Author's note: For the crack pairing prompt at fe_contest. Very slight Percival/Clarine – warning for hints of rather unpleasant injuries and the consequences thereof.
Meadowsweet and Blue
He rides in silence at Clarine's side, his gaze fixed straight ahead as she's learned to expect. She knows all the jokes – the man born with a frown on his face – but repeats not a one, and in exchange, he doesn't note, like Cecilia might, how strong she is, how brave. They face the road ahead – the hoof-worn earth, the dry, yellowed hills – together, without a word.
"I will accompany you," he'd said. "It is a long way to Reglay from here, and winter is approaching. You should not go alone."
I'm not a child anymore, Clarine had thought, but she'd held her tongue and only nodded, letting her fingers wrap tight around the cloth-bound bundle in her arms But he had not said "you cannot", only "you should not", and she likes to think she'd seen a bit of concern for her in his usual grimace.
She likes to think, again, that she sees it now as he looks away from the road ahead, just for a moment, to face her. "East, from here." He points and nods toward the path splitting to the side, winding into the near-bare wood. She remembers when her mother would take her brother out here to train in the warmer months, and her father would leave his study to carry her out to the gardens to teach her the names of the plants healers used in their potions and teas. White willow, meadowsweet, oleander, feverfew – she reaches around to the side of her saddle to clench at the cloth-bound bundle again.
"Of course I know the way to my own home, sir knight."
He doesn't answer, only riding ahead at the same pace, without waiting for her.
Clarine lets her hand stray away from the cloth and back to the reins, pulling her mount after the general. He rides straight and tall, with the noble, mighty air she'd always imagined, as a young girl, that all knights had to have. She remembers trying, herself, to ride into battle like that, with her chest raised high and her chin tilted up, a regal warrior princess with a staff in her hand.
But knights on the battlefield don't ride like that, really – they ride hunkered down with blood in their hair and dirt on their faces, smelling of waste and rot and death. Rot and bile and white willow tea – and she lets her fingers squeeze tight on the reins and her teeth dig deep into the inside of her cheek.
The general turns, and Clarine likes to imagine, for a moment, that the sword at his side is just for show, that his hair is always soft and blonde and perfect, never tattered or limp or drenched in sweat. She watches his chest rise and fall beneath his light tunic – even, steady, strong.
"If you require a moment's rest," he says, eying her with something that's not quite a frown, "we can stop."
"No." She wonders if she sounds like her mother when she speaks so firmly."We cannot stop now. We've been delayed too long already, sir knight."
She thinks she sees him eye the cloth around the bundle at the side, trace its shape with the path of his gaze. Of course he knows – it was he who brought it to her in the middle of the night at her request, he who'd pressed it into her putrid-smelling hands with a silent nod, not daring to speak over the low, fevered moans through the flap of the healers' tent.
"Of course," he says, but he slows his pace and lets her catch up, and again they ride side-by-side down the narrow path, to the castle far up in the hills and the woods where her cloth-wrapped burden will find its home again.
She tries to catch his gaze, the same rich blue as the cotton wrapped around the treasure at her side and the hue of the late autumn sky, but he doesn't oblige, keeping it straight ahead as he rides.
"When we are through here, where will you go?" she asks. She imagines for a moment that he'll stay by her side as she carries the package through the doors, remain as strong as she wishes she could be. He seems a man who'd never waver, never fall, never stare into the distance with those rich blue eyes as she leaves her staves and blends another batch of tea – willow for his fever, meadowsweet for his pain, chamomile and valerian for his sleep (and later, hers.)
"I mean to return to Aquleia." He stops at last, and she follows suit, taking a moment in the stillness to imagine she can hear his breathing mingling with the breeze. He seems to study her now, not the long crescent-shaped bundle at the side of her mount, or the staves she still carries despite the times they've failed her. "Lady Cecilia and I will have much to tend to, and of course – " it goes unsaid, the void they will need to feel in the coming months – "of course, if you ever come to the capital, it would be. . . pleasant to meet again. I. . . I have seen many men fall. You are strong. You will withstand this."
She doesn't believe him, but she nods nonetheless. She will be strong like him.
Clarine's mother's hands will smell of sweet flower lotions and bowstring wax when she pulls away the cloth, the soft blue cotton that's been soaked and scrubbed clean of the stink of war. She'll call for her husband, run her fingers along the limbs of the bow and down the string, remember the morning she'd pushed it into her son's arms – Clarine still remembers.
Maybe then Clarine will apologize for failing, for not knowing how to mend black-green flesh back together, for not knowing how to press jutting bones into muscle or ease the fevered cries of "Mother" that rang through the night – she always took after her mother in looks. But she does not apologize now, not to the general by her side. She only nods and murmurs her thanks, imagining Aquleia in the distance as she rides ahead.