Post by max on Jun 15, 2014 16:59:25 GMT 10
Title: St John’s Wort
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,038
Bingo:Family outdoors shadows nature sweat
Summary (and any Warnings): Briar, Evvy, and the licking of wounds. (Minor spoilers for Battle Magic, PTSD~)
Notes: If you have any questions about any customs or anything (I sort of intended to explain them in the fic but then it changed direction, so that didn’t really happen), ask away.
The shadow of Gyonxe is forever in the ordinary things. Certain times of day, some sounds. There are foods they had eaten in the palace or the mountains Briar is never able to touch again: when he passes through the Winding Circle gates, they become scattered over with lifeless bodies or lurch and warp into monstrous creatures that do not exist outside of his vision. One day Daja is given a lump of cinnabar in a trade and passes it on to Evvy and she comes to an absolute halt, not even breathing while he crosses the kitchen in quick strides and gently unfurls her clenched fingers from the terrible, innocent gift, trying to call her back even as her temperature drops and her eyes unfocus and Luvo’s mountain voice booms through every room of the house, so loud plaster drops from the walls.
(Not loud enough to bring her back either – or at least, not immediately.)
That had been in the winter though.
‘Come on,’ she tells him now. ‘That still only makes four.’
He comes back to the moment at hand, the charmed basket on his arm and the fennel Evvy has carefully worked into it around his memories. Tells her, ‘There’s an elder on the weather side of that hill.’
Around them the long grass sways and the bees hum and midsummer is its own glory to the green world; the time when his veins seem overflowing with the power of so many growing things, flowers blossoming for him without being asked and if he opens himself up he is aware of every seed and plant for miles. Meanwhile human Emelan dies, stultified by the high hours that bake the roads hard and turn the air to treacle so even in the shade of the trees everything feels thick and hot, the only reprieve the cool sea or colder streams – but there is work to be done today, and so this afternoon there are neither.
It is Midsummer’s Eve, and they are gathering wildflowers Rosethorn insists must be taken from where they grow naturally in the hills above Winding Circle, though Crane has a greenhouse set aside specifically for their cultivation. Evvy’s chore, given she had snapped at Comas for shifting her rocks when they were tidying the cottage, but Briar had tailed along to ease the passage of the task and the sting of the scolding both.
He watches now as she sets out ahead of him to where the elder waits calling for him; and calls out to her back that he’ll take the flowers for her, as he’d done with the foxgloves and rue.
It is Midsummer’s Eve after all, and he is never too careful, now.
*
Hours later they make their way home, laden down by foliage and the light still staining the countryside in the colours of its passage. Still too far to hear the tolling of the Hub, but he imagines it is maybe nine o clock because the heat has faded to a bearable level but the sun is aglow over the distant sea.
Still, night will fall – soon. The colours of the horizon tell him so: vivid amber already beginning to turn pink, clouds currently aflame beginning to blush and thicken, and when the sky deepens to indigo they will burn the yarrow and bracken now faggoted across his back and if they jump three times across the fire no bad luck will come to them. A superstition with which in nine years the girls have never bothered, but last year when someone had condescended to explain to Evvy what it meant she had done it too, wraith-like through the smoke and her festival best, her hair braided in a shining rope flying out behind her.
(Because, she had explained, when he had thought to tease her on her sudden faith, gods don’t trouble themselves over people like me.
Because, she had said, unapologetic in her sincerity, I need all the luck I can get.)
In the morning she had bathed her face in the dew of the flowers too, her piety lending the ritual more sacredness than a temple service; her upturned face so young in the white dawn light that all he had been able to remember was the terrible story she had told him, the day she came back to him from the dead.
Around them the grasses whisper, sweet with the heat they have absorbed throughout the day. Under her breath, low as a prayer, Evvy is listing the plants they could not find – dog rose, laburnum, goatweed – at the same time she is dead in the Drimbakang mountains on a pile of ragdoll corpses, and the lemon sweetness of the verbena floods the already rich air.
When Evvy sets her own cargo down and takes his hands, he realises they are shaking uncontrollably, his grip sticky with sweat, and the verbena he has crushed to perfume.
Her hands dry and warm and little around his own. Hardened by a lifetime of hardness – gentleness in the gesture, rather than the action itself – but she is alive in the dusk and smells of wildflowers, and she is the only one who has ever really understood.
Not trying to touch it in words, because there are none. Neither the hackneyed maxims of the soul healer, nor the consolation Rosethorn had found in her faith. Their magic had meant they were able to survive it as so many others did not, but Evvy had torn her soul from her body and some irreplaceable piece of it had remained in the mountains ever since; the price of her survival.
When she says, ‘You have to stay with me Briar,’ it means something deeper than blood, or magic. Or love.
Something more.
The sky has turned white, the evening star glimmering in the east whiter still. He wonders if Rosethorn has given in yet; taken her ferns and flowers from Crane – as they will have to for those they couldn’t find anyway – and it shouldn’t matter where they come from (so little had ever mattered after the war), only that they grow.
He tells her, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
And wants to mean it with all his heart.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,038
Bingo:
Summary (and any Warnings): Briar, Evvy, and the licking of wounds. (Minor spoilers for Battle Magic, PTSD~)
Notes: If you have any questions about any customs or anything (I sort of intended to explain them in the fic but then it changed direction, so that didn’t really happen), ask away.
The shadow of Gyonxe is forever in the ordinary things. Certain times of day, some sounds. There are foods they had eaten in the palace or the mountains Briar is never able to touch again: when he passes through the Winding Circle gates, they become scattered over with lifeless bodies or lurch and warp into monstrous creatures that do not exist outside of his vision. One day Daja is given a lump of cinnabar in a trade and passes it on to Evvy and she comes to an absolute halt, not even breathing while he crosses the kitchen in quick strides and gently unfurls her clenched fingers from the terrible, innocent gift, trying to call her back even as her temperature drops and her eyes unfocus and Luvo’s mountain voice booms through every room of the house, so loud plaster drops from the walls.
(Not loud enough to bring her back either – or at least, not immediately.)
That had been in the winter though.
‘Come on,’ she tells him now. ‘That still only makes four.’
He comes back to the moment at hand, the charmed basket on his arm and the fennel Evvy has carefully worked into it around his memories. Tells her, ‘There’s an elder on the weather side of that hill.’
Around them the long grass sways and the bees hum and midsummer is its own glory to the green world; the time when his veins seem overflowing with the power of so many growing things, flowers blossoming for him without being asked and if he opens himself up he is aware of every seed and plant for miles. Meanwhile human Emelan dies, stultified by the high hours that bake the roads hard and turn the air to treacle so even in the shade of the trees everything feels thick and hot, the only reprieve the cool sea or colder streams – but there is work to be done today, and so this afternoon there are neither.
It is Midsummer’s Eve, and they are gathering wildflowers Rosethorn insists must be taken from where they grow naturally in the hills above Winding Circle, though Crane has a greenhouse set aside specifically for their cultivation. Evvy’s chore, given she had snapped at Comas for shifting her rocks when they were tidying the cottage, but Briar had tailed along to ease the passage of the task and the sting of the scolding both.
He watches now as she sets out ahead of him to where the elder waits calling for him; and calls out to her back that he’ll take the flowers for her, as he’d done with the foxgloves and rue.
It is Midsummer’s Eve after all, and he is never too careful, now.
*
Hours later they make their way home, laden down by foliage and the light still staining the countryside in the colours of its passage. Still too far to hear the tolling of the Hub, but he imagines it is maybe nine o clock because the heat has faded to a bearable level but the sun is aglow over the distant sea.
Still, night will fall – soon. The colours of the horizon tell him so: vivid amber already beginning to turn pink, clouds currently aflame beginning to blush and thicken, and when the sky deepens to indigo they will burn the yarrow and bracken now faggoted across his back and if they jump three times across the fire no bad luck will come to them. A superstition with which in nine years the girls have never bothered, but last year when someone had condescended to explain to Evvy what it meant she had done it too, wraith-like through the smoke and her festival best, her hair braided in a shining rope flying out behind her.
(Because, she had explained, when he had thought to tease her on her sudden faith, gods don’t trouble themselves over people like me.
Because, she had said, unapologetic in her sincerity, I need all the luck I can get.)
In the morning she had bathed her face in the dew of the flowers too, her piety lending the ritual more sacredness than a temple service; her upturned face so young in the white dawn light that all he had been able to remember was the terrible story she had told him, the day she came back to him from the dead.
Around them the grasses whisper, sweet with the heat they have absorbed throughout the day. Under her breath, low as a prayer, Evvy is listing the plants they could not find – dog rose, laburnum, goatweed – at the same time she is dead in the Drimbakang mountains on a pile of ragdoll corpses, and the lemon sweetness of the verbena floods the already rich air.
When Evvy sets her own cargo down and takes his hands, he realises they are shaking uncontrollably, his grip sticky with sweat, and the verbena he has crushed to perfume.
Her hands dry and warm and little around his own. Hardened by a lifetime of hardness – gentleness in the gesture, rather than the action itself – but she is alive in the dusk and smells of wildflowers, and she is the only one who has ever really understood.
Not trying to touch it in words, because there are none. Neither the hackneyed maxims of the soul healer, nor the consolation Rosethorn had found in her faith. Their magic had meant they were able to survive it as so many others did not, but Evvy had torn her soul from her body and some irreplaceable piece of it had remained in the mountains ever since; the price of her survival.
When she says, ‘You have to stay with me Briar,’ it means something deeper than blood, or magic. Or love.
Something more.
The sky has turned white, the evening star glimmering in the east whiter still. He wonders if Rosethorn has given in yet; taken her ferns and flowers from Crane – as they will have to for those they couldn’t find anyway – and it shouldn’t matter where they come from (so little had ever mattered after the war), only that they grow.
He tells her, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
And wants to mean it with all his heart.