The day's travel is far from the most arduous that they've experienced. Terrain within the forest is pure flat earth with myriad twisting paths of trees that seem to offer easier journeys but end in knotted tangles of brambles or impassable gullies or mist-strewn clearings where there are no insects. In those natural dead ends, the birdsong never quite echoes against the trees in a way that seems to obey the laws that govern sound and song and nature anywhere else in the world, at least so far as Fymryn has seen.
The woods of Coedwig are for people, sounds, and thoughts to get lost, or to loose themselves, and never find themselves again.
For all her protestations regarding the dubious usefulness of a guide, the princess sticks close, always atop her beast to keep it from bucking or charging. Froth bubbles around the creature's mouth in en effusion of foam and slick drool, dribbling to the ground, as if he's caught the scent of blood and is just ready to bolt and fall upon prey, and even Marci's steady hand on his shoulder or soft words cooed into his ears by the princess fail to assuage the strange fit.
At one point, they pause for a rest as Davion begins to complain of rocks in his boots and the burden that he carries with the heavy suit of armour, and she wonders how many people in this world are truly deceived by his brawn and bluster. When first they began their journey, and all she'd seen was a smitten, thick-headed gull who was enamoured with the princess, she certainly hadn't been so perceptive.
That's the dangerous thing about Davion The Dragon Knight, really: what he's hiding.
She could respect that.
Establishing a defensible camp is easy enough; between the dragon knight and the strangely alert servant girl who prepares the princess' meals and lugs about her belongings, hefting packs that are twice the size of her torso without complaint or visible strain, Fymryn knows that they're safe. Davion doesn't really seem to sleep; only dreams. The twisted mire that sucks you down, even if the shape and form are different, is familiar enough, but he'd tug free from it if instinct detected a threat.
After they cook a rabbit whose spine she'd crushed after shadow-stepping nearly atop it, they fall into the usual arrangement. Davion has elected to rest outside of his tent, saying something about watching the stars. He likes watching the stars. His eyes are always looking ahead but not at the road; the most distant points that he can find, gaze tilted slightly heavenward as if he's searching for something among the treetops. The forest must simply be alien to him, but there's only a note of careless whimsy.
She saw his face when he left in search of her.
It's a sour note, just off-key.
Tonight, the decision is eminently strange to Fymryn as the foliage and canopy above them have grown so dense that only a glimmer can be seen. Even the moon of Mene - was it ever, or were those just stories too? - is just a cascade of pale light, filtering through the leaves. In the dense wood, there is no wind, every gust caught up in the leaves and brambles.
Worse than the darkness, which for once proves comforting, are the mosquitoes that flit and buzz and leave her waking each morning with a bevy of new itchy welts. She scratches until they bleed and then keeps on scratching until a crimson crust forms under her nails. They don't seem to bother him. For some reason, she doesn't envy him.
Fymryn finds a place for her pack and unfurls her sleeping roll next to him while some instinct, the sensation like the whispering flow of oil from a jar poured out over her ears and trickling down the nape of her neck, tells her that the princess is watching.
Behind her, Mirana looses a cluck of her tongue, the only sound in her strange interplay with the cute little one, Marci.
When Fymryn looks back, she finds their hand-motions are indescribable, a whirl of seemingly sloppy gestures that grow abrupt and punctuated, pouring forth alongside soft and breathless half-words from the princess: mere inarticulate syllables that mingle with the song of the cicadas and the wind-rustled leaves. Now on the ground or in lower branches, but high above them in the treetops.
With Davion asleep or feigning it so well that she can't discern the difference, and Mari slumbering genuinely, she and the princess are left alone. It feels like a test. If so, it's a good one, whoever it was who designed it. She can't pass if she doesn't know what's being assessed, and can't fail if she doesn't try.
Hope that the princess will remain silent is dashed almost instantly.
"Would you mind if I joined you?" Mirana asks while settling in on a log across from the flames and continuing without waiting for a reply.
"I just want you to know that it wasn't my intention to imply that your ... practices are abnormal." With the hint of gravel that rolls off her tongue, like she's spitting stones, that sounds like the princess is spoiling for one of their fights, but crushing it down under the weight of crumbling stone.
Heat caresses Fymryn's face as she leans in over the burning logs. Tree-branch in hand, she prods at the fire, opening up a gap to improve airflow. White and black ash crumples and sloughs off the thickest remaining log as she jabs deep into the core and then lays another hunk of deadwood onto the pyre.
"I don't know what you mean," she says as she sets the makeshift poker, tip still smouldering, by her side.
"About your..." The princess scratches at her temple before curling a lock of still lustrous, almost preternaturally clean, brown hair behind her ear. " Pods ."
A day's exertions, even without the benefits of a pond or river in which to bathe as they threaded their way through the wooded paths that led... home, haven't unsettled her in the slightest, and there's something so infuriating about that.
"Are we really talking about this now?" She scuffs a boot against the ground, running circles in a patch of dusty earth. "What you want to talk about, of all things?"
Mirana smiles in that utterly patronizing way of hers, like she knows some secret that is being dangled just out of reach of an infant. It reminds Fymryn of herself when she told stories to the village children that clustered around her knees, eyes alight with the fire of innocent faith, trust that she wouldn't lie as they embraced the power she held over them to weave the myths of their people.
She wonders how many of them are dead now.
Maybe all of them.
She fucking hates that smile and wants to cut it off the other woman's face.
"I just wanted you to know that it's not something that I judge." That nod is nearly smug. That's what it feels like. "It's just ... different from the things that I'm used to."
"What you're used to sounds like a shadow of the real thing."
The smile quirks, turns bitter like the cocoa beans that Fymryn had chewed on as a child, promised by Dyfed that they tasted of chocolate.
"If you'd prefer not to speak, I would as well, but for the sake of Davion and Marci, it seemed that we should clear the air." So the conversation is for their sake, Mirana proper and self-sacrificing to a fault, is it?
"Clear the air... that's a lovely euphemism." Fymryn's eyes flick towards the tent, the play of shadows from the fire rising and falling along the canvas. "Does that make this more comfortable for you?"
"Does it for you?" the princess asks, her tone airy and prim.
"Nothing can ever make this easy." She can't stop herself from clenching up on the sick in her hands while she nearly pitches to the side and vomits at the tone of her own voice.
"Davion and Marci- I want this to be easy for them. Easier. So tell me what we have to do to make it so," the princess stresses, hand to her belt, thumbing the cartridges, pouches, and compact bow. "They ... trust you, for whatever reason – they like you."
The very suggestion is laughable, simply because of Mirana's blindness.
"Davion is kind to me," she deflects, the flicker of firelight suddenly no longer warm. "I suspect that he's kind to everyone ."
"To a fault," the princess affirms as an insult, surely, nodding.
"But I've seen the way that Davion looks at you when you're trying to ignore it." Fymryn pokes away at the fire, focusing on the sparks as they explode upwards and are snuffed out. "The way your servant, Marci, looks at you."
Leather creaks when the princess fiddles with one of the straps of her belt. "As they look at everything else, surely. With their eyes."
"They love you," Fymryn explains as she would something patently obvious to a child while she plucks up the stick again and rolls the shaft between her fingers.
"Nonsense." Scoffing, the princess waves her off as if it's a jape.
Fymryn is not so cruel, even to this witch, that she can countiance something so precious being ignored. For all their sakes.
"Would he die for you?" she asks, throwing the makeshift fire-poker into the flames. "Would she?"
"I wouldn't let her."
"So is that a yes?" It feels like one as much as it does a barb.
"Bluntly, it's an entreaty to drop the subject." The princess is on the retreat and for someone who's been running all the while, that's a strange thrill, like the scent of blood in a wolf's nose. "You don't know them or their feelings, and that's not what I wanted to talk about."
"You don't get to decide everything." Fymryn's fingers steeple before her mouth, so close that her lips brush over flesh that tastes vaguely of pine when she speaks. "I think that you pretend not to know them, but I can't understand why. Are you really that cold? Or just blind in other ways?"
"I'm focused," Mirana explains as if there's a difference between the two when, by now, shouldn't it be obvious that there's not? Focus just meant that your peripheral vision dimmed.
"So she loves you," Fymryn says into her hands, "but you're too focused to bother with that?"
"She cares for me," Mirana insists.
"Then why wouldn't you form a pod?" Fymryn asks because just from what she's seen, they deserve that and more, and the very notion that humans fear and despise nakedness so much that they spend their lives - waste their lives fleeing from it is a horror she doesn't want to face. "It just doesn't make sense."
"I have no desire to engage in a dalliance with her." Mirana's fingers twitch, though her sigh is fraught with emotions that, perhaps, even with all her experience of joy and pain, Fymryn cannot tease apart. "It would be ... awkward."
"Only awkward because you think about it like that. Call it a 'dalliance.'" Twist the knife again; she's good with her knives. "That sounds like a fancy word for some meaningless fling like Davion's whoring ."
Mirana's eyes narrow. "You know about that."
"He talks a lot. Mostly to say nothing." The smoke stings her eyes but she doesn't dare rub at them as it's necessary, now, perhaps, more than ever, to maintain focus. "Mostly."
"Are you concerned about whom he's sleeping with?" Mirana appears smug, settling into a pattern that, perhaps, she's familiar with - one imposed on fine silk that must have clothed her since she was a child.
"If it's you, yes." It's a crime to use him like this when he's a good man. That much is obvious from the fact that he pursued her. In his heart, he might be better than her, with her child's aspirations that sent her tumbling into a pond of blood, or the pristine princess whom she loathes beyond reason.
"Because you want me to suffer - to be alone, you mean?"
"I mean that I know what you are," Fymryn explains to push and twist the point - the one that's only just cut deep enough to be mortal, lodged in the perfect spot, having slipped in silent and slow between her ribs.
"I don't think that you even know who you are." There's the retort, a projection from a woman who's never wrong, never been told that she's wrong in her life, born with a silver spoon in her mouth, lived a life in the Nightsilver Woods. Her skin is bronzed alabaster in the firelight. "That's why you did all of this. Profaned the sacred. Made a deal with the devil and roped me into doing the same. You just wanted to be someone."
"And you want to be nobody," Fymryn observes and is baffled by the fact that she's kept the malice from her voice. Maybe she's simply too enervated after the day's travel through rough terrain, alien and familiar at once and all the more brutal for it.
"I am quite confident in who I am." The retort is a quiet hiss, out of deference for their slumbering companions, though Marci could sleep through a hurricane, and wake at a pin-drop if it was in any way untoward – probably pluck it out of the air as it fell if it threatened to land on her princess.
"Really?" There's the scoff. One of the hardest things, Fymryn realizes, is knowing yourself. There are few things touched by the light of Mene that one has more reasons to lie about. "Princess of the Moon? That's not a person. It's a title. A role. A story laid out for you. That's an easy thing to get lost in."
"No." Fidelity and wonder allow the older woman's face to soften. Mirana's voice is distant, like the very suggestion has caught her up with it, a warm updraft that upsets the leaves, or sparks rising upwards to set the foliage ablaze. "It's where I found myself."
"Ah, there we go." Fingertips etch random patterns on the log beneath her as she traces the bark under her rear. "You have faith. Believe in the story you were given. That's why I'm worried about who Davion's sleeping with ."
"That sounds like a cobbled together excuse for pettiness, and squabbling over a man is beneath even you." Mirana's head cocks as if she's pondering the prospect, or the words, mentally testing the tips of her arrows. "Though perhaps not."
Mirana's voice has long since begun to grate, the freign accent flowing and scrabbling over her brain.
"It's not about a man," Fymryn says." It's about friends - even Marci's a friend - and what you'll do to them."
"What I'll do to them?" In a gesture of bewilderment, Mirana's hands rise up into the air over the fire, and all that Fymryn can smell is ash. "What have you already done to them? All this misery. All this war. Marci nearly died because of the events that you precipitated. How many more of yours and mine have?"
Investing their faith in Mirana must have been so easy for Davion and Marci, really, when Fymryn considers it. "You are a wonderful actress, you know," Fyrmryn observes, the aggravation in her tone leaving Mirana scowling while the genuine awe at the realization leaves the other woman on the back-foot.
"Acting?" Selemene's priestess asks as she repositions herself, arms folding up under her chest. "At least I don't act like a child and pretend to be something more."
"You pretend to care . So well that you actually believe it, but in the end, you are a believer and that's the issue."
"Everyone believes in something." Mirana points upwards to the leaves, probably gesturing towards the stars and moon, the two faces, twins, dark and light. Mene and Selemene. Her goddess and Fymryn's. " If someone tells you otherwise, it's just because they're deluded. There are always axioms. First principles. Assumptions."
"A zealot, then. Those get people killed. Sacrifice things they shouldn't." Leaning in over the flames so that they're nearly scalding, the smoke whisping upwards so that it burns her nostrils and makes in hard to breathe without choking, she finds the princess' mock-pleasant smile full of feigned sagacity to be as satisfying as it is infuriating. "You're dangerous. Not to me, but to them."
"Nonsense." Were it not laced with a kind of diabolical disgust, something from the pit, that laugh would almost sound like a giggle. "Recent history has proven that you're the most dangerous person here. To the world."
"They believe in you – believe to the point that they'd die for you, and you believe in a cause so much that you would let them." Her back and thighs ache, the mosquito bites on her forearm stinging as she scratches the scabs raw and bloody, her fingers sticky with it, as she leans back. "If it came down to it. You can't let go. They think that's noble, but it's not."
"Are we talking about me or you?" Mirana asks, fist at her side clenching and unclenching. It's all right there, almost at the surface, and Fymryn's chest warms with a kind of malignant glee. Reciprocal pain, like a village festival dance accompanied by the celebratory rounds with voice, harp, fife and overturned casks turned to drums, is more refreshing and natural than cool water. "Because the only one who has misplaced faith here, faith that got – is getting – people killed is you."
"You're not going to get them killed. You're the kind of person who'd sacrifice them and tell yourself that you didn't," Fymryn accuses. The other woman conceals a flinch by rolling her shoulders like she has a crick in her neck after a long day's travel and that spurs deliberate provocation that slips out, alien and ashen in Fymryn's mouth. "That it wasn't your fault. That they did it because they chose to."
"So what you're doing right now, then. All of our soldiers." It may be that Mirana catches herself then as she jabs a finger towards Fymryn's satchel still stained with the faintest traces of the lotus' odour, a lingering petrichor and sweetness that couldn't be compared to any other flower as tendrils of scent wormed their way past her nose and furled around the deepest part of her soul, holding emptiness. " Your enclaves. Your fault and you're trying to make it mine."
"You're not listening." Fymryn snorts because just thinking of the lotus in that sealed box has her smelling them again, so powerful that the flavour is on her tongue, leaving her mouth dry. "Just going in circles. I was a fool to think that you would."
" Now you're speaking of me rather than yourself."
Of whom were they speaking, really? That's a question that Fymryn doesn't really want to pose because it could be her, or her , or Davion or the goddesses, pretender and genuine and how could she tell when she didn't even know which was which?
"The only reason that I'm speaking to you is that you forced the issue," Fymryn insists as she turns to Davion, all innocent bulk with massive shoulders rising and falling with the rhythm of a man who's trained to regulate his breathing. Ash and soot are in the air, smoke that fills her lungs whether she leans in towards the fire or towards him and stares at the arms that had held her - the first arms to hold her since the last time… the last time she'd worshiped with her podmates, the first human touch, and with those memories intertwining intimately, she finds the words. "Trying to make yourself feel better under the pretense of being the bigger woman."
"Give that you're a child, throwing a tantrum, it seems obvious that there's only one woman here, and I'll prove it again by not stooping to your level." Shooting to her feet, boots scrabbling on loose detritus that litters the forest floor, Mirana makes to leave the fireside, the motion setting Fymryn's hand twitching towards her chakram.
It doesn't go unnoticed.
Arms fold into Mirana's cloak, hidden but seemingly away from the bow she still carries. The entire journey has been a test, really, and this taunt, leaving herself open and asking for it – almost begging Fymryn to lash out and cut her down – is just another open question. Another chance to fail no matter what part of the story she chooses to write. "I shouldn't have even tried."
Fymryn's nails dig into her thighs, well away from her weapons. "You didn't."
In an imperious fashion alien to the Coriel'tauvi, Mirana is sneering down at her, lips pulled taut and the firelight splashing flickering shadows that curl up under her hair while the smooth and pale flesh of her chin and jaw glows orange, like she's flushing with an alien feeling.
"I don't care what you believe," Mirana spits, though her voice is low. Davion's always listening to her. Is it possible that he still is now? Faith without obsession is dead. How could you believe in something, truly believe, and not orient your entire life towards it?
"And I realize that whatever Davion or Marci think, I don't care to make peace, or to fight." After pivoting on her heel and stepping over the log that Davion had set beside the fire so that he could stare into it while their rabbit cooked, grease dripping from its sinews, Mirana abandons their battlefield. "As long as it's over."
The last that Fymryn sees of her that night is the vague imprint of her hand as she sealed up the flap of her tent.
Ears pricking with the flow of steady breathing, a rustle of fabrics being shifted, and the familiar whistling song of the night winds disturbing the upper branches of the canopy above her, Fymryn lays back, wishing that she could see the stars.
"Good," Fymryn whispers as she closes her eyes and joins Davion in sleep, or trying to sleep, or putting on the show of it, caught between two radiating heat sources. "I couldn't agree more."
