(123-01-31) Girl Talk
Girl Talk
Summary: The Merqueen has some questions for her holy hostage.
Date: OOC date: 31 January, 2016. IC date: ???
Related: A Septa in the Court of Thieves
Players:
Merqueen..Rhaera..

Rhaera is given a room in the Deepwater Manse that's more fit for a guest than a prisoner, except that there are guards always posted at her door and seldom is she allowed to leave it. One day blends into the next. It's hard to pinpoint how many days it's been when the Merqueen comes calling, walking into the room midafternoon without a care for what her guest might be doing. She stalks in and helps herself to a chair, resting her elbows on the arms of it, steepling her fingers, and staring at Rhaera intensely. "I have questions."

The "guest" is laying on her side on the bed when she's set upon by the Merqueen, her hands folded almost prayerfully beneath her covered head. Some of the colour has faded from her cheeks and lips since she arrived in the Court of Thieves, in this, the darkest part of an already strange city, but without a hint of expression on her resting face, Rhaera seems peaceful.

When she opens her eyes, they're immediately staring at the Merqueen. She doesn't otherwise move. "Do I have answers?"

"The question isn't whether you have them. The question is whether you have the sense to give them to me when I ask for them." The blonde woman crosses one leg over the other, her right ankle resting on her left knee. Dressed in leather breeches and a loose white shirt, rather than like a queen at all.

"I want to know why you came here, rather than let your people take you to the sept. The truth. And if you don't want to tell me, you'll stay here until you do. Otherwise we won't be letting you go to your family. Not when there's a chance you'll bring them back to our doorstep with a tall tale about having been brought here against your will." The Merqueen leans back in her chair. She waits.
<FS3> Merqueen rolls Intimidation: Good Success.

Now that Rhaera is alert, life has found its way back into her face in subtle ways; an expression at the edge of nothing, her features utterly still yet seeming, somehow, amused. After an ill-advised length of silence, staring at the Merqueen, she rolls abruptly onto her back. Though she stares now at the ceiling, her dark eyes are tempted sideways, always just an increment away from studying the other woman again. "They weren't my people," she explains sourly. "They were my wardens. They thought I had done something horrible," she says, the word mocking, her eyes rolling, "and so if I went straight to the sept, I do not know if I would step out again." She stretches her arms up to rest her hands behind her head, leisurely. "Everyone is so dramatic at the Eyrie."

She listens in impassive silence, though the twitch of her ankle back and forth gives away her increasing impatience (or disinterest) with the answer she's given. "Maybe my question was unclear," the Merqueen suggests, even though her tone of voice does not imply, particularly, that she thinks it was. "I want to know what you stand accused of."

"They say I hurt someone." Rhaera states it simply, her voice somewhat airy and faraway, as if she is a neutral party to her own so-called crime when just seconds ago she was bitter. "Burned him. A noble lord … if you must know. The Lady of the Eyrie questioned my devotion to the house and to the Faith…" And just when she has become so comfortable, she sits up, on the verge of a frown. "And so," she says like a sigh, spreading her hands apart; they remain so, hovering in the air, as she looks again upon the impassive ruler. "Here I am."

"They say so." It finally gets interesting, and now the Merqueen is quiet, staring at Rhaera no less intently all the while. She tracks her, from laying down to sitting up, reading the language of her body and what she doesn't say as much as what she does.

"If you are a woman of faith," and she seems to put particular emphasis on the if, "Why do you not surrender to your gods and their servants for judgment?" The Merqueen speaks with a sort of conviction of her own. It colors her next words with an accusation. "Or is there a reason they say so?"

Rhaera bows her head. "Who's to say, but the gods, what's right and wrong, even those of the sept? He will live, with his own sin. The sept is very powerful," she says, soft and quiet. It is a certain truth, but the septa's voice is gossamer as gauze, not fully solid under the weight of the Merqueen's implications. "Sometimes the faithful judge more harshly than the gods themselves." She inches a glittering gaze upward to the woman. "That is why I sent a message to my father, in Driftmark, to ask for his help in assuring my … character; but I have no way of knowing if he's received it."

"You think your kin will shield you from the wrath of the sept?" The Merqueen's tone is laced with a surprising amount of scorn. Dismissive, almost out of hand, of the plan Rhaera seems to have concocted for herself. Rhaera says it's for the gods to say what is right and wrong, but the blonde sitting across from her seems to consider that to be her own province, too.

Rhaera smiles in the face of the Merqueen's scorn, but it is soft and humble; a septa's smile or, at least, an approximation of one. "I can only hope they will convince the High Septon and the Most Devout that I am not deserving of such wrath," she says, again bowing her head low. Her head tilts within its bow as she looks up at the Merqueen with pointed curiosity. "Are you a woman of faith?"

But the Merqueen doesn't like being asked questions. She plants both feet on the floor, pushes back her chair with a scrape, and stands. "Do you think that if I say yes we will have something in common?" She doesn't move to exit. Not yet. "You're a coward. Not because you've tried to escape your fate. Because you've left it in the hands of so many others. Me. The sept. Your family." The same scorn broils beneath the surface of her words. "My god cares nothing for the weak and the craven."

The Merqueen's scorn finally sets something to spark in Rhaera when she's called a coward. A spark turns to an angry flare, and she swings her legs aside to kneel on the bed, instinctive and animal despite her regal bearing. She either means to stand on the level with the queen of the underworld or pounce, looking at odds with the staid, religious garb she's donned in. "I am none of those things," she hisses. "What power does a septa have? Except over the sick, the god-seeking, the children, the needing?" All of whom she seems to scorn with disgust, in that moment. "I have my name, even though they would take it from me as well, and so I will use it. To your advantage, I should add. I'm sure there will be a few angry dragons wishing to scratch at your door but I won't lead them here."

The Merqueen doesn't seem surprised by the sudden flash and flare and hiss of the creature that lurks beneath the facade. "Your dragons could have bought you fare on a boat to Essos," she challenges, her chin raised so that even though Rhaera kneels on the bed, the blonde woman still has that slight advantage over her. "I guess you'll use the rest of your time here to pray your family don't feel so compelled by their faith they return you to the sept."

The wayward septa's face tenses in its frame of plain fabric, and for a split second she looks as though she may grimace outright at the Merqueen. Instead, she nods in agreement, lowering her gaze subserviently … only to dare say, "Perhaps I should pray to your god."

At that, the Merqueen smiles. Not with Rhaera; at Rhaera. "I'll give you to him, if you like. And then you'll know for certain what will become of you." Now she seems like she intends to leave. She prowls toward the door.

As instinctively as she rose, Rhaera leans backward away from the woman, even as the Merqueen makes for the door — but she smiles in the same breath with the satisfaction of learning something about the mysterious underworld ruler. Saying nothing — perhaps gaining sense — she lays back down upon the bed, turning her back.

At the sound of the door closing behind the Merqueen, Rhaera is returned to her peace and quiet, with no indication of what might come next, or when.

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