triss cannot speak.
Triss has heard, but perhaps has the decency to allow Philippa the unspoken shame of how much of a person she truly is in exchange for the strangle hold she has on the rest of Philippa’s heart.
She does not know when it happened but like waking up, Philippa had only just realized the truth.
Here, in this place, she is a fool for wanting—and Triss is a fool for believing Philippa is anything more than a dead thing walking.
Still, she remains silent, breaks Triss’ gaze and Triss tries again—gentler, more herself.
“It is possible to love what is rotten—to have an intimacy with death—to know the blood that birthed you. But only if you stop running from it. Only if you admit it exists in the first place.”
Philippa half-stifles a bitter laugh again, realizing Triss has succeeded in knocking her off kilter once again and Philippa finds herself once again endlessly grateful to anyone who is listening that her eyes don’t bleed out heart like Triss’ do.
Instead, Philippa scolds the wounded animal that occupies her chest in these moments of dizzying weakness for rearing its ugly head unbidden.
This thing, the way Triss elicits this deadly vulnerability that wells up her throat—the way she is endlessly present, patient—this thing will kill them both if Philippa doesn’t save Triss from it.
“Is that what you want of me?”
Philippa doesn’t turn to face her as she answers, instead traces her fingers over the edges of the books binding where it is splayed open in front of her, “Don’t expect me to beg your forgiveness. You know I cannot help what I am. Foolish to expect more, really.”
Triss has once again managed to crack open the proverbial door deep inside which Philippa does her damnedest to ensure remains locked, ever undissuaded by Philippa for all her sharp edges and bluntness.
And perhaps Philippa could have told her the truth but instead she ends it once and for all—snuffs out the moment like pushing the door shut on a zombie’s arm.
She could hear the bone snap— she could hear the long-gone body wail.
Justifies it to herself, like always—tells herself no one, not even Triss, is worth forsaking a home she has already betrayed once, and regardless, the truth of where her heart exists beyond the grasp of anything but her native tongue and the relentless singing of her dreams.
Still, it tugs at something deep inside her painfully, as Triss heaves a sigh, turns away from Philippa again—as she’s done a hundred times before and no doubt will a hundred times again before Philippa finds the strength to do what she should have the moment Triss walked into her life.
And Philippa is acutely aware that despite her self-restraint, a threshold had been crossed—she must live with the knowledge that she hesitated despite knowing this had been the best course of action from the very start because the nauseating affinity for Triss she cannot seem to dispel—
Philippa has never known how to forgive herself for all the things she did not become and there is something uniquely disconcerting to her about wondering for the first time if letting something kill you can you end its suffering—if maybe that’s all love really is.
And if maybe, for Triss, it would be worth allowing.