It was an awful dance: bound legs kicking useless against restraints as those poor souls whose necks had not snapped hanged, suspended by their throats, and left to dangle till, slowly, horrifically, they strangled. It had taken all the strength Eabha had not to rush out and try whatever she might to help them. Roderick called himself a bastion of civilization, but what civiled man sat sipping red, red wine, and watching living beings slowly strangle to death, when he might spare them? If die they must, at all, surely there was a better way than this.
She felt cruel. Eabha had had no hand in the ghastly play they'd been forced to watch as the sun's warm rays washed the scene in queasy crimson, but she felt cruel notwithstanding. She had been there. She was a lady: her position demanded she intervene, demanded she stand for those poor souls, but she'd done precious little, save suggest to any Varmont who would listen that perhaps there might be another way to deal with this (supposed) treachery, and find herself brushed off, one way or another. It was true that none of those hanged that day had been of Calleary or Hanthom, but still she had allowed herself to be silenced and rebuffed without fighting as hard as she might, and in that way, she was guilty, in a sense, wasn't she?
Eabha held her head in her hands. At the time, she had thought only of her family and of her own people, and what repercussions might fall upon them were she tomake a public spectacle of herself, pleading for their lives. because she was a woman, she surmised, Roderick might not be so furious as he might have been had she been one of her brothers, but she could not imagine he would look upon such questions in a friendly light, and she was sure that Lorcan and Hanthom and Calleary, alike, would be forced to pay the price...and yet for all that, those poor wretches would still be hanged by the neck until dead. It had seemed the only path ahead, in that moment, yet now it was over, Eabha balmed herself for not doing more, and stared in blank horror at her wall.
She'd taken to her rooms after the event, claiming headache and fatigue, and Roderick had dismissed her paternalistically: of course she must go, such things were no sight for a tender-hearted woman. But it was no true illness which plagued her, but rather her own accusations, her own guilt, and her own resolve to find a means of avoiding such horrors in future. She must work harder, she must think harder, she must be harder. But she could not see the path forward. Rderick rejoiced, it seemed, in blood, and an emperor's appetites could not be appeased by any one individual: stripped of her titles and her hopes, stripped of her powers and her duties. All that was left to her was the hope of making a good marriage, and she meant to do that, already.
A light, familiar knock was a welcome reprieve. Eabha did not, herself, know how much time had passed since the hanging till now, but she did know that gentle rap, its cadence and weight familiar to her from childhood, and some warm comfort spread into her veins, leeched till now, she suddenly realized, of it.
Getting up, Eabha crossed to the door and, opening it, pulled it open and her sister into her arms. As awful as it had been for everyone to witness, she could not imagine being forced to watch her son's innocence murdered into the bargain was beyond anything. Had little Peadar not known suffering, enough? His grandfather slain by this same tyrant, and his father lost in making war against him, thrusting him suddenly into the light and hailed as lord, only, like his aunt, to be just as suddenly stripped of all such powers with, in his case, a traitorous stranger hailed, instead, as his overlord?
"I'm so, so sorry, Aine," she whispered, slowly stepping back to see her sister's face, again. There she stood for a moment before, suddenly, recalling the door and, quickly, shutting it again for some modicum of privacy. Eabha led her sister to a seat by the fire. "How is our boy?" she asked. "How are you?"
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