Fire & Water
Ashe: Book Two
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TBCChapter Nineteen
It is so easy to be wise after the event. When I pushed Ashe through the map, I would have said that my action was fuelled by a stupidity born of sleeplessness, (this time voluntary sleeplessness), mild lust and envy. If I ever come to trial over that move let’s hope I have a good defender or a better defence.
The fall was probably the best thing that ever could have happened to Ashe, even if I say it as pushed her. After days of watching from a great distance the machinations of the law-abiding members of the Guardians, I lost patience and just shoved Ashe out of the world of intelligent conversation and old friends and into temporary limbo. I’ve raved and ranted long enough about insomnia, which drove me half-mad more than once, but those last weeks were the hardest. Let no-one ever tell you that it’s easy to create an alternative reality. It’s not. A month of sleepless nights to give the Dark Goddess a part of what she required of me. That was only the first part of the bargain: I came out of that transaction owing the Dark Goddess big time, and no-one ever reneges on that sort of contract. And almost as hard as creating such a state is the placing of a living being within it. It’s said that we learn from our mistakes, but I’m not so sure about that. In retrospect I can admit that it was a stupid move, an action of self-aggrandisation, a flight of folly. Oh, to hell with it: I fucked up. I thought I was stronger than I turned out to be. As home truths go, I didn’t much care for that.
But at the time I honestly believed in my own power, and I pushed Ashe because in company with Cairo and the other law-abiding Guardians she had the potential to become too powerful for me to cope with. And to be honest, I didn’t mind the idea of keeping her from remaining in such very dull company: they were a sanctimonious, preaching ensemble: a host of voices raised in criticism of anything even remotely entertaining or simply bad. From the start I inclined toward simple evil. I had – and have now – no time for anything as trite as bad.
I wanted Ashe to be nearer to me, as if pushing her would bring that about. Once she was moving, I thought I could control her to some small extent. But then on the instant a dozen questions followed, the first one being: for how long should I let her fall? To be honest, I wanted Ashe, in some odd, physical way. I wanted to be close to her. I don’t honestly know what it was that I wanted from her: friendship, fucking or… just a chat? I was curious about her, the way you are about someone you keep hearing about but never get to meet. The fact that my sister had detested the little oddity so much should have warned me away from ever going near Ashe, but I was curious and hungry, and I wasn’t to be warned away from anything. I was young and I was still in a prison of sorts. Hell, maybe I wanted her for dinner. I knew she had been more shocked by the meal she managed to miss within the Red Temple. I expect that that missed opportunity for damnation figured in her nightmares.
It seems so strange to think the state out-loud, when you consider how very accomplished I was in other areas, but I really was still a beginner when it came to sex. In my dreams I’d ravished so many women that I often woke in the morning feeling too exhausted to rule a country, or even brew a pot of tea. Although I could push my thoughts out in many directions, I had never seen Ashe and Betany together. I imagined that coupling (of course ) and I knew in my heart that they made a good couple. Frankly, I wouldn’t have been attracted to someone like Betany, who was too strong and far too fixed in terms of outlook, but I thought I was attracted to her lover. I could see Ashe and Betany together in dull, everyday things: eating or talking or just sitting in a shared silence I suspected would be comfortable and easy, and which I envied.
In later days I began to wonder if Ashe’s heart had been caught most strongly by Calliope, the water-spirit. But there was no future for them: when Calliope went back to the water she could never leave again. I remember that in that time I envied Ashe those early days of heart-break and sudden, startling affection. I don’t think she truly began to attain some degree of emotional maturity until the night she spent in the inn. Not that that night worked out too well for her.
That time, with Ashe in limbo, free-falling, I did wish that the Dark Goddess required something other than a sleep debt and a cup-full of blood. I could have gone for a minor amputation – would the Dark Goddess have settled for a digit or two? – which might have done me less damage in the long run. But the spiralling exhaustion, combined by that time with visual hallucinations, must have presented the Dark Goddess with a more piquant gratification. Complex pain requires more time, demands more effort, and it can kill you. If I had severed a finger, I might always have bled to death.
The sleeping payment I managed alright for the first few nights, but after that the old symptoms set in: my eyes – as red and burning as any ermine’s – stung when I looked into the light, and my head never stopped pounding. When the debt was almost paid I thought I had gone mad, but I kept myself under control: the servants went about their doings at the court not knowing than that I had suddenly developed a dislike for wine, or any other sedative, and needed stimulants on an – eventual – hourly basis.
There was more to it than that, of course. I’d wanted Ashe out of the way because I needed time. In response to the little tendrils of frustration and hunger that I had sent out into the city, day by day Mercia was becoming more hostile toward the peace-keeping forces that had been inflicted upon it. Day by day my people felt the irritation that lay beneath the hair-shirt, beneath the skin itself. I had sown the seeds of hatred early, and soon they should begin to grow. Oh, Goddess, how I hate these endless images: why couldn’t Mercia just rise up and bathe the world in blood?
It’s a thought…
The plan was simple enough, and I knew that the simpler the plan, the less chance there was of fucking up. Pit Mercia first against Caer Arianrhod, and when that was achieved, suck the life-blood out of Lammor and use that power to erase the old order. One can have enough of routine and sensible planning. The people overthrown by the two wars would become my slaves, and I would use them to construct my dream city… My city. During those sleepless nights I spent most of my time in designing not maps of war but of architecture.
I could see the palace’s walls rising in the light of a sun I’d be able to face again by then. I should have a palace made of basalt and marble, with colourful additions: each block would be cut to show the mica gleaming within the confine of the quartz. Rose quartz and white marble would rise up toward the sun while the floors of the palace would be made of square-cut blocks of lapis lazuli. As to the rest of the city, I had dreams of rose-tinted sandstone rising from pavements of green agate and turquoise.
In the palace there would be gold edges to the lazuli, and gold leaf would be used to decorate the inner shutters of every window. Gold leaf and the finest turquoise paint. I had in mind what powders would be necessary to the equation, and I knew that it would take the combined casings of at least a thousand, thousand of the inappropriately-named skull beetles, to provide the perfect red that would outline the tiles inside my own bedchamber. There would be friezes and paintings hanging on the inner walls, concealing and comforting the chill of the stone behind them. I would have my own private fantasies turned to illustration: when I came to dictate my dreams, there would be scribes ready to copy down my every word, and architects at hand to lend their skills to the work.
The inner workings of the palace would involve a staircase broad enough to hold twenty soldiers – fully armed and standing sword-to-sword – to a step. A central carpet of black and turquoise would flow from the highest floor to the courtyard proper. The time of simplicity and dullness had come and gone: the new rule was beginning.
At that time no-one knew of my plans: it was far too risky for me to have appeared as anything but the patient and rational leader that the brain-dead city Elders believed me to be. Sometimes it felt as if I remained in my quiet prison. The only real difference was that the view from behind the bars had changed. There were times, I admit, when I feared that I would simply lose my grip and go striding into some elder-set meeting where the venerable and soon-to-be-extinct Elders talked busily and pointlessly about sanitation or repairs to the city, only to tell them that they were fired, banished, and as an afterthought, that I was planning to pull down the entirety of Mercia, only to rebuild her in style by the use of slaves.
In later days I would come to look back on that time, paralleling Ashe’s simple fall with my own frenzied attempts at placating the Goddess, and wonder that I could have been so single-minded, and so very blind. But hindsight is a dragon, and the dragon’s breath burns us all.
At that time the Red Temple amused me. I understood that it represented a very specific hunger, but I had not Ashe’s insight: I did not understand that there was a heart – or centre – to the beast that lived beneath the temple. Ashe was smarter than I was in that respect, and Ashe feared the temple. Had I visited it myself and witnessed the feeding process that had so horrified my enemy, I might have behaved differently.
*****
The beast that was the Word of the Red Temple came to Ashe’s mind as she fell. Long before she touched earth again, Ashe had given up on wondering whether the landing would kill her. If it did, well, what could she possibly have done to save herself? Ashe wondered if there came a limit to the number of times a Guardian could resurrect. Dying always hurt: she knew that fact even if she could not recall to mind the pain. And pain was what came to mind when she thought about the beast, that nightmarish thing, all red and black, that stood on four raw feet. It was the rawness of it that distressed her so badly: the raggedness spoke of nerves open to the elements, and she shuddered even while she fell. And it bothered her very badly that when she looked upon the beast with such horror and disgust… she also pitied it. She pitied it the way she had done Calypso. There would have been no saving the Mercian leader: when you hate someone as much as Calypso had hated Ashe, there would never be room for manoeuvre. Calypso couldn’t have been rehabilitated, but it had struck Ashe with a frisson of something that worried her when she heard that her enemy had died.
Ah, in some ways the fall was like sleeping, going on and on through a dreamscape. She remembered that first fall, when suicide had been preferable to being eaten. She hadn’t changed her opinion on that.
She never knew how long the fall lasted. Afterwards she thought that it could have been minutes, days or hours, so confusing was the sensation. But surely she hadn’t needed more oddness in her life: who would have guessed that she’d be reunited with the dead Cairo after being murdered – for the second time – by Alexis? Ashe felt almost sorry for Alexis, though wild dogs would not have chased that admission from her lips. Ashe knew a little about possession, and understood that it had been nine tenths of Alexis’s drive to kill her. The last part of the equation she put down to a continued dislike that Alexis would never let go. She had too many enemies, and could feel their attentions seeping up from the ground like some kind of insidious rot. Just what was missing from an otherwise normal existence… hideous ghosts with influence over the living. Why couldn’t Murah have just died?
*****
Ardan sat in the rooms Betany had put at her disposal and thought. Sitting on a truly magnificent carpet (woven from an image in someone’s dreams, blue dragons dancing around perfect blood-red roses against a background of woven vine leaves) and oblivious to everything but her own unhappiness, Ardan sat in the stance for meditation, her arms relaxed, palms facing upward, and the soles of her bare feet pressed into her thighs. The position was not comfortable by any means – she was out of practice in terms of yoga and meditation – but pain was not something she wanted to avoid. Like her enemy, and one-time possessor, Ardan no longer cared about pain.
Ardan’s unhappiness had reached a peak that morning . Gods, what a dawn it had been: the sun crashing up over the horizon blood-red, with the surrounding clouds a wealth of gold and purple. An apocalyptic dawn if she’d ever seen one, and hopefully her last. Ardan stood at the window – she had woken early; she wasn’t sleeping well at all – to watch the purple dim to blue while the sun’s red became true gold. Why was it that Caer Arianrhod had to be such a place of wonder? Ardan had spent days walking through the palace and the city that rose up all around it, marvelling over the complexity and the beauty of both. Rhea was busily working on spells that required – so it seemed – no support at all from any other. The simple truth was that Rhea was reluctant to display to anyone – even her own apprentice – the effort she was having to put into all her spells. The other truth was that Rhea was reluctant to display to anyone – Ardan least of all – that she was finding herself unable to rise to the occasion so far as Gowdie was concerned. So there was no use there for Ardan, who had never felt so free or so utterly useless. Day by day she could see that there had been no point to her travelling to Caer Arianrhod, and it seemed most cruelly ironic that the world in which she was now living out her days, surrounded by the wondrous, the bizarre and the simply beautiful, all set in a world of buildings, statues, paintings, hangings and pottery that decked the place, could make no difference to the depression that had been growing within in her since Berrach had first touched her life. No beauty had the power to reach Ardan, she had gone just a little too far. She could even find it amusingly ironic (she didn’t know that in private she wept through such moments of irony) that her decision to quit the world for ever should have been taken while surrounded by pleasant people in equally pleasing surroundings. In the preceding weeks Ardan had changed very much.
When Ardan replayed that infamous morning with Laure, the last instance she could recall of her being honestly happy (possession apart, it was that morning that stuck with her and that played through her head with alarming and relentless frequency), she could remember how it had felt to put her arms around Laure, bringing the queen’s smooth back into contact with her own breasts. She could remember most vividly that and then the look on Laure’s face. “Sweetheart…” Hadn’t that been what she’d always wanted to call someone, or was it simply that name that she would like to have heard for herself? “…The next time I require the services of an incompetent and unskilled lover I’ll be in touch…” That didn’t just hurt, it burned. And the additional, “Otherwise, stay the hell away from me…”, made her stomach turn.
She should have been warned. Oh, Gods, she should have seen what was coming. At some point during the night, when Laure was busily instructing her – Ardan just didn’t have any experience – and had snapped out loud exactly what she required of her temporary lover – Ardan had felt hurt, foolish and immediate, crack through the cloud of simple happiness into which she had been falling. She should have seen from that moment how she had mistaken passion for its close cousin, lust. Now she knew better.
When Berrach slipped into Ardan’s dreams and manipulated them, she had found Ardan only unremarkable and immature, and she had thought Ardan innocent of her presence. Berrach was not to know that afterward Ardan was aware of some odd, dislocated unhappiness, the cause of which she could not see. It was a rather sad situation: while Berrach’s powers were proving to be less effective as their owner had thought them, and while Rhea was finding her own skills to be prone to huge limitations, Ardan had discovered that her own distress could reach cosmic proportions. The use to which she had been put was killing her, and there was no-one around to help her.
It might all have ended differently if Rhea had been a little less concerned with anyone seeing just how fallible her powers seemed to be. Seen up close, Rhea was rather less likeable than Betany still believed the wise-woman to be. Betany didn’t know that Rhea had told Ashe in blunt and immediate terms the news of her forthcoming demotion, and Calypso’s imminent leap to power. Disliking Laure as she did, Rhea had never stopped to consider that Ashe might – might – actually love the princess, or that Ashe might – just might – have been devastated by the news.
Rhea might as well have been a million miles away, for all the good she could do Ardan. In simplistic terms of physical nearness, Rhea might be at hand, but the wise-woman certainly wasn’t helping any. Betany was beginning to notice in Rhea a kind of reckless carelessness about the feelings of most people, and she was puzzled at Rhea’s decision not to employ Ardan, having after all sent for the girl. Perhaps it would all have been different had Rhea fallen in love – at least once – and had her heart broken, or at least badly cracked. But from an early age Rhea had decided that all relationships were formed primarily of compromise and hard work. She was capable of hard work, but believed herself to be incapable of compromise. She had liked Ardan enough to have picked her for an apprentice, and hadn’t Ardan seen for a golden moment or two a life where everything was going in the right direction? Wasn’t it about then that Ashe had set off, not knowing her path, just knowing that a handful of possibilities were open to her? Rhea had looked at Ardan and gone no further than that first cursory glance that weighed, assessed and accepted. She had taken on board Ashe’s request that she look out for Ardan, but somehow had gone no further than simply inviting Ardan to come to Caer Arianrhod. Berrach had seen Ardan as a fruit ripe for picking; now Ardan was beginning to rot.
The bathrooms at Caer Arianrhod were deep and fine, and the Goddess alone knew how they worked: Ardan had nothing but admiration for the system. There were wonderful pools in the basement of the palace, and in the centre of the city: Betany shared all the privileges of her state with her people: well, all but the morning sickness. This Ardan considered and approved, watching the water rise in the tub, and the steam rise also. Stepping into the bath Ardan enjoyed the obscurity that blurred the lines of the room that had become, for some odd reason, almost violently vivid. She couldn’t handle such vividness for too long; the mood put edges on all objects, and those edges seemed sharp enough to cut. She considered for the shortest of moments, not taking such drastic action, instead giving the world another chance, and then dismissed the thought. She was terribly tired (Berrach would have had sympathy with that, had she known about it), and wanted nothing more than to sleep, deeply and eternally.
She emerged from her bath clean and glowing. She put on the silk robe that Betany had ordered be placed in her room upon her arrival, and approached her bed. It was still early, and supper would soon be served, but she had already made good her excuses and explanations. No-one would disturb her; no-one could come between Ardan and her decision.
She was too far gone to think of explanations. Even a day or so before she might have been capable of admitting, to a sympathetic ear, the desperation she felt. Now it was too late. Besides, what could she have said to Rhea? That she was desperate? That she felt she had been used? That she felt awkward and unhappy in all places and at all times and that the only thing she desired was an end to the voices in her head that mocked her constantly and from which there was no refuge? Suicide was not illegal in Caer Arianrhod, though it had been in Lammor: Ashe had frequently argued with Laure and the queen, in those days of dizzy wonder, that it made no sense to bring down the weight of the law upon anyone who failed at suicide. Perhaps it was simple arrogance in the royal family: how could anyone not want to live, born a Lammoran?
Talking to Ashe might have saved Ardan, but where was Ashe? No-one seemed to know. Besides, even if the woman had been to hand, how could Ardan seek help from someone to whom she had always felt oddly superior? Her old argument had been that war often promoted the oddest of people, a description that she felt fitted Ashe very well. Anyone could turn out to be exceptional in battle, but in time of peace how much more significant it was to be chosen as apprentice to a wise-woman… At least that apprenticeship was about to pay minor dividends: Ardan had known exactly what herbs and flowers to gather, soak and distil. She even knew enough to flavour her cordial with perle so that the scent of those flowers rose above the acridness of the green and black marsh berries that formed its mainstay.
She made a ritual of crossing the room to the table on which was set out a copper jug and matching cup. She took up the jug and regarded the oily liquid that swirled around within. A shuddering breath went through her and she closed her eyes tight against a wave of nausea: all this before she’d even taken a mouthful, and she must take at least that much. Ardan filled the cup to the brim and then sat down on the floor beside the window, so that she could watch night advance across the sky. The cup contained sufficient poison to wipe out half the city: she had allowed herself no margin for error, and no second chance.
She leaned back against the wall and tried not to shiver. When she raised the cup to her lips her hands shook and she came close to spilling the liquid. Then she allowed back into her mind the image of Laure that passionless morning, with that expression of disgust and dismissal so very cleanly etched, and drank a first mouthful. The draught was too bitter – it had overcome the perle – but she did not spit it out. A second mouthful followed the first, slipping down easily, though with a heavy sense, as if she was drinking lead. A rush of unexpected dizziness followed on, and the cup was harder to bring back to her mouth because of it, and because of the shivering that was now consuming her. She swallowed for the third time, the liquid staining her lips, and shut her eyes tightly.
Ardan did not hear the sound of the emptied cup striking the carpeted floor. She was too busy with the rush of sensations that had overtaken her: she remembered Laure’s touch, Rhea’s grudging approval and Betany’s kindness. Her final thought would have surprised her, had she still been capable of surprise: she saw herself gathering herbs and flowers and glancing towards Ashe, as the former favourite walked away from Lammor. The flowers must have been made of lead, they were so very heavy, and already their heads were drooping. She must get them into water before they died.
*****
Betany had not welcomed the sickness. Rhea had claimed that she would find something to keep the nausea at bay, but Betany was coping. The evening was so fine that it was impossible to think about the demands of the early morning, and she been too busy all day to think about herself. She had been to see Gowdie, had met with the town and palace council to discuss a mass of comparatively insignificant points and was finally free to think her own thoughts and simply watch the sun set. She wondered how long it would be before Ashe came back: Rhea was oddly reticent on that point, but Betany was coming to understand the wise-woman’s shortfalls just as much as her gifts. Once she had thought that Ashe might have been happy as an apprentice to Rhea, but now she understood that such a partnership would never have worked. All she honestly wanted was Ashe back and Gowdie at least happy, in whatever form happiness took root. Betany would have been as contented to see the karg lying grumpily and sleepily before the vast fireplace as she would have been to have seen Gowdie there in human form, playing chess or drinking perle, or simply sitting. Betany’s world had in some respects narrowed down with the onset of pregnancy; values and necessities were clear and distinct: what mattered was keeping her country fair and well, and her people happy and safe, and Ashe back at her side. If she could have put up high walls all around Caer Arianrhod, she would have ordered their construction. And padlocked the city’s gates, too, so Ashe could not leave again. Looking out over the city and thinking of Ashe, Betany felt the baby move inside her
*****
Berrach watched Ashe fall and wondered why she wasn’t feeling lighter or more cheerful. She was gaining a better hold on her own country; Mercia was becoming less tolerant of the Caer Arianrhod’s peaceful intervention, and back in Lammor, Laure was miserable and frustrated; Ashe had been taken away from her friends and her potential was therefore contained. Everything about her should have added up to happiness, but it did not. Ashe probably could have helped to clarify that sensation, but she did not. Ashe was no longer falling.
She hadn’t landed: it wasn’t as easy as that, but Ashe had begun to assert herself over her conditions. She held in her heart and somehow before her, the image of Betany. She remembered how good Betany had been about her leaving, and she regretted more and more that she had.
Of course, if you were going to go global about the situation, she accepted that everything she had done or witnessed was in some way significant. In those happy days before packing up a few belongings and setting out from Caer Arianrhod with Gowdie by her side, she had known nothing about the Red Temple, let alone the beast that dwelt beneath it. She’d been happier before seeing that nightmare in the room of temptation, or whatever the fuck they called it, but there wasn’t any avoiding the facts. Sooner or later she would have to bring an end to the place, or die in the attempt. It wasn’t enough to just get back to Betany’s side: there would be two of them to think about very soon, and Ashe wasn’t willing to accept the concept of their child in a world where the beast ravened and growled and feasted.
Her thoughts were becoming more determined and more clear by the moment, and as such, their strength was becoming more than Berrach could contain. It shocked her to visualise Ashe struggling to be out of the darkness into which she was falling. And it hurt.
*****
I don’t know why it should have passed me by that Ashe might fight me. I certainly hadn’t considered that other possibility, that Ashe might get clean away from me, until it began to happen.
I thought that the magic I knew and worked was stronger than any that Ashe might have encountered. I thought that the Guardians were, for the main part, fallible and liable to hurt. But I had forgotten that this particular Guardian had an irritating habit of throwing off ordinary mortal hurts and harms. Since exhaustion and the sleep-debt I had run up, I had found myself having to close my eyes tightly and centre every aspect of my thoughts into holding Ashe still, and even then it wasn’t any good. Oh, I hate her. I really do. Couldn’t she, just for once, give in? The Goddess knows, it’s something I’ve occasionally thought of doing…
Enough of that. When I felt Ashe wake up to the idea of fighting me I needed to direct all my energies in her direction, and I couldn’t. It wasn’t the right fucking time. Worried over some paltry aspect of war, government or municipal outrage, the Mercian Elders had called a meeting that I had no choice but to attend – I shall be so happy when they’re no longer an issue – wiping away from my face any expression of fury, loss or… failure. The Elders wanted my time and my attention, and in giving them even the minimum of both, I lost my hold on Ashe. I felt her slip free of me, like a fish sliding free of the hook that had it prisoner. The feeling was almost – the Goddess help me with this one – erotic. I felt an ache between my legs and for a moment I honestly thought myself about to ravish one of the beneficent city Elders.
Days like this I do not need.
*****
She had never been in any way an arrogant soul. She hadn’t even ever been particularly confident. Ashe was swimming free of the pit, and a dozen odd thoughts were running through her head as she did so. The primary consideration was the simplistic but wholly fixed desire to be back with Betany, but the other thoughts were bizarre things, born of both dreams and nightmares, and she could not ignore them.
Pushing through air or water – it felt like either, or both – and moving faster all the time, Ashe was seeing events all around her. For an instant she witnessed a woman addressing a meeting, the woman’s back to her gaze. It was only when the figure hesitated and then swung around, an expression of temporary fury on her face that Ashe knew Berrach. Even if they’d never met, Ashe knew her enemy. Berrach’s obvious and immediate hatred was like a ducking in of ice-water, but it did no harm; serving only to sharpen Ashe’s perceptions. She could see for the first time the shadow of Calypso’s heredity and she grinned cheerfully, like a warrior strapping on armour and sword. Berrach was a patently obvious enemy.
She saw Rhea next. She saw the wise-woman from a long and cool distance and became aware, for the first time, not of skills exposed, but of humane qualities lacking. Rhea was working busily enough, brewing up herbs until the air in her workshop was blue with smoke and almost impenetrable, but she was working foolishly and with an air of bleak confusion. Whatever was needed to cure Gowdie, it would not be forthcoming from that site.
She glimpsed Betany, and there she saw nothing but simple determination, and a mind open to the needs of her people. She felt the sickness that Betany was fighting each morning and wished that she could prevent that. She saw Betany’s love for her, and it brought tears to Ashe’s eyes. She thought out-loud, “I must get home”, and thus motivated, began to move more quickly and with determination through the ether that supported her.
On her way out she saw two more images: the first was that of a spirit or ghost, with one arm disfigured, stealing a path through the twilight world and leaving horror in its wake. Murah, she thought, wondering what imbalance in the world had let that monster loose. Murah with the beast of the Red Temple still out there and hungry. And within the shadow that Murah cast Ashe saw a well-appointed bed in a well-appointed room, with a figure lying too cold and still across the covers. She did not for a moment recognise Ardan, and then she did and drew in her breath sharply. The happy – she nearly thought the word “smug” and then withdrew it in apology – little figure who had taken on the role of apprentice to Rhea. Things were definitely out of order.
Taking a deep breath, Ashe closed her eyes tightly and flung herself out into the ordinary world.