#super compelling

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The hill was empty, this late into the evening, and a chill was creeping into the air. Fifth Red Petal sat with her back to the biggest boulder and looked out at the town below, and the fields beyond, dotted here and there with farmers' houses and sweeping away to the edge of woodland on the horizon.

She didn't hear Housin coming. Housin moved into her line of sight before she sat down, though, so Fifth Red Petal only jumped a little when the pale shape appeared in her peripheral vision. Then Housin settled down next to her, arm-to-arm. She didn't quite lean.

"I expected you to be more shocked. Do things like that happen even in whatever peaceful place you come from, or have you been in the world long enough to see this part of its ugly side before?"

Her tone was a little too flat to read; Fifth Red Petal couldn't quite tell if the question was mockery or not. She tensed against it anyway, her shoulders going up, and shoved a bit to make Housin pull away.

It didn't work. Instead, Housin actively leaned in, her shoulder pressing against Fifth Red Petal's through the thin fabric of her gi and the thicker fabric of Fifth Red Petal's gambeson. Her unscaled shoulder, which was unusual. Normally she sat on Fifth Red Petal's left to soak as much heat as possible into her scales. It seemed to comfort her, after a difficult day, though Fifth Red Petal had already learned better than to think she'd admit it.

Was Housin trying to comfort her?

Fifth Red Petal lowered her shoulders, slowly, and shook her head.

"I phrased that badly," Housin said. "Have you seen that before?"

Fifth Red Petal nodded.

"Where you came from?" She gestured outward, towards the distant horizon, then pulled her hand back in and tapped the ground in front of her. "Or in these lands here?"

Fifth Red Petal kept nodding, touching the ground too, then gesturing outwards.

"So your homeland isn't perfect either." Housin's tone was still too level and even to decipher, except that by now Fifth Red Petal trusted that it wasn't meant to be mocking. "Do they handle it better?"

Fifth Red Petal shrugged. She wanted to nod; she still felt frustrated, and hopeless, and angry, remembering the woman they'd watched walking so calmly to the gallows. It rubbed her raw to know how easily she and Housin could have gotten her away, if she'd been willing. Fifth Red Petal didn't know if it would have been right or wrong, but she still would have done it, had the woman let them.

But she wasn't sure how it would have been handled on the island, if any such situation had gotten to the point where one person killed another. It hadn't in her lifetime. The elders handled such things case-by-case, and depending what had happened, and where people's sympathies lay, she could only imagine being any case like that, and any possible resolution, being painfully divisive. Even the few cases she had seen had torn up the community badly enough.

Giving up on pantomime, Fifth Red Petal scraped around in the dirt and came up with a stick. Leaning forward, she brushed the earth flat in front of her, then started to draw. Her art was crude, even now. Clear representations of people and things had never been her strong point. But she only needed a child's skill for stick figures, with features to distinguish them. Ninth Sunparched Grass, with his crooked, one-tusked smile, and Third White Heron, with his stiff pointed ears.

Their handfasting, first, really just two crude figures touching. And then what had happened after, with blood dripping to illustrate, though really there had never been more than bruising, that she knew of. And last herself, with horns and tail, and Sixth Stone Dropping, with his two-tusked, furious frown, pulling them apart. She added a quick crowd of circles on sticks to represent the elders, and an arrow to indicate dragging Third White Heron before them.

Housin leaned forward, studying the rough-sketched sequence. She pointed to the third part. "How soon did that happen? As soon as you knew?"

Fifth Red Petal nodded.

"And how soon did you know?"

Not quite sure how to convey the length of time, Fifth Red Petal instead reached up and drew a circle around her eye with her finger, then pressed her hand against it as if it hurt. She wasn't sure herself how long it had been between the handfasting and Third White Heron's temper rising, but she knew it hadn't been the first time he'd been hurt, when Ninth Sunparched Grass had finally gone to the healers with too clumsy an excuse for them to believe.

Housin grunted, softly, and leaned back against the boulder, pressing their shoulders together again. She was silent for a long moment, the line of her arm a steady pressure against Fifth Red Petal's bicep.

"They knew," she said at last. "These villagers. None of them were surprised to hear what was happening. Or surprised that she didn't trust the headman to help her. Or surprised that she killed her husband. The way everyone stood, and looked at each other, and murmured together, they knew everything. But they acted like it was an inevitable tragedy."

Fifth Red Petal turned to look at Housin, frowning under her mask. She hadn't noticed that, but she didn't think that Housin was wrong. Housin seemed to struggle with understanding people's motivations, from time to time, but she was better than Fifth Red Petal at reading their moods.

"I don't know how it would have gone if her husband hadn't been the headman's brother, or how your situation might have gone if other people had been the ones involved. But individually, that-" she pointed to Fifth Red Petal's drawing "-was handled better than this. Maybe your homeland isn't perfect, but in this one comparison, it's better."

That was true, but it didn't make Fifth Red Petal feel any better about the woman she'd failed to save.

Either Housin realized that, or she hadn't been finished making her point when she said it. She went on, flat and toneless, without expression.

"She said she didn't want the help of devils and serpents. But I don't think she would have taken it if we'd been humans, either. Or even angels. She'd had it beaten into her already that no one would intervene. That was the only truth she knew. She'd accepted it already, when she killed him, and she'd accepted that she was going to the gallows. It was impossible for her to see another way."

Fifth Red Petal thought of the woman's lined face, the tired resignation on it. Housin wasn't wrong about that, either. Even Fifth Red Petal had seen that much, though she hadn't been able to put it to herself that way, not until Housin articulated it.

She reached up, though, pointed to the center of the sky overhead, let her finger fall slowly towards the sunset.

"If she'd had more time to think about it, she might have come around. But she didn't." Housin raised her own hand in front of her, palm turned upward as if cupping something, then flipped it over and let that intangible something go. "We would have had to kill people who thought they were doing justice, to drag away someone who thought justice was being done."

Which was why Fifth Red Petal had stood aside, after the woman had refused their first attempt to help her escape. At that point, they couldn't have done it without murder, and the woman would have only seen it as more blood on her own hands. Fifth Red Petal would not put that upon her. The belief that the gallows held her absolution had been all that she had left.

She nodded, again, and leaned sideways slightly towards Housin, meeting the pressure of her friend's shoulder at last with her own. She could feel a little bit of stiffness go out of Housin. It was undoubtedly deliberate, but Fifth Red Petal knew that didn't mean it wasn't real.

Housin didn't say anything else, just leaned further in until their skulls touched. She pressed her head against Fifth Red Petal's, and Fifth Red Petal pressed her own back. On the distant horizon, over the treeline, the sun was going down, painting the sky in shades of dull red and violet and blue.

A bruised sky, Fifth Red Petal thought. That seemed right somehow.

They watched the sun go down together, and the stars come up. Then Housin stirred at last, likely driven by the cold, and Fifth Red Petal rose with her. Fifth Red Petal looked down the hill towards the town, the dark shapes of buildings dotted with the occasional bright square of an unshuttered window.