It had been nearly a month since she arrived in Seahaven when she was surprised by a familiar face. It was difficult to recognize Rusper without the thin coating of dirt that covered his face from sun-up to sundown. But it was undeniable– his broad nose and dark eyes caught her eye immediately. He was dressed rather well– which was to say, in his finest smock, as opposed to the usual work rags.
She caught the sad pursing of his lips before he said anything. “What’s wrong?” she called across the street, and he stepped up close to her. He seemed a bit baffled to see her, moderately well-dressed and poised like a city girl. Cordelia realized she probably looked like an entirely different person.
“I’ve come to fetch you, Cor,” he said solemnly. “Your father… well, your father’s passed.”
She expected to be shocked, but the truth was that that was among her many worries when she’d seen his expression. She opened her mouth to say something, then moved on. Rusper looked on, expecting her to cry, or anything, but no such reaction seemed forthcoming.
“Alright,” she said. “I suppose… I suppose we’re coming back for a wake?”
He nodded.
“Let me get my things, and my savings,” she said. “What’s going to happen to mom?”
Rusper shrugged, clearly feeling the weight of the future more solidly than her. That’s when the gravity of the situation hit her.
It should have been raining. But instead it was a rare sunny day.
Up and Down
As much as she had fallen in love with the city, Cordelia was still only herself in the wilderness just outside its walls. Seahaven had been many things for her, foremost, a chance to reinvent her identity. To be more cool and confident. To express more leisurely thoughts.
On some level, though, it was driving her crazy. She had never realized how important to her it was to work from dawn till dusk. She wandered the streets with maddening repetition, scraping together enough money to get by but somehow professionally unsatisfied.
In the woods, though, everything changed. She felt as she did when she was a little girl, picking through fruits and mushrooms, skipping over streams with confidence. It was almost like a mobile meditation. She was plunged back into the comfortable position of a woman alone with her thoughts, and not at all pressured into sharing them, into being witty and sophisticated and insightful.
In the city she felt driven to shake her roots and prove that she was a talented, thoughtful individual. And she loved the challenge of it. But something about her visits to the Western forests and fields and swamps was soothing and healthful. A dose of reality in the middle of the bullshit and the airs of self-confidence.
It was always disrupted when she ran into a demon.
She’d seen them before, on the farm… they’d get into the chicken coop and everyone would wake up in the middle of the night. Once a terrifying, infected bat, easily two feet in wingspan, had found its way into the house. But they’d always been able to trap and defeat them, thanks to the safety of numbers.
Now she was confronted with what might have been a raccoon, if not for the Darkness. She heard it growling before she saw it, the gleam of its eyes and yellow, snaggled teeth in the fading evening light.
There was a tense moment where she didn’t know what to do, and they stared at eachother, feeling one another out. Finally, Cordelia feinted left and bolted, her long legs carrying her swiftly and efficiently, though she was unused to sprinting all-out. Branches and twigs assaulted her, but she kept up her pace until she found Seahaven’s walls again.
And yet, come the next evening, she knew she was going to be venturing out beyond the safe walls again. She couldn’t avoid it, danger or none.
Research
Cordelia steps into the Seahaven library, a place she has come to love well in her time in the city. Never had she seen so many books in her life, and at first there were too many options and she’d drift willy-nilly from shelf to shelf, distracted by any old title. Back home they’d only had one book, and she’d learned to read by brute intellectual force alone. But suddenly she was overwhelmed by texts, and would stop by early in the morning with a particular question on her mind only to stumble out of the place to find the city already dark.
After the first few days, though, Cordelia felt she’d shed enough of her farm-bred ignorance to focus on more specific topics. Primarily those related to the strange and interesting persons she’d run into. Finding her superstitions regarding magic a tad inadequate, she delved into magical topics to gain a greater understanding of channellers, making mental notes to ask Viscount Aanson Doraster about, later. Meticulous plans were forming, by which she planned to surprise and impress him with regard to her sudden depth of knowledge on a subject she’d previously known nothing about.
And then there was the matter of the Vek. She’d found the lack of concrete information on them rather frustrating.
But today her purpose is purely… recreational? Vocational? She wasn’t quite sure. Ever since she’d started thinking about the alchemical arts, she’d wanted to understand them better. She’d always enjoyed cooking, combining this and that and whatever was on hand to make something delicious. And she’d always been rather good at it; she had a head for recipes and flavours. Now she was wondering if that same talent might be applied to medicinal and pharmacological purposes.
So as she makes herself comfortable by the southern nook and pulls out a few treatises and books of general theory, she takes down notes and diagrams. But her mind is hardly on her page, so much as all the good alchemy was doing in the city– that the plague had been cured, that medicine could be distributed and salves applied to burns. How a spoonful of laudanum calms even the most distressed mind.
And yet there were so many commoners as yet uncured, so many people without the money to afford medicine. There has to be a way to make alchemical drugs more available to the population at large, she thinks to herself.
And, of course, she is wondering if this is the path down which her future lies. Her parents had thought she was bound for more intellectual pursuits, but parents are supposed to believe in their children. It was her new friends in Seahaven she believed, when they told her she was bright and capable.
Later on, she wakes up in a start, having dozed off at her studies, her dreams full of alchemical formulae and natural disasters.
Flashback – Departure
Pre-dawn on the farm. Cymur’s light is barely tinging the horizon, and Balor has yet to extend its influence at all. The animals begin to stir and rouse for another day, but there’s a strange discontent to their clucking and shuffling. It’s a feeling that has permeated the whole farm for days, though nobody can say why. A carriage rolls down the beaten road to the old farmhouse, which groans from the strain of standing.
Cordelia has already awoken and takes note of the approaching carriage from her glassless window, concerned. She pulls on her peasant’s smock and descends the stairs.
“There’s a carriage coming, papa,” she announces to the kitchen, where her mother is frying eggs in a pan. A full woman, and her adult height, Cordelia dwarfs both of her parents.
“It’s just new hired help,” says her father. “Me an’ Rusper can’t handle all this land on our own. We’re pulling in some new farmhands–”
“How can we afford that?” Cordelia interrupts. “Don’t you think–”
Her father presses on, raising his voice. “We think it would be a good idea to send you off somewhere, away from all these unattached men. To a big city, maybe.”
Cordelia falters and folds her arms. This was the last thing she was expecting. “I know I’m your little girl, but I’m not a delicate flower. I can handle catcalls, and if any of them try anything I’ll just flatten them and then tell the dogs to teach them a lesson. There won’t be any problems.”
Her mother kept her back levelly to Cordelia, who suddenly notices the older woman’s posture. She is moving tensely and rigidly, and it suddenly occurs to Cordelia that she is not getting the whole picture.
“Oh, gods,” she murmurs, thinking of her father’s massive debts, “You sold the farm to Dirket, didn’t you.”
Her father’s leathery face creases with a sorrowful frown. He says to her, “We didn’t want you to find out. And… and things will be easier, as sharecroppers. We won’t have to sow and reap this whole property on our own.”
Cordelia sits, faint, in her chair– a sturdy thing her father put together out of leftover wood from the barn, the only chair in the house tall enough for her to sit at properly.
“And now we have enough coin to send you somewhere. Anywhere–”
“I already know we’re basically serfs, now, and not even proper farmers,” she sullenly interjects, “That was the point of sending me away, right? To keep me from finding out?”
“No,” her father says, starting to get angry. “The point of sending you away is that there’s nothing for you, here. Except to marry one of the farmhands and continue on as a sharecropper. And… my darling, you’ve always been too smart to be out here tilling the Earth. You can read! You can write! So get out of this rotten old house and figure out why the gods gave you the talents they did!”
She argues as best she can, on the necessity of her staying. There are too many chores that need doing, she says. Who will clean the coup and muck the stables and mop the floors after too many dirty boots have tromped across the house?
But her parents are adamant. She’s going, obligations or none. And over the course of the argument, she begins to accept the idea. Dreams of travel and trade and the mountains and the sea which had long been forgotten emerge from her soul, and before long, they aren’t discuss whether she will go but where.
