presents...
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The Oracle
The wages of sins were not, apparently, all that great. Mateo Bianco's room was in a squallid tenament in a bad part of Chiarisa, down on the canals and well away from the palace. It wasn't that he couldn't afford better; they found a sack of coins stashed in the room. He'd needed the kind of place where questions aren't asked, even about emaciated foreign women who never leave the room. Such anonymous dens came either very, very cheaply, as here, or else at such cost that three of the moneybags would have been insufficient to procure a week's lodging.
The landlord was bribeable enough. His rents weren't nearly high enough to make silence worth his while, and the man and the woman asking fairly screamed "nobility" with their dress and mannerisms. And the nobility were predators. If their prey was in Room 4, best let them get right to it rather than decide to focus on something a little nearer at hand - like him. The small pile of senators swiftly disappeared from the battered, stained counter and a key tagged "4" appeared in its place.
Odessa Blanchard reached out and took it with one gloved hand. Angelo Donati seemed content to let her have her way with this enterprise, so long as he was there to see for himself that the Oracle was freed. She looked at him sidelong. He had surprised her, which she never accounted a good thing. It was not something she planned to have happen again.
She paused in the reeking hallway to reach for her rapier. It was in her little pocket of Portal-space, the same place she'd left the wine bottle and poisoned cups. She was no expert - politics took entirely too much time to allow for enough practice - but had found her skill sufficient on a few prior occassions. She let the pocket close and approached the door, fitting the key into the clumsy lock.
The door opened into a small room, containing a pallet and some bags and little else. The Oracle, clinging to the wall and trying to stand erect, startled when the door opened and dropped back down to the pallet. She watched, silent, as Odessa and Angelo entered the room; Angelo closed the door. She looked from the door, to Angelo, to Odessa with her colorless eyes. "Dové Mateo?" she asked finally, in a voice that betrayed neither hope nor fear.
"In Macha's battle-hall, where her wolves rip his flesh and her ravens strike at his eyes," Odessa answered, in Avalonian.
The Oracle sat up a little straighter, surprised at this. "Who are you, that you speak my tongue?"
"Odessa of Breg, seer, and Macha's spearmaiden. We come to take you home." The young woman shrank back, shaking her head.
"Che cosa accade?" Angelo wanted to know what was going on. Odessa held up a hand to him, not sure herself. "You do not wish to go home?" The Oracle's head kept shaking back and forth. "Who are your people?"
"MacIntyre," she said at length. She paused, and a light kindled in her pale eyes. She touched her own chest. "Una MacIntyre. My name is Una."
"He never called you that."
"...no."
Of course he hadn't. Only people had names, not tools. She wished she'd met the Bianco under different circumstances; it sounded as if she might've learned quite a bit from him, and there were few people she was willing to say that about. "Don't you want to go home, Una MacIntyre?"
Una wet her lips. "No. Yes. I do, but... what if they send me away again?"
"Send you away." She said it in a tone that sent Montaigne courtiers scurrying for cover in le Chateau.
Una nodded. "Yes, I... " She seemed to think the better of what she was about to say, although Odessa was getting an inkling. Una looked around the room abruptly, a trapped look on her face. "I'll... go to the hills. Please."
Carefully, the countess approached the pallet, holding up the key they'd taken from Mateo. Una looked from it to the sword, and Odessa stooped to put the weapon down. "Better?" she asked, smiling slightly despite herself. "You," she continued, "are hardly in the shape to survive on your own." She sat on the edge of the pallet and looked meaninfully towards Una's legs, curled up underneath her.
Una hesitantly shifted her weight and stuck out one stick-thin leg with a shackled clasped around the ankle. But her eyes went to Angelo. "I will be fine on my own. I want no more of keepers."
"You are sick, and weak, and in a place very, very different from MacIntyre lands," Odessa told her, wiggling the key into the shackle. "In Breg, you know, we believe that seers are blessed. Favored by Mathonwy - Aengus, you call him - with foresight."
"You... you do?"
"We do. We honor them. And, by the oaths I owe my Lady, I would not leave you alone and sick in these distant lands." Anyone from Charouse would have been surprised to see the unguarded emotion in the countess's eyes - and surprised to notice how much more it made her resemble Cardinal Durkheim. The key finally turned and the black iron band cracked open. Una stared for a long moment and then, with a sob, lifted her leg free of it.
She turned again toward Angelo, and then back to Odessa. "I will live no more a captive. Give me a blade." Odessa nodded, took a small, ornamented knife from her belt and presented it to Una. The Highlander held it for a long minute, looking down at it but not, Odessa thought, watching it - she was waiting to see if they'd take it from her again. "Where will we go?"
"There is a fishing village not too far from here, and a house in the village. You will have a room in the house, and keys to all its doors. There will be a healer in the house, a woman, who will see that you become healthy again. And then... you may go to the hills, Una MacIntyre, if you wish it, or stay in the house on the edge of the sea. Or I will find you a ship that sails to Breg, and a place in the High King's court or a cottage in the forest or at Mathonwy's temple."
"I will not stay," she said quickly. "This is an ill-fortuned place."
"As you like it. Come, Angelo will help you up." Odessa beckoned him over.
"Thank you," Una said, once he had her up. She regarded Angelo quite closely with her water-colored eyes before saying something to Odessa, who translated it for him.
"She says that you will walk with Death on a drowning island." She shrugged. "Good thing you're going back to the mainland soon, eh?"
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