ravkanwitch | [closed post: shadow and bone]

[closed post: shadow and bone]

Nina is back in the library but with a different task in mind today. She has a couple books on weaponry spread out on the table in front of her this time and she's flipping through them idly, glancing at some designs. Weapons have never been her forte; who needs them when all you need to do is think and squeeze a hand and be able to incapacitate a man that way? But death - death is more fickle than life. She can't just defend herself with the concept of death, especially in a place that seems to lack it. No bodies to control, no graves with secrets to collect. She needs something more substantial.

And yet, it's a slow process. She finds herself distracted, thinking about the day of visitors. Seeing Kaz Brekker in the flesh again. Liu Mingyan. Speaking with Baghra about the Darkling. She's thinking about the long, long life that must have led to lead him to who he is now. She's not necessarily sad, just -- pensive. Lost in thought.

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It's clear that Nina has had combat training, albeit with different weapons. It's clear, too, that she's seen true danger--she moves with a certainty that speaks to her own willingness to defend her life at any cost. Laertes paces smoothly back, grinning all the while. (He wants her to see that this is good, that this is fun, that he is no enemy seeking her end.) "Good! Now we'll switch. When thou art ready, press thine advance again. Needst not tell me when; I'll see it, and answer." A little faster, now, he advances on her.

Nina moves backwards carefully, foil held in front of her, retreating with the form that he taught her. After a beat, she changes it up and begins advancing on him again. Her form still isn't the best but she does move with confidence.

Laertes just smiles harder, telling her, "Good, good, there's promise in thy steps! Now--mark how thou holdest thy blade. It should be about of a level with thy heart, or perhaps a little lower, and square to the center of thee when thou standest to the side. Canst draw a cross with thy blade, and return to center?"

Nina's blade had been slightly off-center, so she re-centers it after drawing a cross, as he asks. "Like this?" She asks, holding the blade a bit lower and more centered.

"There, that's as it should be. Now imagine thou art defending thyself from a blow--thou needst must parry to shed thine opponent's blade. Some fencers divide their parries into four quadrants, using that cross as a guide, and name eight parries--two to each, depending on the angle of the wrist. Needst not remember each of their numbers, nor perfectly capture their forms; I certainly don't." He grins. "This system of numbering came after my time, or else from somewhere I've never fenced, because I learned it from a book here. Take what I show thee as a place to begin, and not an ideal for which to strive. In a real bout, it may be needful to answer a blow lower or higher, further in or further out. Nonetheless, I'll walk thee through these eight, that thou mightst see several ways to defend thyself." Laertes makes his own cross in the air, then counts as he demonstrates: prime, seconde, tierce, quarte, quinte, sixte, septime, octave.

Nina follows his direction for the eight parries, paying close attention and copying his example -- then repeats it again, to ensure that she remembers it.

"Thank you for teaching me this," she adds. "I feels a bit... like I'm back in school in the Little Palace again with the other Grisha, but I've always liked school."

"I liked it, as well--and I cannot be grateful enough to thee for organizing so many opportunities for us and Janet to learn." It feels a little tender, still, to speak of Janet; she's been nothing but cordial to him, but he is always aware when they meet that he has done great injury to her happiness (or let it be done, which amounts to the same thing).

"Well, both you and Janet are good friends, so it's not even close to a hardship," Nina says easily. Her eyes suddenly brighten a little, sparked by an idea. "Do you want to go bone hunting with me?"

"Oh, let's!" He suddenly remembers a discovery from the day when he and Claudius went hunting for an alchemy lab, and says, "I know a room that will have some interesting bones for thee, though I know not whether any will be large enough for a blade. Let's put away our foils and take a look." He suits action to word and puts up his foil, then belts on his rapier again to lead her toward the taxidermy room.

Nina puts hers away as well, trailing after him again curiously. "A room with bones?"

"More skins than bones, but I do remember some skeletons in it. I was eager enough to be away--I was looking for something else at the time--but it may yet reveal better secrets to our scrutiny." It was between the library and the tailor-shop-turned-alchemy lab, he remembers, so he leads her in that direction until he recognizes the deep reddish wood of the door. After a peek inside to confirm that it is indeed the room he remembers, he opens it with a slow, grand flourish. "Behold: our menagerie."

Nina enters the room and spins in a slow circle, taking in all the shelves of taxidermied animals, odd skeletons interspersed here and there, and jars of who knows what. Dead animals don't give her the same sense as humans do, the way some people can sense which direction a body of water lies in -- but she can still manipulate their bones.

"What is this place?" She asks, in wonder, meaning both the room and the mansion. "Why are these here?"

"I wish I knew," says Laertes. He steps fully into the room, studying a model of a raven with eerily realistic glass eyes. But for a thin patina of dust, it looks as though it might tilt its head and croak at him at any moment. "Perhaps for thee?"

"Me?" Nina asks him, a little startled. She touches a little skeleton model of some sort of rodent. "I mean, I'd like to think I'm wonderful -- but I'm not anyone special."

"This place answers our wants, like an overeager lover showering us with gifts," says Laertes as he moves from beast to beast, searching for something with bones. "It gave Tress her spores, though there are no moons here to supply them; it gave Sagramore a place where Fenyes might be cared for as she deserves. Not all of its gifts are welcome, but some--like those--are needful. There may yet be needful gifts in here."

It's very telling that it wasn't the first thing on her mind, that she's grown comfortable here at the mansion and it isn't at the forefront of her thoughts, but Nina suddenly thinks of the jurda parem in Lan Wangji's possession and frowns, pausing in her search. "I did find something. It feels like so long ago. It was an... unwelcome gift."

He turns away from a jar containing a preserved pair of lungs--when he looks at them too long, he could swear they're breathing. "Oh?"

"It was--" How does she begin to describe what happened? That she could have killed hundreds of men with just a twitch of her pinky finger? The weeks of recovery from addiction? She speaks carefully. "It was something from my world that is very dangerous to me. I was surprised to find it, but I gave it to Lan Wangji for safe-keeping."

She looks subdued and thoughtful for a second, but shakes it off with a smile, happy to change the subject. "Do you see anything that might be large enough?"

Laertes pokes through a drawer that's full of tiny, perfect bird skulls, then another below it full of neatly labeled vertebrae. Working systematically down the body, he reaches a drawer full of femurs of various sizes, including one labeled ... "Would Temeraire find it ghoulish, if thou didst wield a blade of dragonbone?"

Nina makes a small face. "I don't think I should upset a dragon if I can help it." Then again, the bone shards that she normally uses are human bones, taking from a graveyard and fashioned into the shape that they are with the assistance of first, Wylan, and then, honed by one of the Fabrikators in the Little Palace.

"Then take thy choice of these; I think these--" he glances at the largest label "--femurs are the nearest in length to a sword thou wilt find here."

Nina tries to pick up a rhino femur bone but it's quite heavy and wide. "It's heavy," she says. "It also feels denser than that of a human's."

A label on the next drawer catches her eye; the drawer is a lot wider and taller than the one they're currently looking at, too. "Dinosaurs?" She asks Laertes, reading the label out loud.

"Some kind of lizard?" Laertes guesses, leaning on his Greek again. He would have studied that language far more diligently if he'd known how often he'd be using it! "A ... terrible lizard?"

"Terrible lizard," Nina repeats, opening up the drawer and staring at the bones. "These are gigantic."

Laertes glances down, and swallows. "The creature to which they belong would be far larger than our Temeraire."

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