Her horse veers off left. Shara steadies it - but looks left, why not, to see what's distracted the horse.
Well, that's one hell of a garden. It's got residual magic over it - the raveler's equivalent of lint, nothing Shara can mess with while the plant raveler's not actively working on it, but there is definitely a plant mage here.
The house has the same property.
And so does - something else.
Three different kinds of raveler-residue over the same property. All recent, though the house, requiring no active maintenance, less so than the garden and the - other thing.
Shara raises a hand; Kayam comes to a halt while Shara squints.
And then the unfamiliar something inside the house flares and Shara gets a very clear look at what's making the third kind of lint.
She promptly loses her breakfast onto the excuse for a trail they're riding on before she can even think about interfering with its work.
"Whoa, milady, what's - what's wrong, were the rations bad -?" asks Kayam
Shara shakes her head. "Some kind of raveler I don't recognize in that house. They're - I don't even know how to describe it. Raveling people."
"...The way you say that I somehow don't think you mean like healers do."
"Not like healers do," shudders Shara, swigging water. "Raveling their - feelings, I guess. There's people in that house and I don't know if there's a thing keeping them all together except the magic."
"Could... you... stop them, if they tried to do it to us?" asks Kayam slowly.
"I think so. I was caught off guard - there, they're doing it again, I can't reach from here but I can see the stitching. I think I could counter it."
"You think."
"If it was coming at me, absolutely - I'm less sure I'd grab it in time if it was aimed at you. It doesn't feel long-range, though."
"Okay. So - what do you want to do, milady?"
Shara thinks.
"Tie up the horses. You hang back here and watch through the window. I'll - knock on the door and see if I can fix the problem by talking. When I've figured out who it is, if I've decided they can't be reasoned with or I'm worried they're going to keep raveling at me until I'm too tired to stop them - I'll let off a flashball and you fold straight in - don't walk through the garden, it'll turn on you if the plant mage wants - and then I guess you kill this particular raveler. Maybe their work will dissolve when they die and the others will be okay."
"What if their work, um, does not dissolve when they die, as a for-instance?"
"Then," says Shara, "we'll be in a house with a bunch of people who just watched us kill their best friend, and you will fold us back to our horses smart-quick and we will run away very fast, but at least no one else will get - mindraveled."
"This sounds a bit more dangerous than your usual sort of idea," says Kayam.
"It's pulling double duty," says Shara, and she dismounts, and approaches the house, and knocks.
"Oh, hi! Random traveler person! You are attracted by the pretty house, lots of people are attracted by the pretty house. If you are a bandit I recommend turning around and walking back the way you came, 'cause this is the wrong house for that. If not, though, we're really friendly! Hi!"
"Two!" says Jony, appearing and smiling brightly. "I'm the plant mage, I'm glad you like the garden. Kesaven's a builder." Kesaven, who has also appeared to have a look at Shara, waves.
That's those two ruled out, then, assuming they're telling the truth.
"Augh!" he hisses, covering his eyes.
Zeviana can't see, she's just as blind as the rest of them - but she's the one with actual combat experience. She follows the voice, the new one she doesn't recognize, and moves to knock the owner's teeth in. With her eyes closed, because she isn't going to be blinded again.
Changing the path of the punch -
Through Adarin's shredded shield goes Zeviana's fist. Kayam tries with her knife again.
This time it hits. There's a wet, choking sound.
Jony and Tima are clinging to each other and crying. Everyone else is screaming, some of them Chelasi's name, and rubbing their eyes.
- and then through the spots and blurred vision she sees who she punched. Then she sees the blood.
"No," she says, and then she's trying to stop the bleeding and it's - there's too much blood, just everywhere. She can't. There's no way. She tries, anyway. "No!"
"Why?" he half-sobs. "She did nothing to you!"
"I'm a metaraveler. You saw. She was something I've never seen before, raveling people, raveling you, and I might have thought it was worth seeing if she had all of your permission to do it until she tried to grab me."
"I would've tried to talk it out with her but she tried to make me like her pretty much as soon as I said I was a raveler. Didn't three mages in the house seem like a lot to you? Until you realize it was four."
"How could - how could you just assume - we were happy," he chokes out at Shara.
"You were manipulated," says Shara.
Anlon shakes his head and gathers Chelasi up into his arms, weeping.
The other friends are still mostly crying.
"If - some of you want to disperse from this house here and don't have other places to go, I can take any number of you to Casasha and help you get settled somewhere," Sharabel says. "If you all want to leave I want to delay leaving until those who were out shopping have come back so they can get explanations and the same offer."
"Chelasi," sobs Anlon.
Jony flings herself out the front door to go comfort herself with plants. Tima, bereft of hugs, takes tentative steps in Adarin's direction. "Adarin?"
Adarin doesn't reply. But he makes another sweeping motion, with his hand. The shield moves from Shara and Kayam - to himself. He does it not for the sake of bodily protection, but for enforced personal space. Tima will not be getting hugs. She will not be getting within two feet of him.
Kayam looks at the remaining people in the room: corpse, Adarin, Anlon, everyone else fled and scattered. "Er, milady. Should we be - dealing with the body -?"
"Don't touch her, neither of you touch her," says Anlon. "I'll burn her when I'm ready. Ought to burn you but she would've wanted me to live."
He doesn't start any sort of conversation or do much of anything, really. He will just be there, in his shield. Curled up around himself and not moving. Occasionally his fist clenches, then he takes a deep breath and it relaxes.
Adarin's bag is deposited next to him, outside of his radius of 'no touching.'
The gardener doesn't kill them when they step out, so they retrieve their horses and tie them up nearer by, and then Shara circulates through the house, shadowed by Kayam. Jony's staying with her plants, uncontested, so she can pass the news to those who are out shopping when they're back, and expects they'll go to Quel's family in Antaurb. Anlon's staying, and Jony doesn't seem to object. Everyone else seems to have a place to go that they can get to by themselves - Tima doesn't but she's tagging along with Dayree. It's only the brother and sister who'll be wanting guidance back to Casasha.
She circles back to him.
"We don't need to wait for the shoppers to get back. When do you want to go?"
"Well I'm ready to go now. C'mon, Rin, do you really want to be here any longer than necessary? I packed your stuff, we can just leave right now."
"So stop it!" she repeats. "Stop it right the fuck now because so help me I will find a way to pummel you for doubting that it's genuine!"
He's not quite sure what he prefers, yet. He's gotten so used to - being surrounded by happy people. Happy people that all got along. So out of curiosity and a missing familiarity with doing anything else, he asks, "What sort of trip of indeterminate length, if you don't mind me asking?"
"So I know how much context to supply. So, Casasha's throne doesn't have traditional inheritance. Or, not all the time. The child or children of the existing monarch regnant get first crack at the position, but if they don't get it by age twenty-one - or if there is no such person - anyone from a pennon family can send anyone they like to have a try. And if that doesn't work commoners can give it a shot, too. The way you get the regnant crown is by convincing the heir crown that you are the sort of person who should rule Casasha, and the traditional way to do that is to have an adventure, rescue one or more people from some sort of horrible fate, and then show up covered in glory and possibly new scars with exciting backstories and see if the crown will float when placed on your head. So I was looking for things to do in that - category, and Casasha's in pretty good not-very-adventurous shape, so I was wandering the wilds. The crown allows you to have your adventures with companions so I brought Kayam."
Shara's horse misses a step; she doesn't fall, but does stumble. Shara keeps her seat, but a less practiced rider may have trouble.
"Um," he says. Then, he releases her from the hug. "Sorry, sorry, reflex -"
Adarin nods. "Yeah. Thanks - I'm not sure what I need, yet. I think I'm still in shock, I mean intellectually I get it, but every now and then I wish Tima were here to hug me or that Quel would sit with me and not ask any questions or - just the place in general." Wince. "Chelasi included. Which makes me feel rather sick."
"I meant prevent them from happening entirely. Tell the rain to stop what it's doing when it's nearing dangerous levels, and go shoo over somewhere else where it's more wanted. But - nope, lost weather. Had to be the one I was leaning towards, too, it couldn't have been the animal talking one."
"Maybe she thought that was depressing. There seemed to be a lot of emphasis on being - happy. Maybe she took it before she knew he was dead and didn't want you to leave to go back to him. Maybe she considered it untidy to have anyone with affections for people who didn't live in the house."
Adarin nods. "It was - subtle, it wasn't - like she demanded our attention all of the time, but I... Remember multiple times if I was busy doing something for long periods of time I would conveniently feel guilty for mistreating my friends, her in particular, and I would stop."
Shara's up in the morning before Kayam. She builds a little fire - she has a artifice foldable knife with a finicky firestarter in one of the compartments, which helps - and fetches some water from the stream they're following and tries to be quiet as she sets about boiling a pot of beans.
"It's not editing. It's - like, okay, there's parts of me that still like her. But! Now there is a huge thing that I can't get over that is terrible and horrific. So because of that, I hate her, on principle. The parts where I still like her are - fuel for that, now, because I hate how I like her and I know the reason why I do, and I hate her for that, too."
"I'm not sure if I'm explaining that well enough, but basically - love can totally turn into hate at the drop of a hat, strong emotions lead to other strong emotions. So if I really want to win, properly win - I need to not give a fuck about her. I'm working on that bit, that one's harder."
"Uh, there is a certain disadvantage to growing the party because it's costlier for me to interrupt a spell than it is for the person to cast it, so if they can try a lot of targets instead of having to pause to check the success of a single spell, I can be wiped out pretty early."
"We usually only eat hot meals breakfast and dinner on the road, and sometimes not those either," Shara mentions. "Takes too much stopping time to pause and cook for midday." She starts saddling up her horse.
"I don't travel outside the country a lot, so the traveling would be less like this. Even if the crown's not impressed with me I'll take some downtime before I pack up and set off again. You could talk to my father about bodyguarding him if you prefer, but two incidental ravelers is well within my personal budget as long as I'm generally doing things and not lounging around."
"Weeks. We stopped to restock twice, once in a trading post sort of place in the wilds and once we dipped into Antaurb, but slightly different trail food is still trail food. Dense caloric stuff. I just want a creampuff and some fruit that hasn't been turned into leather."
Pause.
"Also when you meet other travelers you cling to your weapons and threaten each other."
"So when her birthday rolled around I got her the horse and we went on a brief adventure hunt but found only minor things, and we've been venturing out on a roughly yearly basis since, though not into the wilds before this time - I'm nineteen now. Hopefully I can stop having rescued you."
"Okay, uh - if she were here and I were - unaware of the circumstances - I would be a good deal closer. Arms around waist, head on shoulder - copious... amounts of nuzzling. Some hair petting." He winces again. "... Possibly little kisses to - neck, hair, hands. Or not. Depending on my mood."
"Okay. Within the scope of the princess-and-rescuee relationship: kisses are off the table unless your knowledge of etiquette extends to kissing-the-hands-of-pennons and the weirdly elaborate rules around that, probably best to steer clear of nuzzling, for purely practical I-have-to-look-around-and-see-where-we'r
"You're welcome." Pause. "The guidelines might change after a while when we're around people besides Kayam who pay attention to what I'm doing - a certain amount of clinging and possibly weeping is within parameters for the recently rescued, but people will probably raise eyebrows if you're hugging me a lot after a month and there has been no happy announcement."
"Right, uh - of course. Hopefully I'll be over it in a month so I'm not potentially putting you in an - awkward position."
"I've never worked with a shielder before, so we'll have to poke at it for details. With Kayam I can nudge the endpoints of the folds she makes, or make them bigger or smaller - it's not efficient to do the second thing, she can do it a lot cheaper than I can, but if she's running on empty and I'm not it's good to have the option. I can unfold them, too. And if I want to be a zombie for the next two days I can add a third point to a two-point fold - she can do that without needing more than a good night's sleep, she only gets that tired if she makes something with four points or hangs onto a lesser fold for a long time."
"I write them down. And then they're not inside my head anymore - well, not exclusively - and I can look at them without them sliding around, hiding or trying to look prettier than they are or distorting themselves even further the more I turn them over in my head."
"Okay, well. Chelasi's obvious - she had no respect for my personal space, no respect for things I wanted to do in my spare time, and made things about her. All the time. Tima I think I'd dislike for a similar reason, she - wants what she wants and then if you're not supportive of that, she gets annoyed or upset. It's not as pronounced as Chelasi's, mind you, but it was still - she still didn't come across as someone that respected me as a person. Anlon - I don't know, I feel like he just wanted everyone to get along and worshipped Chelasi, and - that kind of disturbs me, honestly, that level of obsession."
"My head's too - confusing and contradictory to let me be properly angry. I'm angry that my life got marginalized for three years, I'm angry that I don't love my father anymore, but - other than that..." He shrugs. "I think I just pity her, because she was so desperate to - be loved."
"For one thing, it's nice to be a raveler there. I think in Antaurb it's customary to pay for most forms of work by the hour, is that right? Which is kind of - the opposite of the point of raveling. Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but at any rate that's not a firm and general standard in Casasha, you can find work getting paid for results or a salary by the month with bonuses for particular flurries of activity if that works better for you. For another, the crown means that the pennon families tend to try to raise children who would be able to come up with some reason besides 'the crown wants me to' to rescue helpless people - the crown is not impressed if you're acting by rote, is a noticeable pattern - and so I like to think we have a better class of nobility than some of our neighbors."
"I... don't think that would work very well. I'm pretty sure she could have, if she needed, pulled hard and fast enough on those threads she was knitting to have someone previously about to run her through catch her before she passed out from the effort."