#fjotra

“Oh, I know,” says the orc, grinning now. “Ugly tools for ugly work, and all that. Only use it for buttering bread, though, to tell you the truth. But this dagger, this dagger is good gra-Khazgur craftsmanship—and I know that for a fact, riddle-kid, because my mother forged it.” She tilts the knife so that her face, fierce and fond, flashes in the blade. “Mauloch’s folk, we find beauty in work well done. In work done with love—for family, for foul or fair.”

Staring at the knife, the Sibyl looks for love: love in the hilt, love in the soft-worked leather of the sheath, love in the blade beaten bright.

The orc looks a little anxiously at her. “Is that, uh...does that make sense?”

The Sibyl smiles at her.

* * *

“What is beautiful?” she asks the old Mephalite.

The Mephalite, the old wizard smoking his pipe by the open window, blinks in blank surprise. The Sibyl blinks back at him. They stare at each other until the Mephalite smiles, bemused—he does not recognize her either, the Sibyl realizes—and leans a little forward in his seat.

“Veloth rejected ostentation and excess,” he says, committing himself with perfect seriousness to the child’s question. “He taught that what is beautiful is also simple. The clay bowl, unpainted, that bears marks from the fingers of the potter—that is beautiful to Veloth, and to we who follow him. But my god”—he shapes his hands in a sign of reverence, as if playing cat’s-cradle with an invisible string—“teaches that there is also beauty in complexity. Intricacy. The web that seats the spider, a thousand strands spun to a secret that only the spider knows—that is beautiful to my god. And to me.”

The Sibyl stares at him.

“So there’s, ah, there’s—” The Mephalite clears his throat and smiles, embarrassed. “There’s bowl-beautiful and web-beautiful, I s’pose. Is there—do you need something? Did someone put you up to this, dear?”

Unblinking, her face calm as the moon, the Sibyl judges the old man: his tarnished rings, his smoke-stained hands, his face creased into ugliness by age and care.

“Bowl-beautiful,” she concludes, and stands on tiptoe to kiss his startled brow.

* * *

“What is beautiful?” she asks the young Mephalite.

This Mephalite, the bold young jarl with hands painted black, recognizes her at once. And he does, to all appearances, what he ought—he turns from his friends, his smile only slightly sardonic, and sweeps into a bow so deep that the horns of his crown brush the floor. The Sibyl does not smile back.

“A worthy question,” the Mephalite says, undaunted, and offers her his arm. “May I show you?”

So the Sibyl walks with him from the banquet-hall, from the harping and the dancing and the warmth of many hearths, into the dewy chill of a Haafing night. Lanterns light the path through the High Queen’s courtyard. The firelight flickers on her roses, bursting from trellis and thorn—and on the face of the young Mephalite, cold and luminous in the dark.

He kneels as if compelled by one of the bushes, then flicks a flower aside. Smiles strangely. “Here is something beautiful.”

The Sibyl bends to look.

She sees the moth first, fluttering weak wings. It hangs beneath the bush as if suspended, and the Sibyl has to squint to see its snare: a spiderweb, jeweled with evening dew. The spider hangs heavy beneath it. The Sibyl watches, entranced, as it toes like a tightrope-walker towards the struggling moth—

She looks suddenly at the Mephalite. If he were watching the spider, she might have forgiven him. But he’s not watching the spider. He’s staring, with cruel and childish anticipation, at her.

“You mean to frighten me,” she says softly, and shakes off his arm. She’s halfway down the path when she realizes that she’s furious—she spins around in a flurry of skirts, eyes aflash, and flings a prophecy in his face. “Arrogance, Nelkir Black-Hand, will unravel the garment you weave!”

The young Mephalite, jarl of Whiterun, stares at her white-faced. He is, the Sibyl realizes, scarcely older than herself.

* * *

“What is beautiful?” she asks the hagraven.

She had almost been too frightened to approach the hagraven, the taloned one, sitting hunched and horrid in the High Queen’s festive hall—but the mad old matriarch is draped in finery, in silver and dyed plaids of hogget-wool, and so the Sibyl concludes that someone must love her. And there is no reason for a Sibyl, she tells herself, to fear one who is loved.

The hagraven cocks her head birdlike, staring at the Sibyl with one sharp, ancient eye. She scratches her chin with a claw. The skin at her throat dangles like a vulture’s wattle.

“Stolen one,” she says.

The Sibyl swallows, her throat dry. She thinks of spiders and moths. She moves her lips, trying once again to find her question. “What—what is—”

“She knows,” croaks the bird-woman, nodding to a dancer in the crowd. She smiles toothlessly. “She who stole you. Ask her.”

* * *

“What is beautiful?” she asks the Dragonborn.

The Dragonborn, her smile bright, kneels to look the Sibyl in the eye. She must have been dancing all evening—she’s out of breath, for all her fabled strength, and her dark, handsome face shines with sweat like a star.

“Why do you ask?” she asks the child.

The Sibyl blinks, surprised. She hesitates.

“The old priestess said to me,” she says softly, as if confessing some great shame, “that those who do not know Dibella do not know the beautiful.”

The Dragonborn raises her eyebrows. “And what do you say?”

Now the Sibyl does not hesitate. “I say there is no beauty in that stricture.”

For even the knife and the spider, she thinks, had been lovely in their way.

The Dragonborn studies the Sibyl’s face. Then she grins.

“Dance with me, Fjotra,” she says, and takes her by the hand.

The child who is Sibyl, who has not been called Fjotra since she was five, plunges with wide eyes into the dance: the stamp of drums, the clap of hands, the tromp of whirling feet. She spins with the tambours. She breathes with the bright flutes. The Dragonborn shouts something glad and gleeful over the din, shouts it to the man playing the viol, who grins like a cat and starts sawing twice as fast—and the dancers gasp and laugh and try to twirl in time, the Sibyl among them, bumping into people here and there until she falls, giggling, against the Dragonborn’s arm.

“There!” says the Dragonborn, her grin a flash of fire. She steadies the child with a gentle hand. “Now, I’ve never met Dibella—”