Post by Shhasow on Nov 18, 2010 3:28:01 GMT 10
Mourning
Summary: The morning after the battle.
Rating: PG
I'll start posting one at a time now because I've almost exhausted my cache.
Thanks to Ankhiale, as always.
Part 8 of 11 (so far)
_______
The two combatants circled, naked swords in hand, looking for an opening, a loss of attention, a brief wandering of mind or a wrong step.
As one, they stepped towards each other to begin their deadly dance of steel.
They feinted, lunged, quick-stepped to avoid sudden thrusts, leapt to a side and circled to counter an aggressive charge.
The face of Keladry’s companion wore a look of absolute concentration, a savage grin playing on his lips as he ducked and wove, as light on her feet as herself. Dimly, she knew her own expression mirrored his, but she gave it no thought as she launched a complex offensive pattern that he blocked and returned.
It was a glorious testing of body and mind, physical strength and mental. They gasped for air, chests burning. How long until one of them gave out, or both?
This was the height of expression, the apex of their art. It was a deadly battle for control, a battle of muscle and will.
This was not peace. It was better than peace.
It was exhilaration.
As her muscles tired and breath gave out, she pushed herself past them, forced her brain to ignore the pain. Pain was weakness leaving the body.
As the sweat ran down her face, she felt refined, purified, as if all of her cares and worries and foolish dreams were swept away.
Keladry felt greater than herself, strong, powerful, unbreakable.
Beautiful.
He was too, a small voice noted distantly. While no one could call him graceful, he moved lightly with a solid purpose, grandly occupying space, filling it with his presence. His broad shoulders heaved with exertion; the exquisite concentration on his face never faltered as he sped up the tempo of their dance.
She followed, matching at every step, pushing him to push her ever upwards towards some unreachable ideal, the warmth in her chest emanating throughout her body, breath coming fast, body tightening in preparation for some unspeakable conclusion.
Suddenly they stopped, locked body to body; he bore down on her as she blocked with both hands, swords hilt to hilt. Their heads inches apart, Kel could see every drop of sweat on his face, every individual hair, the golden flecks in his warm brown eyes as they reflected something unidentifiable that burned inside of her.
They leaned closer together, struggling, muscles burning, jaws clenched, determined.
Closer, closer, closer…
“Keladry,” he murmured huskily, eyes dropping to her lips.
“Wyldon,” she spoke in a sigh.
His gaze flickered behind her.
His face went slack with shock, then tight with terror.
“Keladry,” he said in horror.
She felt a sudden piercing pain in her chest. She looked down to see steel flowers sprouting, cutting their way through her skin, growing, growing until they pierced his own, forming a path of metal between them.
Blood bubbled from his mouth as he whispered.
“Keladry.”
“Keladry.”
“Keladry of Mindelan, report!”
Kel shot up from the bed, then grit her teeth as pain blossomed through her body. She grasped her chest and looked down, relieved to see it merely bandaged. Jump, having joined her at some point during the night, grumbled in his sleep. She stared at her hands until someone turned her head with an iron grip to the side; she saw the exasperated face of Lord Wyldon.
“Gods, you are a heavy sleeper,” he muttered, releasing her.
“Only after healings, my lord,” she answered quietly, unobtrusively searching his face, for the blood or that look, she wasn’t certain. “Usually I sleep lightly.”
“Thank Mithros for that.” He sank gingerly onto his bed. “You were dreaming.”
Kel slammed down her Yamani mask before she blushed openly. “Thank you for waking me.” She looked everywhere but him. “How are you, sir?”
“Fine.”
She studied him out of the corner of her eye. Wyldon did not wear a shirt, but he was covered in enough bandages to preserve his modesty. His left shoulder was swathed in cloth, as was his torso and extra lengths on his right side. How had this happened to them so near to Corus?
His grumpy voice startled her. “You never did report.”
Kel decided he was annoyed at being too injured to successfully fend off a healer. She took a deep breath and spoke dispassionately.
“We were about half a mile away from the palace when about two squads of trained soldiers ambushed us behind a turn. We were… dehorsed and managed to incapacitate enough of the attackers to escape.”
Dehorsed… Peachblossom was dead.
Kel gasped, eyes filling with tears. How had she forgotten about her mount? Her cranky, bad-tempered horse, broken and then pieced back together, who had carried her for ten years. He was more than her horse, he was the other side of her that she never showed, the part of her that was annoyed at other’s inanities, who wanted to snap and snarl at those who sneered at her, to trick and tease and…
Her hands flew to her face as she hunched over, ignoring the pain in her chest for the pain in her heart.
She mourned her lost companion, her testy ally who had willingly carried her in every joust and every battle, with a savagery that tapped into her own, deeply buried inside of her, hidden by years of discipline, only arising in battle.
Her bed tilted and a heavy arm wrapped around her, pulling her gently into a broad expanse of crisp white. Kel was aware of nothing but the deep voice that soothed, rumbling indistinctly as she let herself cry.
Wyldon studied the girl in his arms. A few years ago, or even now if he didn’t know her, he likely would have sneered at such an obvious weakness as tears, perceiving them as a loss of control and an example of the foolishness of female warriors.
Now, though, he understood a little more.
Her tears, rather than being a sign of weakness, derived from her greatest strength, her unending compassion. Only she could feel so deeply about a temperamental abused gelding, yet her mutt of a horse performed for her on par with his own horses, bred from the finest lines.
Peachblossom was only one of the incidences where her compassionate nature overrode good common sense. There were those sparrows, the dog Jump, the servant girl for whom she had missed her big examinations, that horse boy of hers she emancipated. For anyone else, all or most of these risks would have proved foolhardy, yet the sparrows led them to the spidrens her first year, Jump was as fine a warhound as the Corus and Cavall kennels could provide. The servant girl proved loyal and was making a name for herself in the bowels of Corus, and the horse boy Tobeis was instrumental in the Scanran debacle.
Which was another topic in and of itself.
Somehow, Keladry saw in animals and people what others missed. She helped them be more than what other people had forced them to be, more than themselves.
And she considered him a friend.
No, he could not fault her for her compassion, not when he was a grateful recipient of it.
After her knighthood and especially after his recommendation that she be pardoned after Scanra, he had been ostracized from those he thought friends. They wanted little to do with him after he trained and commanded the Lady Knight; they thought he was bewitched. The most base accused him of sleeping with her even as a page.
He had not controlled himself well. Such an accusation went against every principle he had lived by his entire life. To suggest that of him was willfully malicious; it meant an utter disregard for his entire life’s work, for his oaths, morals, and vows.
Ansil of Groten would not slander him again, at least not to his face.
Nor was Wyldon accepted among the progressives, not that he wanted to be. He was grudgingly tolerated, but no more. He was much too fond of stability and openly leery of change to fit with that crowd.
So he stood in between, stranded by his principles, loyal to this girl who defied all of his expectations and succeeded beyond her male counterparts.
Yet he could not begrudge it, not when he had her friendship. Not when she saw something in him that everyone else missed, something that made her seek his company whether for training or escape during a court function.
His arms tightened slightly around her, rubbing her back softly, ignoring the shoots of pain that ran through his body at her weight on his shoulder and his movements.
No, he was not surprised at this softening of opinion.
Let her cry for now.
Maybe one day she would cry for him.
Slowly, Kel came back to herself, became aware of more than her encompassing sorrow. The strong heartbeat beneath her ear, the arms that narrowly missed her wound but that still stretched and aggrieved it, the chin that rested gently on the top of her head, the sensations brought themselves to her attention.
She was embarrassed, incredibly so, but it warred with a feeling of comfort and protection. Kel wasn’t sure which feelings would win, but the latter confused her and the former demanded she extricate herself immediately.
Kel pulled back against the arms; they instantly lifted, leaving her sitting by Wyldon’s side. She turned her head away, not wanting to meet his eyes, certain that they would carry irritation and scorn at her loss of control.
“I apologize, sir,” she whispered, interrupted by a cough.
“Keladry,” he sighed. “Do you think I will chastise you for mourning.”
“I, yes, but, well,” Kel said, confused.
He shook his head and placed a comforting hand on her knee. She looked at it for lack of anything else; it was broad and long with neatly trimmed fingernails, strong muscles, and liberal scars.
“Peachblossom was more than the horse you rode for ten years,” he said slowly. “You saved him from a terrible fate, and he was loyal to you beyond anything for it.”
Kel shook her head. “I know that, I do. It’s just, he could have been put to pasture after the war, he was old enough for it, but I didn’t want to lose him, and now I have, forever.” She swallowed hard and closed her eyes.
“I rather suspect he had something to that decision,” Wyldon said wryly. “He would not have been happy to be idle; more precisely, he would not have been happy away from you. He refused to leave you in danger.”
“He should have fled!”
“It wasn’t in his nature to flee, any more than it is in yours.”
Kel nodded unhappily, unconvinced.
“Keladry, do you think anyone could have done what you did? Any of your year mates, any of the pages I’ve ever trained, would have given Peachblossom up for a bad job, not worth the time and effort. No one would have done as you did, no one could have. You must believe it, else you will suffer unnecessarily.”
“Yes sir,” she said softly.
Wyldon’s hand moved from her knee to pick up her hand and grasp it.
“If you tell anyone this, I shall deny it,” he warned, “but I cried when my first mount died.”
Kel was shocked. Lord Wyldon, the man made of stone?
He nodded. “Aramis was the first colt I raised. I bred him, trained him, and rode him off to the palace for page training. He was my closest companion for nine years, but he died my last year as a squire, hamstrung by a dying soldier laying on the ground. In the heat of battle, my dearest ally looked up at me, and I ended his pain.”
Kel squeezed his hand. What a terrible thing to be forced to do; she could hardly imagine it.
“I fought the rest of the battle with blurred vision. I am not sure how I did not die, but I kept fighting. I couldn’t stop; my knight master eventually found me hacking at corpses to make sure they were dead.
“He told me what I am telling you, though I didn’t believe him at the time.
“Compassion for friends is not a weakness. Peachblossom was better off for you, and he went the way he would have wanted, fighting with his last breath to protect you, his ally, his best friend.
“And if you breathe a word of this to Queenscove, I will challenge you at every tournament for the next twenty years.”
Kel laughed hoarsely. “I understand; you have to keep up your reputation, my lord.”
Wyldon nodded with a smirk, and then hesitated slightly as he slowly released her hand.
“Are we friends, Keladry?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“My friends may call me by my given name.”
Kel, touched, reached out and grabbed his retreating hand. She squeezed it tightly once, and let it drop between them. “Thank you, Wyldon.”
They both knew she was thanking him for more than the privilege, but there was no need to say more.
They understood each other perfectly.
Summary: The morning after the battle.
Rating: PG
I'll start posting one at a time now because I've almost exhausted my cache.
Thanks to Ankhiale, as always.
Part 8 of 11 (so far)
_______
The two combatants circled, naked swords in hand, looking for an opening, a loss of attention, a brief wandering of mind or a wrong step.
As one, they stepped towards each other to begin their deadly dance of steel.
They feinted, lunged, quick-stepped to avoid sudden thrusts, leapt to a side and circled to counter an aggressive charge.
The face of Keladry’s companion wore a look of absolute concentration, a savage grin playing on his lips as he ducked and wove, as light on her feet as herself. Dimly, she knew her own expression mirrored his, but she gave it no thought as she launched a complex offensive pattern that he blocked and returned.
It was a glorious testing of body and mind, physical strength and mental. They gasped for air, chests burning. How long until one of them gave out, or both?
This was the height of expression, the apex of their art. It was a deadly battle for control, a battle of muscle and will.
This was not peace. It was better than peace.
It was exhilaration.
As her muscles tired and breath gave out, she pushed herself past them, forced her brain to ignore the pain. Pain was weakness leaving the body.
As the sweat ran down her face, she felt refined, purified, as if all of her cares and worries and foolish dreams were swept away.
Keladry felt greater than herself, strong, powerful, unbreakable.
Beautiful.
He was too, a small voice noted distantly. While no one could call him graceful, he moved lightly with a solid purpose, grandly occupying space, filling it with his presence. His broad shoulders heaved with exertion; the exquisite concentration on his face never faltered as he sped up the tempo of their dance.
She followed, matching at every step, pushing him to push her ever upwards towards some unreachable ideal, the warmth in her chest emanating throughout her body, breath coming fast, body tightening in preparation for some unspeakable conclusion.
Suddenly they stopped, locked body to body; he bore down on her as she blocked with both hands, swords hilt to hilt. Their heads inches apart, Kel could see every drop of sweat on his face, every individual hair, the golden flecks in his warm brown eyes as they reflected something unidentifiable that burned inside of her.
They leaned closer together, struggling, muscles burning, jaws clenched, determined.
Closer, closer, closer…
“Keladry,” he murmured huskily, eyes dropping to her lips.
“Wyldon,” she spoke in a sigh.
His gaze flickered behind her.
His face went slack with shock, then tight with terror.
“Keladry,” he said in horror.
She felt a sudden piercing pain in her chest. She looked down to see steel flowers sprouting, cutting their way through her skin, growing, growing until they pierced his own, forming a path of metal between them.
Blood bubbled from his mouth as he whispered.
“Keladry.”
“Keladry.”
“Keladry of Mindelan, report!”
Kel shot up from the bed, then grit her teeth as pain blossomed through her body. She grasped her chest and looked down, relieved to see it merely bandaged. Jump, having joined her at some point during the night, grumbled in his sleep. She stared at her hands until someone turned her head with an iron grip to the side; she saw the exasperated face of Lord Wyldon.
“Gods, you are a heavy sleeper,” he muttered, releasing her.
“Only after healings, my lord,” she answered quietly, unobtrusively searching his face, for the blood or that look, she wasn’t certain. “Usually I sleep lightly.”
“Thank Mithros for that.” He sank gingerly onto his bed. “You were dreaming.”
Kel slammed down her Yamani mask before she blushed openly. “Thank you for waking me.” She looked everywhere but him. “How are you, sir?”
“Fine.”
She studied him out of the corner of her eye. Wyldon did not wear a shirt, but he was covered in enough bandages to preserve his modesty. His left shoulder was swathed in cloth, as was his torso and extra lengths on his right side. How had this happened to them so near to Corus?
His grumpy voice startled her. “You never did report.”
Kel decided he was annoyed at being too injured to successfully fend off a healer. She took a deep breath and spoke dispassionately.
“We were about half a mile away from the palace when about two squads of trained soldiers ambushed us behind a turn. We were… dehorsed and managed to incapacitate enough of the attackers to escape.”
Dehorsed… Peachblossom was dead.
Kel gasped, eyes filling with tears. How had she forgotten about her mount? Her cranky, bad-tempered horse, broken and then pieced back together, who had carried her for ten years. He was more than her horse, he was the other side of her that she never showed, the part of her that was annoyed at other’s inanities, who wanted to snap and snarl at those who sneered at her, to trick and tease and…
Her hands flew to her face as she hunched over, ignoring the pain in her chest for the pain in her heart.
She mourned her lost companion, her testy ally who had willingly carried her in every joust and every battle, with a savagery that tapped into her own, deeply buried inside of her, hidden by years of discipline, only arising in battle.
Her bed tilted and a heavy arm wrapped around her, pulling her gently into a broad expanse of crisp white. Kel was aware of nothing but the deep voice that soothed, rumbling indistinctly as she let herself cry.
Wyldon studied the girl in his arms. A few years ago, or even now if he didn’t know her, he likely would have sneered at such an obvious weakness as tears, perceiving them as a loss of control and an example of the foolishness of female warriors.
Now, though, he understood a little more.
Her tears, rather than being a sign of weakness, derived from her greatest strength, her unending compassion. Only she could feel so deeply about a temperamental abused gelding, yet her mutt of a horse performed for her on par with his own horses, bred from the finest lines.
Peachblossom was only one of the incidences where her compassionate nature overrode good common sense. There were those sparrows, the dog Jump, the servant girl for whom she had missed her big examinations, that horse boy of hers she emancipated. For anyone else, all or most of these risks would have proved foolhardy, yet the sparrows led them to the spidrens her first year, Jump was as fine a warhound as the Corus and Cavall kennels could provide. The servant girl proved loyal and was making a name for herself in the bowels of Corus, and the horse boy Tobeis was instrumental in the Scanran debacle.
Which was another topic in and of itself.
Somehow, Keladry saw in animals and people what others missed. She helped them be more than what other people had forced them to be, more than themselves.
And she considered him a friend.
No, he could not fault her for her compassion, not when he was a grateful recipient of it.
After her knighthood and especially after his recommendation that she be pardoned after Scanra, he had been ostracized from those he thought friends. They wanted little to do with him after he trained and commanded the Lady Knight; they thought he was bewitched. The most base accused him of sleeping with her even as a page.
He had not controlled himself well. Such an accusation went against every principle he had lived by his entire life. To suggest that of him was willfully malicious; it meant an utter disregard for his entire life’s work, for his oaths, morals, and vows.
Ansil of Groten would not slander him again, at least not to his face.
Nor was Wyldon accepted among the progressives, not that he wanted to be. He was grudgingly tolerated, but no more. He was much too fond of stability and openly leery of change to fit with that crowd.
So he stood in between, stranded by his principles, loyal to this girl who defied all of his expectations and succeeded beyond her male counterparts.
Yet he could not begrudge it, not when he had her friendship. Not when she saw something in him that everyone else missed, something that made her seek his company whether for training or escape during a court function.
His arms tightened slightly around her, rubbing her back softly, ignoring the shoots of pain that ran through his body at her weight on his shoulder and his movements.
No, he was not surprised at this softening of opinion.
Let her cry for now.
Maybe one day she would cry for him.
Slowly, Kel came back to herself, became aware of more than her encompassing sorrow. The strong heartbeat beneath her ear, the arms that narrowly missed her wound but that still stretched and aggrieved it, the chin that rested gently on the top of her head, the sensations brought themselves to her attention.
She was embarrassed, incredibly so, but it warred with a feeling of comfort and protection. Kel wasn’t sure which feelings would win, but the latter confused her and the former demanded she extricate herself immediately.
Kel pulled back against the arms; they instantly lifted, leaving her sitting by Wyldon’s side. She turned her head away, not wanting to meet his eyes, certain that they would carry irritation and scorn at her loss of control.
“I apologize, sir,” she whispered, interrupted by a cough.
“Keladry,” he sighed. “Do you think I will chastise you for mourning.”
“I, yes, but, well,” Kel said, confused.
He shook his head and placed a comforting hand on her knee. She looked at it for lack of anything else; it was broad and long with neatly trimmed fingernails, strong muscles, and liberal scars.
“Peachblossom was more than the horse you rode for ten years,” he said slowly. “You saved him from a terrible fate, and he was loyal to you beyond anything for it.”
Kel shook her head. “I know that, I do. It’s just, he could have been put to pasture after the war, he was old enough for it, but I didn’t want to lose him, and now I have, forever.” She swallowed hard and closed her eyes.
“I rather suspect he had something to that decision,” Wyldon said wryly. “He would not have been happy to be idle; more precisely, he would not have been happy away from you. He refused to leave you in danger.”
“He should have fled!”
“It wasn’t in his nature to flee, any more than it is in yours.”
Kel nodded unhappily, unconvinced.
“Keladry, do you think anyone could have done what you did? Any of your year mates, any of the pages I’ve ever trained, would have given Peachblossom up for a bad job, not worth the time and effort. No one would have done as you did, no one could have. You must believe it, else you will suffer unnecessarily.”
“Yes sir,” she said softly.
Wyldon’s hand moved from her knee to pick up her hand and grasp it.
“If you tell anyone this, I shall deny it,” he warned, “but I cried when my first mount died.”
Kel was shocked. Lord Wyldon, the man made of stone?
He nodded. “Aramis was the first colt I raised. I bred him, trained him, and rode him off to the palace for page training. He was my closest companion for nine years, but he died my last year as a squire, hamstrung by a dying soldier laying on the ground. In the heat of battle, my dearest ally looked up at me, and I ended his pain.”
Kel squeezed his hand. What a terrible thing to be forced to do; she could hardly imagine it.
“I fought the rest of the battle with blurred vision. I am not sure how I did not die, but I kept fighting. I couldn’t stop; my knight master eventually found me hacking at corpses to make sure they were dead.
“He told me what I am telling you, though I didn’t believe him at the time.
“Compassion for friends is not a weakness. Peachblossom was better off for you, and he went the way he would have wanted, fighting with his last breath to protect you, his ally, his best friend.
“And if you breathe a word of this to Queenscove, I will challenge you at every tournament for the next twenty years.”
Kel laughed hoarsely. “I understand; you have to keep up your reputation, my lord.”
Wyldon nodded with a smirk, and then hesitated slightly as he slowly released her hand.
“Are we friends, Keladry?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“My friends may call me by my given name.”
Kel, touched, reached out and grabbed his retreating hand. She squeezed it tightly once, and let it drop between them. “Thank you, Wyldon.”
They both knew she was thanking him for more than the privilege, but there was no need to say more.
They understood each other perfectly.