November 4th, 1888

[motherof_bone]

Date: November 4th, 1888
Time: Afternoon
Location: The great hall.
Characters: Anyone [OPEN]

Summary: The fungus has its effect on Miss Catherine Saint Croix.
Warnings: Creepy of the old-school fairytale variety.

Sitting on the steps in the Great Hall, Mary has seated herself primly. Her skirts are arranged around herself like a fan, like a flower, and her pale, delicate hands are laced together in her lap. She was supposed to be watching Ivan, but the boy is nowhere to be found, and that makes it all the stranger that she seems to be sitting and telling a story to no one at all. Part of the story she seems to sing, over and over again, a refrain:

❝ It was my mother who murdered me;
It was my father who ate of me;
It was my sister Marjory
Who all my bones in pieces found;
Them in a handkerchief she bound,
And laid them under the juniper tree.
Kywitt, kywitt, kywitt, I cry,
Oh what a beautiful bird am I! ❞

She is telling the story of The Juniper Tree.

"And the bird drops the millstone on her, crushing and killing her..."

Comments

[gentlemanliest]

It's the sound of her voice that draws him closer, the way that, through his daydream, each syllable spoken in her sing-song voice seems to double his vision and the words flicker across his eyes. He must have heard this once before as a child but only now is Robin really listening to it. Somehow being in verse softened its meaning as a child but there's danger in each rhyme, as if his feverish hysteria has held a mirror up to the original words and revealed their true meaning.

He finds himself hovering a few steps behind her, slumped against the thick, wooden banister and the mushrooms now scattered across it for support. The governess. Robin knows her in passing- he has no children of his own for her to educate- but he hesitates even so. The phosphorescent glow of the fungi illuminates her in an alien way.

"Do you think," he asks, eyes moving up to the shadowy beams overhead, "that all birdsong is secretly so macabre?"

[motherof_bone]

That undercurrent has always been visible to Mary. It has always flickered there in the scorching flames that consume her world. The voices of the dead--(the voices of her madness)--have always taunted her with such tales. It wove a knot of fear in her heart, a fear that had becomes feral and starved for power of its own; dreadful power that she could wield against others and take justice in her own pitiful name.

What is justice, anyway.

She looks towards Robin slowly, as if she's not quite sure he's there at all, perhaps nothing more than another maddening whisper from a phantom. She answers him regardless, her words slow and heavy.

"The birds can bring savage portents. And we may take their auspices from them by force and spill them out upon the table..." Her fingers table on the stair she's sitting on, fingernails clicking in a spider-tattoo. "It is not God who rules the wilds."