Considered him. The order stirred through me oddly. Feel. I didn't want to feel his hands. I didn't want to touch him. He couldn't make me touch him, could he? Another part of me told me I was being silly. They were just his hands. It was about work. It wasn't as if he were compelling me in any other way. Was he?
I could not read his eyes.
But another fear: what would I see, if I touched him? I didn't want to do it for that reason, as well. I didn't want to see things in people. Least of all Tanen. But I didn't want to be the one to make something out of his gesture if he didn't mean anything by it, or then the joke would be on me for assuming there was something there. I was about to end my hesitation to save face, when I realized there was no need to touch him. My eyes could suffice just fine; I could see the beginnings of blisters and calluses on his hands.
So, “Come back when you're bleeding,” I said instead, and turned away to end it. “You know nothing of working in the fields.”
He chose to withhold further objection, or insistence. Perhaps accepting that I was not so easily won over. I could only hope that that acceptance meant he realized it was folly, rather than simply realizing he would have to try harder. I didn't want him to prove anything to me. I wanted him to change toward the others. Beyond that, I didn't care about him. Had no interest in his affairs. Perhaps that was self-absorbed of me, but survival was rather that way. It was certainly no more friendly than it needed to be.
But tables had a way of turning, like dominoes.
In the days that followed, I would become a hypocrite. For there were indeed those who won my affections better than Tanen.
But it was a good kind of hypocrite to be, for what that's worth. Perhaps such a notion was twisted. But Dar'on was twisted, and everyone in it.
Including me.
Including Tanen.
Including Ombri...
*
I did not meet Ombri until the balance tipped. I call it that, because of what happened, but also because it seemed to be a turning point, of sorts. When things began to come together. Or spiral out of control. Or both.
I opened the door of the manor one morning, and saw them:
Dominoes.
They came right to the doorstep of Manor Dorn, all lined up and poised for...for what? A taunt? An invitation? They had found me, followed me. My eyes surveyed the countryside, but there was nothing. The dominoes curved around the house and disappeared into the thinning mist, a line that stretched clear down the road and into the city where it was rooted.
I regarded the tokens at my feet, allowing the stillness of the land to wash over me. But that's when it happened:
A shift in the city.
I heard it, that faint rumble that was like a subtle earthquake. Nothing tumultuous, and it fell still as quickly as it had happened, but I felt the shudder in the bones of my feet. I became riveted to the dominoes at my feet with a new acuteness, a very specific discretion lighting inside me.
It was as if the front domino and I became trapped in a paradox together, and I was astutely aware of the first breath of it swaying, of it beginning to rock back and forth, unbalanced, a pendulum without a holster. It swayed from front to back in greater arcs until one time it tipped too far, and then my dread for the incident that followed was fulfilled.
The domino fell, against its predecessor. As the chain reaction began, something in me clicked. Some savvy intuition. If the result reached the city... I didn't know what, but surely something would be set in motion. This was that something set in motion, a fuse burning back toward its source. Burning fuses never ended well. Whatever it was that would ensue, it was impossible not to want to stop a climax before it reached the city. It was instinct. Good things never came of disturbing the city. It was impossible to say whether or not the mischief was bad, but if things could be kept stable, that was certainly the alternative we strove to cling to, with what little influence we had.
So I dropped my vegetable-harvesting sack, and ran.
My skirts thrashed about my legs as I took off after the ripple. I