The walk to the town is a miserable one. Despite her fine, warm clothes the cold still manages to penetrate once she's slogging through deep snow. That it has at least been churned up by the horses is something, but that means that it is - in parts - compacted and slippery, not at all fun to walk through. Yet other than the occasional expletive muttered underneath her breath, she stays relatively silent, trying to act the part of sullen and cowed captive rather than anyone likely to give the approaching township a problem.
It's an experience, entering this new place. Just as the village they'd stopped in overnight had been an experience; a first real look at the outside world, how people other than the gnarled and twisted ones she'd been enslaved by live. There's a certain heaviness about the atmosphere as they're finally granted admittance; shadowy faces peering out at them from stony apertures and doorways, expressions difficult to read in the night's dimly illuminated gloom.
A shiver of emotion runs through her as Lenore surveys her so coolly before turning away, though it's one she isn't sure how to interpret. Concern? For herself, or for the vampire? Maybe she's just fucking cold and it doesn't mean anything at all.
Her incarceration, at least, runs smooth as flowing water. Her vampire guards are guided to the town's jail by two of the city's own, both of whom seem cold and disinterested in either herself or the soldiers. There's barely a fuss made at all as she's led into the jail proper - one large, barred cell scattered with stinking straw, and a cluster of miserable prisoners eyeing her coolly contained within. They don't even ask to search her - only insist that she opens her mouth and shows her teeth before she's ushered inside - a request that draws an arch look from the vampires, shared between themselves. It’s also punctuated by the hissed threat from Gideon that if any fingers get near her face she'll bite them the fuck off. It's a threat that draws only muffled laughter, and apparently satisfied, she's shooed inside the dim and reeking cell without so much as a cuff about the head.
It's not hard to begin striking up conversation. Lenore's guard are led back out again, and the men set to guard the prisoners skulk off to whatever they'd been doing before her arrival. Which looks - from Gideon's partially occluded perspective - like napping, and playing cards. No one is paying her a blind bit of attention.
She finds herself confined with two criminals so petty that what they'd done is barely worthy of the word crime, and two others who seemed to have done nothing more than vocally oppose the mayor. One prisoner tells her to mind her own fucking business and go to sleep, whilst another - the only other occupant of the room - watches Gideon with a calm assessing gaze, and asks to see her bruises. She wants to know, apparently, how badly she's been hurt.
This last is an older woman, dark hair shot through with steely grey, and Gideon relents to her requests to check her over if only because she likes the straight-forward authority in her voice, and the fact she seems more concerned with Gideon's injuries than what she's in for. Her attitude is one that commands no nonsense underlain with something akin to kindness, and so it's hard to know for sure whether Gideon's judgements are accurate; small acts of human warmth threaten to melt her defences entirely. Yet the conversation she strikes up with the woman makes her think she could be onto something. She is not the best person for this job, it's a risky ploy of Lenore's at best, because what little she knows of people is hardness and an ugly rot that extends deeper even than bones. But when this woman tells her she's a respected wise woman and healer, that she'd wound up in jail for quietly undermining the current mayor to people who could be useful-- it's something.
If she has no interest in running the town herself, then perhaps she might know who would.
no subject
It's an experience, entering this new place. Just as the village they'd stopped in overnight had been an experience; a first real look at the outside world, how people other than the gnarled and twisted ones she'd been enslaved by live. There's a certain heaviness about the atmosphere as they're finally granted admittance; shadowy faces peering out at them from stony apertures and doorways, expressions difficult to read in the night's dimly illuminated gloom.
A shiver of emotion runs through her as Lenore surveys her so coolly before turning away, though it's one she isn't sure how to interpret. Concern? For herself, or for the vampire? Maybe she's just fucking cold and it doesn't mean anything at all.
Her incarceration, at least, runs smooth as flowing water. Her vampire guards are guided to the town's jail by two of the city's own, both of whom seem cold and disinterested in either herself or the soldiers. There's barely a fuss made at all as she's led into the jail proper - one large, barred cell scattered with stinking straw, and a cluster of miserable prisoners eyeing her coolly contained within. They don't even ask to search her - only insist that she opens her mouth and shows her teeth before she's ushered inside - a request that draws an arch look from the vampires, shared between themselves. It’s also punctuated by the hissed threat from Gideon that if any fingers get near her face she'll bite them the fuck off. It's a threat that draws only muffled laughter, and apparently satisfied, she's shooed inside the dim and reeking cell without so much as a cuff about the head.
It's not hard to begin striking up conversation. Lenore's guard are led back out again, and the men set to guard the prisoners skulk off to whatever they'd been doing before her arrival. Which looks - from Gideon's partially occluded perspective - like napping, and playing cards. No one is paying her a blind bit of attention.
She finds herself confined with two criminals so petty that what they'd done is barely worthy of the word crime, and two others who seemed to have done nothing more than vocally oppose the mayor. One prisoner tells her to mind her own fucking business and go to sleep, whilst another - the only other occupant of the room - watches Gideon with a calm assessing gaze, and asks to see her bruises. She wants to know, apparently, how badly she's been hurt.
This last is an older woman, dark hair shot through with steely grey, and Gideon relents to her requests to check her over if only because she likes the straight-forward authority in her voice, and the fact she seems more concerned with Gideon's injuries than what she's in for. Her attitude is one that commands no nonsense underlain with something akin to kindness, and so it's hard to know for sure whether Gideon's judgements are accurate; small acts of human warmth threaten to melt her defences entirely. Yet the conversation she strikes up with the woman makes her think she could be onto something. She is not the best person for this job, it's a risky ploy of Lenore's at best, because what little she knows of people is hardness and an ugly rot that extends deeper even than bones. But when this woman tells her she's a respected wise woman and healer, that she'd wound up in jail for quietly undermining the current mayor to people who could be useful-- it's something.
If she has no interest in running the town herself, then perhaps she might know who would.