Work Text:
"You're going to fix Cyd," she tells it.
It stares at her, and she sneers back.
"I am going," it replies, silky smooth and with an echo not meant to still be in this world, "to do no such thing."
She opens her mouth to argue. It beats her to it.
"I have the Houses breathing down my neck enough as it is. I do not need the complications that un-petrifying someone that could point at them and go 'that's who turned me to stone, Marshal!' would bring."
She narrows her eyes. "You will fix Cyd." This time, it isn't a suggestion.
Behind her, Teor shifts unhappily, but he doesn't know what's in front of him. None of them do, except for her, and she will not let it touch them.
She glances over to where Murray and Azune are dramatically dropping some box they're moving from one wing to another, while Hal and Shadia silently shove some of the smaller, lesser missed objects into their pockets. She flutters over to whisper into its stolen ear.
"They'd rip you to pieces," she breathes. "Shatter you, if they knew. You wouldn't want that, right?"
She'd feel bad, if Bolaire Lathalia wasn't just another character it plays. Thjaz had promised her, and he didn't break his promises.
She drags a needle down from it's eye, across it's cheekbone, chipping the clay, ever so slightly, as she does, to drive the point home.
The hiss of pain it lets out is just another performance, of course. Thjaz used this one against it all the time.
She sheathes her needle. Flutters back to the edge of the desk. For some reason, Azune has a hand on his warhammer; Murray is twitching with rage; and Hal is seething in silence.
Strange, but not her problem.
"So you're going to fix Cyd for us, aren't you," she tells it. It's lip curls in disdain as it nods, short and sharp, but she supposes it has to play Bolaire - they've got company, after all.
'Zune is already moving to swat Thimble out of the air, sending her careening into a shelf. This is only slightly helped by Murray, who violently wrenches chance sideways as he swings. Just enough to make it hurt.
He has no idea how they're going to explain this to Shadia, who's hovering at his shoulder as he himself hovers at Bolaire's side.
The truth might do, actually. Their partner was threatened and they reacted. Not even unproportionally, by orcish standards.
Hal is busy feeling out the tone of this spell. He's never had to cast it himself, but 'Zune had taught it both him and Murray, just in case.
Hal trusts the rest of the employed capitalist stooges with Shadia's life. It is worth so much more than his own, after all.
He lets himself feel out the tune. Anticipate it. Hum along.
Bolaire startles slightly. Understandable, Hal's little ditty tastes of clay and ceramic and chipped paint and theatre and truth.
In short, he hums of Bolaire, in all the ways that matter. Such as no longer being chipped by Thimble's little threat display.
He nods to himself, pleased, as Bolaire's chipped cheek heals itself.
Shadia watches at his shoulder as Hal works. He quietly resolves to teach her, too, how to feel out the tunes of reality.
It is, he privately feels, a part of the bardic tradition that the Houses will not be able to take from them, no matter how they try to stamp out illegal magic. Orc's might has well have been illegal, in a time they refuse to let themselves forget. They know how this ends.
Murray, meanwhile, is leveling a glare at Thimble's slightly concussed fluttering.
Hal cannot find it in himself to be apologetic. Not even for Thjazi. He really should have known that Halandil Fang is a deeply vindicative man. He does not take lightly to people hurting his own. Especially not someone who could have been a sister, in another life.
But Thjazi was away so often, and Thimble so stuck to his side. He saw them together, if at all, and he saw them rarely, if ever.
Shadia and Hero know his partners better than they knew their uncle by blood, better than they know the woman who should have been their aunt, and they've only been together for a few months.
Frankly, that tells you more than enough, he feels.
Bolaire doesn't count. He was their uncle years before they got together.
The pining doesn't count, either.