Other than Davion's chores, learning the farmsman's craft from his father, childhood had been a blurry mess of pulled pigtails, tussles in mud-pits, bloody noses that put him in his place when he took on a bigger boy, and respect earned and returned in scraps. Best of all, it had been, more often than not, long, slow sunshiny days spent by the pond. Wildflowers, and the earthy smell of muck. Shade cool on his face. Mud luscious between his toes. Croaks and hums and the omnipresent buzz of dragonflies.
In the waist-high bulrushes around the edges, getting eaten alive by bloat-flies, he'd catch frogs, scooping them up into a bucket that he left in the shade. When he'd finally gathered up a gaggle of them, he'd spend an hour just watching them scrabble over each other in the little pool of water at the bottom before dumping them all back into the pond.
Sometimes all those things came together:
Like that one day, when a faceless boy had scooped up a baby frog, spindly legs only just having emerged from the base of its nearly translucent, bulbous body, and let it loose, only to crush it underfoot, guts smeared against the sole of his boot.
It took three kids and a collective beating from the older boy and his friends to put Davion down that day, planted in the dirt with his breezy white tunic rent and stained. Spindly arms were barely enough to push him to his feet, nose clogged with blood.
There was a deep wrinkling of his mother's brow as he smiled and showed off split knuckles and blood between his teeth, but his father slapped a meaty hand to his lithe shoulder and there was no need for words. No chastisement from his mother as she cleaned him up and set about sewing his torn shirt, and no praise from his father – just a half-mug of stale and sour beer that was among the sweetest things that Davion could ever remember tasting in his life even as it mingled with the savour of copper on his tongue.
That was Davion's childhood. There had only been one schoolhouse for the village children, and it wasn't for him.
As a boy with a dirt-smudge face rushing about his village, Davion had no need to learn his letters, and hated them besides. A farmer's son wasn't going to become an innkeeper or money-lender or scribe, a fact that he expressed quite plainly to his mother. He'd never seen the point in reading or letters or speaking "proper," voice slurring with that distinct peasant intonation unique in small ways that let anyone from the village know that they had come upon a friend and neighbor, or, with the lilting roll of an "arr" or stuttered lisp of an "ess," a stranger.
Men from the cities spoke with their own accent - one that was proper.
The Dragon Knight did.
After that, letters became a vitally important part of Davion's life as he buried himself in every book that he could pull from the cinders. Dragon Knights read, and they learnt and they trained, and so did Davion.
Always a spindly little whelp, he'd started running. He was good at running, just like his father told him. Some pointless fights couldn't be won, but you bloodied a bully's nose for the sake of it. Other pointless fights couldn't be won, so you ran or you burned.
Hefting logs and threshing wheat and running while burdened down by loads of grain had been enough to fill out his figure, but that bulk was cut back and refined through his official training in Dragon Hold.
The twisting runes that he had learnt to read and mouth and scribe for himself were power; there was power in the naming of things, and power in the choice not to give voice to them, and it was more in words than in deeds, more in thought than in action, that Davion the Dragon Knight was born.
While he had always been the talker with his boyhood friends, always the social butterfly who could feign expertise in any subject and draw all eyes and ears to him, he'd not understood how words form the fundamental structure of the world just as much as the four elements and the four fundamental forces. Words gave shape to ideas; words cajoled and inspired and turned a rabble of terrified villagers into reveling celebrants; and words were stories and the protection charms weaved into dragonscale armour and the runes carved into the great teleportation chambers in Dragon Hold. All of which was magic, just magic of different sorts.
Words, and the yarns knit by his squire in taverns across the realm, also wooed a fair share of ladies, which was when action took over, but, then, so did his being a Dragon Knight, and a young man who was rather easy on the eyes.
Ever since Fymryn joined their group as a guide, though, she'd been the talker: keeping him up at night by rhapsodizing over the stars, or slowing them down in the gullies and rocky canyons due to her inexperience with the terrain, which led to some sight-seeing and pestering question as she pointed out every outcropping and striation in various rock formations,.
Maybe that was for his sake, or for hers; he didn't know. There was a lot of talking on the road. More than he'd ever been accustomed to on his journeys, no bar maidens or village girls to impress, but it was good to just let the words flow or get washed away in a different tide.
That changed when they arrived in Coedwig. But for her suggestion that they flee, Fymryn had been otherwise silent, even when they received word that the captain of the Dark Moon Order had agreed to the Invoker's terms.
Diplomatic success and some strings pulled by Fymryn and Mirana came with better accommodations than a "tent by the apothecary's."
At least there were no warding runes on their new holding cell, deeper into the village of Coedwig.
That was what Davion assumed were slathered over several of the more grandiose structures replete with ornate wood-carvings that had been dashed or defaced in the spurt of iconoclastic blasphemies that drove on the Dark Moon Order. Davion could see that; Mirana could too, he knew, and if anyone could change a Goddess' course, it was her.
Passing through the low entryway to survey the dusty, spartan living and dining area, Davion felt the weight of the low ceiling on his back. A quick peak into the two adjoining rooms uncovered a pair of bedrooms fit for a human child. Coriel'Tauvi built everything small, including their people, though Fymryn and Marci were roughly the same size.
Duck under the doorway; spread legs wide to keep from cramping; make sure to keep his trousers and woolen socks on in bed, when the time came, because he'd be hanging half out of it.
He'd had worse.
A bed went a long way.
And, after dropping them off in their hovel, the guards were even nice enough to feed them this time.
The mélange of nuts and fruits was hardly the most substantial meal that had ever been presented to Davion, but he was more than used to variations and privation. Cured or salted meats jammed down his gullet or gnawed on for minutes on end while he pushed just that extra mile on the road; bone-warming and sumptuous stews, heavy with fatty beef or venison and thick chunks of potatoes with a side of bread slathered in butter, washed down with strong pint of beer – he could take either in turn.
His trust in the princess' at-times dubious penchant for diplomacy had been rewarded. Dauntless, a believer to the end, faithful in ways that Davion could only dream, Mirana had gotten it done. He knew that, and that reality should have settled his stomach enough for him to eat without reserve.
Even if his arse ached worse than it would if he was just out in the wilderness as he plopped down at their table, knotted and aged. Fymryn took watch by the door, staring out the window, while Marci moved to the other side of the room and did the same. Apparently she took to heart her mistress' command to ensure their safety.
He made a show of eating, at least for a few minutes, despite his profound lack of appetite. Mid-day meal was a distant memory in the shadows of Coedwig, but he had no stomach for this.
For her part, Fymryn was over her head, and didn't look like her appetite has survived. Not much of her had survived.
He got that.
Of the three of them, Marci usually tore into her meals with a vigour, ripping off hunks of venison or boar and gnawing the bones when she was done, before licking the grease from her fingers. She hadn't even glanced at the food. Instead, she rested by the window, her top-knot a loose tangle of orange that sprawled and splayed out in wispy tufts while her bangs hung low on her pinching forehead.
"Marci?" Hands rising to the front of his chest, he pointed towards himself, then to her, noting in his peripheral vision the quirk of Fymryn's head, and then placed both index fingers, held upright, before his mouth and flicked them back and forth between them.
A pitiful thing, her smile rose, and she nodded, leaving the window behind to join him at the table.
"What are you doing?" Fymryn asked as Marci took a seat across from him, clearing away the platter of fresh fruits and the two bowls of unidentifiable nuts and mushrooms.
"Just having a chat."
"Marci can't speak." As if suddenly thinking better of herself, she waggled her hands before her chest, nervous laugh bubbling out from deep inside her diaphragm. "Uh- not that I meant to offend."
"Sure she can."
Marci's head bobbed.
"You just have to learn the words." Davion insisted.
Their halting conversation, punctuated by a few lessons involving words spelled out in the alphabet that Marci had taught him during the earliest days of their journey together, ranged through a dozen different subjects.
It must have been somewhat frustrating for Marci to have to put up with him, given that his vocabulary couldn't have been more than that of a small child, and he delivered most of his replies by way of a grotesque mixture of butchered signs and verbal expressions, leading her to supplement his speech by demonstrating the appropriate gestures that he'd no doubt forget in short order.
Eventually, Fymryn drew in close to watch, hooded eyes rising up until she was drinking in the sight of Marci's motions, her own hands visibly quivering under the table. To Marci, it probably would have been like watching a baby babble. When the time was right, Davion started to pose questions, as best he could, about the woods of Coedwig that Marci simply couldn't answer.
That was when Fymryn actually tried to join in, leaning onto the table, into their space, on her forearms before she realized that she actually needed her hands. Perhaps by dint of her heritage, a genetic facility with languages, she was actually fairly adept at plucking up the new terms as Marci took them by the hands, figuratively for the most part, and guided them through the complex, interconnected motions.
She wasn't anywhere close to truly being able to carry out a conversation; heck, neither was he, and neither of them were really learning and practicing extensively. Marci, largess, patience, verbal speech, and charades were carrying them.
But that wasn't the point.
A sour expression overtook Fymryn's countenance when they strayed onto the subject of the village architecture and Davion tried to find some way to ask for the sign for "thatched" without coming out and saying it.
Halfway through the sign, once Davion finally worked through a pantomime of a roof and a few gestures towards the buildings visible through the window at his back, Fymryn interrupted with a croak.
"What's the word for … for pod?" Lidded eyes unfocused and staring past Davion towards the rows of singed huts along the edge of the village, Fymryn thumbed the edge of the chakram at her left hip.
While Davion himself might have played off the question with a boast or jibe that died on the tip of his tongue, the sight of soot and ash filled his head with the biting smell of that smoke.
Marci merely brought her hands together and extended them outwards in a crescent, miming cracking it open before tapping a line along one index finger with the other.
"That kind of looks like a pea-pod." Davion offered with a shrug and a wide smile. He could still feel the blood sluicing through it as Fymryn reciprocated.
By way of reply, Marci rapped the table to draw their attention back to her, and then made a circular gesture with her hands, thumb and index forming loops, touching each other, other fingers splayed towards the ceiling, in the form of the letter "eff" as Davion had learnt it.
"That's ... pod and – what?" Though her tone was light and inquisitive, she had her hand to her belt, fumbling with a strap, fingers knotting.
"Not a word that I've seen before." Even knowing the letter itself, he can only guess at the connotations of the sign; so many of them were intuitive once he pieced them together, had the right key to unlock them.
A quick flash of Marci's hand dismissed the question, as she'd done in the past when he failed to pick up on her intentions. If they had the resources, he could just offer her a scrap of parchment, but the hovel into which they were led seemed absent most amenities, let alone luxuries. Interpretation became a game of charades, at which Marci was particularly adept by necessity, Davion presumed.
In rapid succession, gaze semi-playful and semi-serious, she mimed a bragging and bulging hulk of a person, a dainty and waifish girl, her hands tucked together under her chin as she threw doe-eyes at him, and then began to rock a phantom baby in her arms.
"Oh, a family."
Fymryn's nose crinkled as if she'd smelled something foul enough to distract her attention from the huts and the Pod. "One man, one woman, and one child is a family?"
"Usually that's how it works."
"So, no one else in your villages takes care of the children. It's all... isolated?"
Marci just shrugged, and tapped two fingertips against the back of her fisted hand.
"Yeah. Marci agrees. It's basically normal." It was, and for some reason, he had to remind himself of that. Normal got washed away in the tide of dragon blood. "Is it different for a pod? All of you taking care of the children?"
"A pod belongs to each other, and children belong to the village. They're its future, so everyone has reason to be invested in how they grow up."
"Does that make things easier?" he asked as he leaned back on his stump, drawing in his legs to try to alleviate the cramping.
"We all have a sense of ... ownership." A thumb rose to her lip, squeezing. Red bloomed out around the pad, and her next words mumbled out. "Everyone teaches and everyone learns, and together we grow."
Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Marci raise her hands to the sides and shrug. "That's not so different from the smaller hamlets, but farmers are pretty disconnected because of distance, and cities because you could run into a thousand new faces every day in a place like Hauptstadt."
"That sounds a terrible existence." Pressing her hands together before her chest, Fymryn licked her lips and smiled like he thought that she did in the dragons' rookery, when he told her, without saying it, that her life could still matter. "No connection. So many bodies, but no people."
"I guess it is tough to wade through the bodies," he said, recalling the cramped back alleys of Hauptstadt, the destitute gamblers reeking of stale sweat and piss, "feel them all around you but never really connect to them." He shrugged. "Unless you hit one of the taverns or brothels. Lots of bodies to connect to there, for the right coin."
"I think that I like our pods." As she mouthed the words, Davion was focused on her hands, the delicacy of her grasp, thumb to the edge of a wooden spoon, dipping into the bowl to rotate it in a slow circle, handle bobbing. "Our villages. Our homes. It's a good way of life."
"I've never really minded leaving a home behind. Too much to do in the world. An inn or tavern will do well enough for me."
"That sounds rather sad." The way Fymryn was sucking in air had him trying to breathe for her, like he was watching that poor village boy's father choking on the frothing blood that spilled out from his cracked and bloated lips in the few moments before his body realized that it was dead. "Not to have a home that you want to get back to."
Before Davion the Dragon Knight could muddle the matter further, Marci flagged him down.
With her fist cocked upwards, the inside of her right wrist tapped against her left in several violent thrusts, before her clenched hands, fingers trembling, smacked and ground together, one atop the other, in a twisting motion. As she made the sign for family once again, her hazel eyes tightened up, appearing glassy but not implacable and detached. The vigour of her gesticulations seemed to be directed towards the runes that doted the distant, condemned hut.
"A home doesn't just sit there," Davion began, splitting his focus between Marci's hands and the agitated drumming of Fymryn's fingers against the tabletop. "A home is something that you build. And you can always choose to do that. Choose to put in the work again. That's why it's a mother and a father and children. You brought them into the world. You ... have more of a responsibility for making sure they grow up right. You work at it."
"Well, a pod brings them into the world together," Fymryn retorted, though without any aggression. "All one act. All one ceremony. All one... ritual. So that what we create, we build together. When one of us is weak, the others can be strong."
At that, her mouth stuttering into a hint of a frown, banished instantly, Marci nodded her assent, quirking her index and middle fingers and bringing down her right fist atop the other; miming a sprout rising up from the ground; pressing her hands together and then wrenching them apart while splaying her fingers as if throwing something away; then jamming a thumb to her cheek and temple.
"Right." Davion's chest itched, but he couldn't scratch it through the Invoker's dragon-plate armour. "It's not easy to grow up without a mother and a father, or, with someone ... busy all the time. I guess it would be nice, spreading the load."
Fymryn set her hand to her cheek, watching Marci weave through another slow sentence that didn't bear repeating in polite company, nothing like the way she spoke with Mirana, all emotive chops and slurred signs.
It died out, only half 'spoken.'
A flash, not of regret or resignation or guilt, but of some nameless fear that clawed deep into Davion's bones passed over her face as Marci began eyeing the food out of respect, he wagered. He watched as the elf girl weighed her words, balanced them against her thoughts, just like that span in the rookery: soot and ash in his nose but not in the air, and a scared little child crouching before him, dainty hands clutching at the Invoker's sealed trunk like it was a parent and she a little girl, just woken from a nightmare.
Then the moment passed with her smile rising up.
Davion knew that kind of smile.
"How have you been able to memorize all those words?" Fymryn asked, reaching for a handful of blackberries. "You got lost around the fifth term for moonlight."
"Well, first, I kind of think that you were making those up," Davion prodded, putting one fist atop the other with his index quirked, and drifting the upper hand forward while winking at the grinning pugilist who formed a "wye" with her hand, thumb and pinky extended, and twiddled it before her nose.
Sensitive though Fymryn was, and as deeply spiritual as the Corieltauvi's relationship to Mene's Moonlight might have been, the young woman responded well to teasing. It was normal.
"But I've always been really good with my hands." By way of illustration, he scooped a nut from the bowl to his left, set the oily, crimped fruit on the back of his thumb and flicked it deftly into his mouth.
"Pity that." Fymryn shrugged off the comment, though red crept across her cheek, as she watched him chew down his food, still bitter in his mouth. "Most women like a man who knows how to, uh ... speak well."
"I'm a man of many talents," he offered with a smirk, thumbing his jaw while Marci retorted in a gesture that was most assuredly not a sign, and fully understood. Fymryn's flush told him that, at least. That was an easy, familiar reaction, yet small tremors raced through his fingers from knuckle to tip like he was suddenly buffeted by the thick anxiety that welled up before a hunt.
"But all of those talents depend on being well-rested." Hands to the table's edge, he half levered, half raised, himself up from his makeshift seat, probably left there just as a little torture for the Nightsilver guards' guests. Neither women, parsing out their meals, seemed particularly impressed by a punctuated bow. "So on that note, I think that I'll take my leave for this evening."
"Not hungry?" Fymryn asked, so clearly slightly destabilized as she tucked into herself, shoulders slouching in a way that made her appear almost comically small, and he couldn't be certain whether that was play, guile, or genuine disappointment.
He fiddled with the straps that hooked his cape to the buckles of his shoulder armour, suddenly aware of the sweat and grime in his clothing as it stuck to his flesh like a second skin. "Not feeling too hungry these days, really."
Marci barely managed a nod, but it wasn't as if she ever needed words to speak. Even signs could pass away when they weren't needed, so with a parting nod, he turned and crossed the distance to his assigned room in only two strides.
He was just at the threshold, something tight in his throat, when Fymryn halted him.
"Davion?" Fymryn's subdued call had him looking over his shoulder at the two small women who were now actually tucking into their meal. Hands bursting with nuts and fruit, Marci was pounding back bulging mouthfuls, while Fymryn clutched in her palm a unshod walnut, knuckles white with strain as she gazed at him with eyes lidded and misted.
"Yeah?" he asked, bracing a hand to the doorway that led into his sleeping chamber and waiting through the ensuing silence. His palms were sweaty. He hated that feeling.
That smile was genuine, though confused, an admixture of sentiments that Davion didn't want to consider, as Fymryn looked up at him, caught his eye.
"Thank you for being you," she said simply, earnest like a young girl who had received a precious hand-sewn doll for her birthday.
He blinked through the haze as a molten pillar of fire in his sternum started creeping upwards, like it could spew out in a vomit and just empty everything that he was.
Who else could he be but Davion the Fucking Dragon Knight?
That was what he wanted to be.
"Try hard as I might, I can't be anyone else." He appreciated the paradoxically sombre and playful nod of acknowledgement. "'less I get good and drunk." That wasn't who he was right now, though, much as he hated being, and yearned to be, anything less; anything more; anything else. If it bothered her, she didn't show any sign of it as he threw her a wink. "Have a good night's sleep, my ladies."
"Likewise, Davion." And with that, she turned back to her meal, questing about for some scraps that flew forth from the ravenous tornado that was Marci.
With a laugh, he retreated into his sleeping chamber, closing the door behind him. Once he was across the threshold, muscles in his cheeks crimped and coiled, and he was suddenly aware of the aching knots across his shoulders, in his chest. Lactic acid cramping burned a rushing river of pins and needles in his thighs.
It took a few moments to tug off his boots and collapse back against the door to breathe.
And not breathe, holding it until his lungs screamed for air and he couldn't.
And breathe again; until the feeling passed. Wood and metal plate were firm against his back, enough to keep him from falling.
He chose to sleep in his armour again.
Even through the miasmal haze of alien ozone mingled with some form of incense that wafted down from the shrine erected to Selemene, honeysuckle and pine hung in the air, as cloying as anything in the woods of Coedwig.
Throughout their journeys together, Marci and Mirana had appeared to dismiss or ignore the senses that Davion himself, in retrospect, realized were growing keener by the day; even a field-mouse chittering and scraping about in the earth, all plump meat and luscious fear, was enough to prick his ears and twist up his guts like they were being squeezed up by a noose. Now he knew why, of course, and he glutted himself on bottle after bottle of booze each night after they passed a hamlet or merchant on the road.
It was only that keen sense that allowed the breathy voices from the other room to reach him as he propped his head in his hands, pillowed down on the cool, fresh sheets that had been laid out for him.
"So," Fymryn began in a hush, and the image of her cupping a hand to her cheek as she leaned into Marci's personal space, lithe and playful, was clear as a pure stream. "I get that you're not in a pod with him."
There was a beat of silence.
"My only question is why."
At the very least, a huff of air should have burst from his nose, a laugh stifled, but nothing came.
Before he fell asleep, Davion spent a half hour listening to the chirp of crickets, the rush of wind, and the low murmur of voices and shuffling of feet and cloth as the women readied themselves for bed in the two far rooms. When all the human and elf-noises fell silent, save for the faintest puffs of distant breathing that scraped about inside his skull, made him think of a forge's bellows and fire consuming fields and the mice scampering through the blazes, he closed his eyes and refused to open them.
There were only half-remembered signs, hands twitching to burn the feeling of them into his muscles, and then thoughts grasping at the myriad words for moonlight, guttural and lilting in Fymryn's brogue, resounding though he could not speak them.
He allowed himself to dream.