a millstone hung

[sideways]

Title: A Millstone Hung
Link: AO3
Rating: G
Series: Pillars of Eternity (Sagani, The Watcher, Vela)
Wordcount: 2,556
Summary: Sagani helps the Watcher grapple with the fallout from her decision in Sacrificial Bloodlines.
Tags: No Archive Warnings Apply, Referenced Past Child Death, Soul Ancestor Problems, Late Game Spoilers
Remarks: A certain cameo in Deadfire kickstarted this fic, and half a year later I've managed to tie it off. It's been long enough since I played PoE that my memories of the actual quest are pretty rough, but hopefully I haven't skewed too far from any facts! It was fun trying to capture Neus' inherent eerieness in combination with her more sweet-natured personality (itself under siege by this point in the game).

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Itumaak's cold nose rouses Sagani from a dream of home so bittersweet she can't tell if she's sorry to leave it.

 

It lingers like whiteleaf on the tongue: the warmth of a fire drying towels by the hearth and the knots of Kallu's braided beard pressed against the crook of her neck, his soft hands linked across her belly. 

 

And Aniik. It had been littlest Aniik in her arms, still pink-cheeked and full of promise.

 

The ache in her chest is heavy and years-dulled, and Sagani folds a gentle fist over it, allowing it time. Her living children have most of her heart, as they should. It is only fair to leave the dead their tender bruises.

 

One last duty here in the north: that much she's promised herself and others. Then she's taking southward trails on rabbit feet and not stopping until the peaked tips of Massuk huts stagger the horizon.

 

Sharp teeth grip her wrist, gentle enough to break thoughts without breaking skin, and Sagani tips her head sideways in her bedroll to meet the fox's glittering eyes. Itumaak is not just awake but alert, ears flicking and swivelling to chase noises in the night.

 

"Hm? What's the matter?"

 

She hears it for herself in the next moment: the thin, stuttering, unhappy sounds of an infant finding itself in discomfort and preparing to make it the problem of everything in ten miles with ears worth speaking of.

 

Sagani sighs and pushes herself upright, raking tangled hair out of her eyes, and reaches for her boots. The dream makes a lot more sense, all of a sudden.

 

They'd ringed their camp as best they could, their newest and most vulnerable at the centre. Once upon a time that still would have left her sleeping with an eye open; now she just thinks with dry humour on any would-be bandits having their pick of unwelcome ends depending on which sleeper they disturbed first - assuming they made it past the orlan keeping watch somewhere in the trees in the first place. The clear moon overhead is bright enough to pick between the web of lines and pegs, Itumaak stepping soft-pawed over hidden trap runes with the delicate ease of animal instinct.

 

Thumbing gritty sleep out of one eye, Sagani slips a hand under the canvas flap of the tent and lifts it overhead, bringing the moonlight with her in a soft spilling past her shoulders.

 

It falls unmercifully across the shapeless wraith bent low over the cradle like a spider descending, its face a charcoal etching half-smeared into twisted dark above the mewling infant. Rymrgand's frozen breath skips Sagani's heart out of rhythm, all the old tales clotting instantly in her veins: death's doorway, and the dark usher come to see souls through it.

 

Pox and plague, starving bellies, a babe gone still and blue-lipped in the night-

 

At her side, Itumaak stretches his jaws wide around a yawn that ends on a soft, unconcerned yip.

 

Right. Sagani breathes out hard through her nose, shaking off twilight phantasms, and looses her hold on her knife to set her hands on her hips instead.

 

"Watcher," she says. "Pretty sure you're meant to be sleeping."

 

"I know."

 

The godlike's voice, hoarse at the best of times, has been reduced to dry leaves turning over in the wind and Sagani has to strain to hear it over the babe's fretful whining. A bony hand emerges from the folds of the heavy blanket draped across the Watcher's shoulders but stops short of offering any comfort to the squirming bundle, instead hovering hesitantly above the cradle as if it is warded against her touch.

 

Neus turns her face towards Sagani, mouth crimped in tired bewilderment beneath the dark, tumorous expanse that swallows the space where any eyes might be met. "Sagani, did I steal a child?"

 

"Depends on how you look at it, I guess," Sagani says dryly. "I think there are plenty who'd say you rescued her."

 

"Ah," Neus murmurs. "They are generous."

 

A rough pat to Itumaak's neck sits him obediently at the entrance, and the Watcher drifts backwards as Sagani approaches the crib. Inside, the little orlan has just about undone the first layer of her goat-hide swaddling, and tiny furred fists freely wave their protest in the air. Small mercies: there's no warm stench rising to meet Sagani's nose, so the problem likely lies at the other end.

 

"Tsuut-tsuut, little one," she says absently, levering the babe into her arms. Muscle memory unthinkingly settles the orlan against her chest and the noise immediately softens into quieter hiccupping, but needle teeth still flash at her insistently in the dark, chewing the air.

 

Sagani eyes the Watcher hovering uncertainly at her elbow. Shadows are never kind to Neus, leaching the small warmth from her skin and creating deep valleys in the landscape of fleshy growths capped across her head until she looks like something too long inside its own gravecloth. She stands steadier on her feet than Sagani has seen in a while, but there's still a hunched droopiness about her that falls well short of the energetic young woman first met at the lonely crossroads, before any of them had known where those roads would lead.

 

"Sorry," Sagani says. "Itumaak's ears are usually the sharpest around, but I guess you beat him this time."

 

The Watcher's fingers twist into the folds of the blanket. "I think I was the one who did the waking, actually." Her face is turned downward to the babe, and it's true it doesn't seem to enjoy the attention, ears pinned back tight. "I only meant to look."

 

"Look or look?" Sagani says, raising an eyebrow, and the Watcher sighs fretfully and tugs at the end of her nose, a gesture reassuringly familiar.

 

"A glimpsing like any of your own," says the eyeless godlike. "Nothing deeper. Just to be sure it was no dream."

 

Painful pinpricks pluck at Sagani's scalp as grasping claws no bigger than a grass beetle catch hold of a loose braid and start to pull. She grimaces, tilting her head under the pressure. "Oh, she's very real."

 

A corner of the Watcher's lips lift in a smile, but only briefly. Neus rests a hand against the basket, still tentative as though she might upset the structure with even that small gesture. Not likely. Sagani has lashed the cradle together herself from green branches, traveller's style: sturdy once standing but easily pulled apart when breaking camp, and of a height that would keep the child out of reach of morning's damp. They'd all pitched in to pad out the reed basket with a motley collection of hides, blankets, and what clothes could be spared. The most noble sacrifice was Kana's sharkskin belt, offered with grave ceremony to fasten the basket to its stand.

 

It lacks a maker's mark, though: Neus has provided nothing as yet, unless one counts the babe itself, having barely thrown her bedroll upon the ground before she was collapsed into it. And having been vague and short-spoken in the hours before. It's an oversight that surely rankles against her priest's sensibilities.

 

The trailing corner of one of Edér's old shirts is drawn between two grey fingers, then folded gently back into the basket.

 

With a hunter's economy of movement, Sagani doesn't waste time in needless circling around the issue. "How much do you remember of what happened yesterday?"

 

"All of it, in a way." Neus huddles inside her blanket as if retreating from a snow-sluicing gale, turtling up until the wool is tucked high around her chin. In the warm atmosphere of the tent, the gesture makes Sagani want to sweat. "I still hoped for a dream. That I'd only find - cabbages and coinpurses in here, or perhaps a straw doll." She adds, in a brittle facsimile of her usual cheer, "I think I could tolerate that kind of madness. It has charm, yes?"

 

"Is madness what you're calling it?" Sagani asks bluntly.

 

Neus lapses into a silence that prickles at Sagani's neck. After a moment, she says, "Myself, I- That is, I was angry, but…" She shifts, uneasy, but seems to shy away from brushing against anything in the narrow confines of the tent, leaving no real stage for pacing. "She wanted them punished, Sagani. Not… not for their act, but for our anger. The inconvenience of it, you understand. I took the child in part because we knew it would hurt them."

 

And dealt the kind-hearted half her own wound in the process, Sagani thinks, watching the woman hunch further still, crooked teeth pinching chapped lips into stillness.

 

There weren't many among their number who'd say she'd been entirely wrong in any harsher feelings. Sagani had been tempted to tell Itumaak there was a fresh throat for his teeth herself on hearing of the Three-Tusk chieftain's plan to sacrifice a healthy child, all for the sake of trying to strengthen his own failing seed. Villages had burned for less.

 

Still, it was hard to deny open anger hadn't been a common look on Neus - until it had. Confiscating the orlan baby from a tribe whose leadership had turned against it was a reckless move, but fair; it had been the cruel twist to the Watcher's lips as she'd done it that had caused concern.

 

Sagani gives Neus another keen look at the confirmation; but there is no sign of the Awakened soul in her now. At least one of them is getting some rest.

 

"Angry's fine," she says. "But let's keep your other one out of any decisions about what to do with her next. She's had enough of being a piece in some kaam-saq game."

 

Neus accepts this with such quiet and miserable agreement it almost feels a bluntness too far. "I do wonder that none of you spoke louder against the thieving."

 

The babe squirms hard in Sagani's arms, denied the braid and growing restless, and she adjusts her hold, propping her up against her shoulder where claws can dig deep into the fur mantle. "You took us by surprise a little, if I'm honest. And it wasn't as though there were better choices ready to be made."

 

"Poison," Neus says unhappily. "Assassination! I couldn't."

 

"The old man would have deserved it. But it probably would have borrowed us just as much trouble in the end. Like I said, not a lot of better choices."

 

"The other one might disagree." The Watcher touches fingers to the thickened and bulging mass at her forehead - but lightly at least, not jerky and clawing as if frightened and furious to find it there, as if her body is a foreign burden. There is a deep strain underneath her wispy voice, like old wood in a storm. "You say to keep her out of it… Madiccho. Thistles in a garden, Sagani. I fear one day soon I'll look upon them and see only the flowers. Would you have thought it my idea to tip poison into his drink, and spoken softly on that too?"

 

"You're not that prickly, Neus."

 

Silence, save quiet, uneven breathing and the disgruntled ehk ehk sounds of an infant nowhere near soothed to sleep. At the entrance, Itumaak's eyes gleam sleepily in the dark.

 

Sagani sighs, feeling small hands plucking again at her hair. "Vela here's alive and hungry, and that's as good an outcome as any. Don't go following 'maybes' - it's not a trail that ever leads anywhere useful."

 

The silence stretches long enough that Sagani starts to worry the Watcher has become lost in something else instead, subsiding into the place that leaves her shivering and muttering; then the hand lowers and the head lifts, uncertain. "Vela?"

 

"It's what the chieftain's son called her. Can't exactly go back and ask if it's short for anything." Inspiration strikes, and Sagani begins unwinding the protesting babe from her body. "Here, if we're both going to be standing around - I need to get her food before she grows up thinking dwarf-hair is a decent meal."

 

Immediately Neus shuffles back until thin shoulders bump against the canvas, a hand raised to stave off assault. "Oh - Sagani, no, children don't… I am not a friendly face."

 

"You were a strange face crowding her in the middle of the night, that's why you upset her," Sagani says patiently.

 

"'Strange' is a kind word," Neus replies, still arching away as if presented with a hot poker, "and she deserves more kindness than that. Where is the food? I will fetch it."

 

The hot poker does not appreciate being extracted from the body warmth it had been enjoying, and unhappy syllables begin to link together into a sustained wail.

 

"Whatever you were thinking," Sagani says over it, "whatever she was planning, the babe's here now. She's not a fish we can throw back for being too small, you know."

 

"It's only that-"

 

"You're not going to hurt her. But you are going to have to learn how to hold her."

 

A long hunter's firm order; a mother's knowing reassurance. It freezes the retreat. Neus worries her lip a moment longer, and then the shoulders lower from their defensive heights, and she eases tentatively forward, arms stiffly extending from the shelter of the blanket like the skeletal grasp of the usher reaching to take the young orlan into her final embrace.

 

Sagani, briskly determined, hands the baby over.

 

The transition is clumsy enough that Sagani feels memory at her back again: fire, and babe-weight, and uncertainty deeper than a glacial crevasse. Kallu, second-eldest of his siblings, had been the natural. Sagani had learned with the same dedicated years of practice as she had the bow.

 

"Get your hand under her - no, there, helps you both feel less like she's about to fall."

 

Hands that delight in allowing the jointed crawling legs of an insect to trail across the naked palm hesitantly settle around the weight of the squirming orlan, until at last it is clasped with some measure of security, tiny claws winding into the blanket slipping askew. Watcher and infant regard each other from their close quarters with a weak and mutual horror.

 

"Is this what drinking is like?" Neus says faintly. "I don't think I like it."

 

Despite everything, Sagani snorts. "You usually have more time to get used to these sorts of surprises before they actually show up." Along with the cradle, they've shifted over some supplies for easy reaching. Luckily orlans wean young. Even luckier they have Hiravias around to say as much, to approve of or grimace at anything they might try to serve up for supper.

 

Sagani finds the strips of dried meat they'd left soaking; flicks a piece that still seems over-tough to Itumaak for his patient guard. Behind her, the soft shuffling start of an awkward rock isn't doing much yet to quell the building howl - but a full mouth and belly will solve that problem soon enough.

 

"I am truly sorry," is the murmur underneath the noise, "for what fate has brought you. But we shall do our best to find you a better parceling of it, hm? And I my best to keep my part in it my own. ...Ah. No, no, don't eat that."

 

One last duty, Sagani thinks again, tired and fond. You'll understand, I hope.

Comments

[weirderwest]

neus i would die for you. and you're right, soul ancestor shenanigans are ALWAYS top tier 💖👌