ink-splotch:

i. sandry
Sandry took her embroidery up to the highest wall of the duke’s citadel. The guards there nodded recognition. They knew this petite brunette and she knew each of their names. She found her little niche, with its comfortable out-of-place chair in it, and curled up with her feet tucked under her skirts. As Sandry chose her thread, she looked out over the land, out to the slums and the markets, the ships swaying gently in the calm harbor, all the way to clean lines of Winding Circle far in the distance.

She had seen this place through earthquakes, pirates, plague, and murderers, through censuses and visiting dignitaries, her uncle’s heart attack and a half dozen tax collections. All her siblings had gone  out and walked the world, learning new horizons both inside themselves and out. But Sandry stayed.

She found her horizons here, sewing in her uncle’s court while posturing nobles thought her busy hands meant that she wasn’t listening, wasn’t thinking, wasn’t taking their plans apart piece by piece—

Sandry watched as the street lamps were lit, one by one, down the long sweeping streets. Her needle dipped in and out of the cloth. She was seventeen and she was in love with this life. She could never, would never love anything the way she loved this weight of responsibility on her shoulders.

ii. tris
He was a fire-eater who performed in the univeristy courtyards, all grins and sharp cheekbones, letting dangerous things dance over his hands.

Briar would fall over laughing when he heard and he would tease Tris for years. “For you, Coppercurls? Of course they’d be someone who spat flames from their mouth for fun.”

After his performances, the fire eater would wash his hands off with precise care and slip into the university libraries. He was no mage and he had no rich father to pay his tuition, but he read (almost) as fast as Tris. He stacked books high and knew when to talk about ancient hieroglyphs and when to shut up and turn pages.

And he wasn’t afraid of her.

Tris thought about falling in love when he listened to her thesis abstract with rapt attention and asked piercing questions when she was done.

She thought about it when he slipped her his favorite book instead of a kiss.

But Tris fell in love when she took him out into a storm and he gripped her hand like he wanted to be there. She fell in love when he touched the lightning curling through her hair. Every hair on him stood on end and he didn’t drop his hand.
 
iii. daja
Meeting Rizu had been like the first time Daja had pulled gold wire, in Frostpine’s workshop at ten. It had opened up a whole new world. It had given her a whole new life and put something beautiful in her hands. The metal had sung to her.

Gold was the kindest metal, the most forgiving, and Daja, for all her work with iron and all her fame with bronze, would always have a special place for it in her heart.

But she didn’t look for gold when they got back to Emelan. She made nails and hinges and horseshoes. She kept a sketch of Rizu that she tried not to look at too often. Daja did not feel beautiful. She did not feel worthy of beautiy.

Briar dragged her out to pubs. Daja left them early and didn’t listen for her brother coming home hours later with a guest or two.

Sandry dragged her to tea with her uncle and to weaving exhibitions that bored Daja to tears. Her saati meant well. They were still trying to relearn each other, after years of growing apart. But every now and then Daja would see that spark in her saati’s eyes and remember that at her very core Sandry was always Sandry.

Daja dragged herself out to visits at Lark’s and trips to various local smithies. The grander they were the worse she felt. Gold engravings and elaborate, lovely work lined the tables. Daja’s hands felt too big, clumsy and sooty. Rizu had traced her palm and called her beautiful, once, but when Daja had asked her to come with her Rizu had begged her to stay, and Daja had left anyway.

So Daja went to littler smithies, the ones tucked in the back of stables or renting out the bottom floor of a grumpy two-penny-bit mage’s apartment. Daja talked horseshoes and wagon repairs and charmed their anvils if they asked it of her.

Helen’s smithy was behind a stable. She was a small woman, for a smith, but clearly deeply heavily muscled despite the fact she only came up to Daja’s sternum. She barely looked up from her engraving work until she saw the glint of Daja’s bronze hand.  Scrambling up (this is when Daja realized how very tiny she was), Helen reached out for Daja’s arm with all of Sandry’s careless vivacity, but didn’t touch.

“It’s—”

“A long story,” supplied Daja.

“something I’ve never seen before,” said Helen and lifted her eyes to Daja’s. “May I?”

Daja waited for her hand to pull back, defensive, for the back of her head to whisper damning things about girls who left beautiful, soft, loving young women in faraway courts and walked away.

But this smith, who still hadn’t given Daja a name and wouldn’t for two visits more, much too distracted by talking living bronze and hammer preferences, she was looking at Daja with eyes that were a warm, pale brown, almost gold. She had soot on her cheeks.

Daja unfurled her bronze fist and offered it to her, palm up and open.

iv. briar
Briar left a beautiful, content woman in his bed and hopped out his window to get to the sheltered garden at the back of Daja’s house. It was his house, too, he supposed, but it didn’t feel like it.

This garden though, with its thick fragrant jasmine and flowering ground cover, did. He’d tucked a patch of soft moss into a shaded corner.

Running his fingers through it as the cold moonlit air banished the last lingering traces of his bad dream, Briar remembered a patch of moss in the dank parts of a cell he had visited three times. It had given him his name.

When Briar was ten, he had reached out on a sunlit garden path and a pea shoot had twined itself around and around his fingers, singing in a language he hadn’t learned yet. He knew it now, could convince the plant to grow another way, or cure it of mold, or call all its buds into riotous bloom.

He felt so distant, now, from that moment of sunlight and incomprehensible joy.

These hands had bled and curled in pain. They had bled others dry, too. It was defense, it had been war, it was for Evvy and Rosethorn and—he still woke at night from sweat-soaked dreams.

He felt like he had years of grit under his fingernails, not good soil, not loam but grit: rocky grey earth that never grew anything but twisted weeds.

And maybe he did.

Beautiful things could grow in unlikely places: Chammur’s rocky passages and Hajra’s hard streets, a cold dank cell and the ugly battlefields they’d left high in the Gyongxe mountains.

Briar was standing here in the cold night air, in this garden he’d built for his sisters. These hands he had buried in the jasmine— they made medicines and coaxed his shakaans into the shapes they needed. They teased Evvy and they brushed over the collarbones of lovely, laughing women.

These hands were his and they were worth loving. Even stained, even soiled, even with the grit of all his losses and worst moments tucked into them, they were his.