She turns her face away then, swallowing in a low contemplation about what needed to be done, in the immediate. The bloodied weapon, her ruined clothes. She knew she must be a sight. From the look of the guards when they had found her, it wasn't much of a supposition that she stepped out too far in her rage, her need to preserve him, their family, and slipped back to the woman who screamed herself hoarse over battlements, who took death in both her hands and begged it to do worse.
But it's faded away, in the face of all this. What's left after is a brutal and unforgiving thing between them and - she turns the blade over in her hand and steps away from him. Not to go far, just to the door that stood open, and the guard that was the other side of it. It's to him she gives the blade - she trusted a Barrayaran to its proper care far more than the last Komarran she saw attempt to clean the thing. A ruse - as she tells him to fetch her water, a cloth, and clean the blade. No, don't bother to replace someone at her position. If he did not mind, she needed a moment, with her husband, alone. He would understand, of course.
Waits there, a bid for time, until the guard comes back with just what she had asked and she takes it with a nod and a slow shut of the door behind her. She walks back to the low table of their rooms, and sets it down before she sits, and puts her hand into the water. She'll bathe, properly, after wards, but for now -
She needed to get some of this off her skin. And she starts, with water wet fingers trickling pink with diluted blood, to fish the phial from around her neck and over her head to let it drop and clatter onto the surface with a dull ring. "I was sixteen when I first met Sir Bors de Ganis. I did not know it then, but he was only one part of something far greater I would be witness to. My ... first husband was still alive then, and Jhansi attracted many travellers, after all - one lone Englishman did not seem - did not seem particularly strange." There's a hitch to the breath, she does her best to never speak of those days as they had happened to her, only that they happened at all. An observation of some other woman's life.
no subject
She turns her face away then, swallowing in a low contemplation about what needed to be done, in the immediate. The bloodied weapon, her ruined clothes. She knew she must be a sight. From the look of the guards when they had found her, it wasn't much of a supposition that she stepped out too far in her rage, her need to preserve him, their family, and slipped back to the woman who screamed herself hoarse over battlements, who took death in both her hands and begged it to do worse.
But it's faded away, in the face of all this. What's left after is a brutal and unforgiving thing between them and - she turns the blade over in her hand and steps away from him. Not to go far, just to the door that stood open, and the guard that was the other side of it. It's to him she gives the blade - she trusted a Barrayaran to its proper care far more than the last Komarran she saw attempt to clean the thing. A ruse - as she tells him to fetch her water, a cloth, and clean the blade. No, don't bother to replace someone at her position. If he did not mind, she needed a moment, with her husband, alone. He would understand, of course.
Waits there, a bid for time, until the guard comes back with just what she had asked and she takes it with a nod and a slow shut of the door behind her. She walks back to the low table of their rooms, and sets it down before she sits, and puts her hand into the water. She'll bathe, properly, after wards, but for now -
She needed to get some of this off her skin. And she starts, with water wet fingers trickling pink with diluted blood, to fish the phial from around her neck and over her head to let it drop and clatter onto the surface with a dull ring. "I was sixteen when I first met Sir Bors de Ganis. I did not know it then, but he was only one part of something far greater I would be witness to. My ... first husband was still alive then, and Jhansi attracted many travellers, after all - one lone Englishman did not seem - did not seem particularly strange." There's a hitch to the breath, she does her best to never speak of those days as they had happened to her, only that they happened at all. An observation of some other woman's life.