a pocket full of posies

Greg rolls his lips across his teeth, raising his brows, and does an altogether terrible job of pretending not to recognize the marks.

“What have I said about runes?” Tom demands, his tone harsh, but keeping it low, well aware of the number of people just on the other side of Mondale’s dozing form, itself large but not impassable. “You’re going to get me killed. I am already too Teuton, you only make it –”

“They’re for protection,” Greg interrupts, putting his hands up while he takes a step closer, brows furrowing, “Lukas says – ”

“Killed,” Tom repeats, emphatically, grabbing both of Greg’s wrists and squeezing them for a brief moment, then throwing them away with a harsh growl. “You cannot be using this – your uncle, the king, will burn you, too, Greg. Do you want to be burned?”

“But Lukas –”

Tom rushes to hush him again, lifting a hand to silence the prattle and keeping his own voice low. “Is not here, is he?” He says, then feels some guilt at Greg’s pouting glance toward the ground at their feet. “Can you not use it in a way that is less evident? Like you did before?”

“Well, I – ” Greg makes a pinched face. “I could, perhaps. But the seiðr is more reliable, you see? Before I was… only –” He makes a spinning gesture at a loss. “You know. Speculating.”

“I absolutely do not,” Tom insists, though he certainly does, and has been more than accessory and technically instigator; if he’d known that giving Greg those bits of grimoire to burn would lead to this, he’d have never have done it.

“Okay, uh… What if I…” Greg takes a deep breath, leaning closer to Tom and putting his hand across the saddle. He lingers there for a beat and distinctly looks around them, then abruptly leans down to press his mouth to Tom’s with a breath, plainly humming something low, and suddenly rather than stolen pleasure there is an awful burn at the inside of Tom’s lip like Greg’s tongue has turned to hot coals.

Tom attempts to retreat backward, but Greg has a hold of his shoulder, expressing a rare show of strength until he is done mumbling into Tom’s mouth. He lets go, but the damage is done, and Tom runs his tongue across the inside of his lip, then reaches into his mouth with a pair of fingers to confirm the shapes. He looks down to the saddle to see the leather unmarked beside Greg’s splayed fingers, “What have you just done?”

“No one will find it there,” Greg says, lifting his nose somewhat, but there’s an uncertain tremble to his mouth and a paleness to his cheeks that betrays his use of magic.

“No one will – ” Tom throws his hands up, leaning forward with a furious snarl. “This is why you’ll never be a knight.”

Greg rolls his lips together. “I do not... wish to be one.”

“I know!” Tom growls, glaring hard and wishing that he could shout, but that would startle Mondale and the camp. “That’s the problem!”

Greg blinks rapidly, then drops his head in a nod. “Oh.”

“Do you know how that looks for me!” Tom demands, harshly under his breath, while turning to finish untacking Mondale. “You’re twenty-two and the King’s nephew, and all that I’ve never done to train you over these past three years is completely obvious.” He squeezes one across the pommel of Mondale’s saddle, yanking it off, as his voice lifts and tightens with damnable emotion. “It’s going to look especially sorry when you run off to join the nords to do magicks.”

“Thomas, I wouldn’t – I won’t. Not that I would ever leave you or, or the kingdom. But I certainly would not go North,” Greg says, leaning close to Tom with a glance over Mondale’s back and presuming the milling, wearied footsoldiers in the distance, lit dimly by their fires. “They aren’t – they don’t like doing magic there, either. It is not considered all that… seemly.”

Tom raises a brow, as he’s met many a magician of the North – or one, for certain, but Queen Gennembore was surely unabashed. “In what way?”

“For uh, men, I did mean. In the same way that – ” Greg wets his lower lip. “Um, kissing you is unseemly.”

“Ah,” Tom intones, sweeping his fingers down a strip of leather against Mondale’s shoulder and meeting chain with a flick of his thumb. “That way.”

“And I…” Greg visibly swallows, looking at Tom with a bowed head, to emphasize his gaze through his dark lashes. “I would truly like to do nothing more than stay in these fields with you to do both. So you – you must be protected.”

Tom exhales a slow breath, thinking of two years ago, when Greg had admitted to keeping and learning from the grimoires of the righteously-executed. He had been trying to use it as leverage to go back to the castle proper, to scare Tom in some manner to allow him to retreat back into his uncle’s fortified land, but Tom had instead given him his own mare and a set of new leathers, encouraging his magic, and… kept him, still, at his side and conquering for and now a bit against Roy. He should have turned him in, gained and used the status as a witch hunter of the King’s own kin to impress his promised princess, gone home a hero at a respectable thirty years, but even then, he found he had also longed for nothing more than for Greg to stay in the fields and forests and constantly beside him; he had never, ever though imagined Greg might someday return the sentiment.

As it is, Tom can suddenly feel himself folding ever so to a perpetual battlefield. He might still go back to his own land a hero, but it may now be a return under a different shield and with a lanky stag witch.

He traces his tongue across the shapes inside his lip, now scarred over, as if they had always been present. “It’s not going to turn me into a devil damned rhinoceros, is it?”

“I don’t…” Greg says, brow furrowing for a beat, then tilting his head like a hound. “Know what that is?”

“It’s a horned beast from the far southern continent,” Tom says, then motions across his face, miming the growth of a horn from the base of his nose. “A great thing with near impenetrable grey hide. Protected.”

Greg is quiet a beat, then raises his brows. “Like an elephant?”

“No,” Tom says, playing at irked, dropping his hand to gesture outward with a flatten between them. “Like a rhinoceros.”

Greg presses his lips together, eyes gradually narrowing with his own, subtler temper. “Have you ever seen one?”

Tom lifts his chin. “I’ve seen a depiction.”

“So, well – it could be an elephant, for as well as those are ever done, Ser.” Greg pronounces, like a lofty, spoiled princeling, his own nose going up and pretending to concern himself with straightening Mondale’s mane under bridle strap. “But this is… it is a blessing, not a – um, a transmutation?”

“Can you give yourself one; a blessing to protect yourself that way?”

Greg blinks twice, then offers a short shake of his head, as his mouth twists with a mild, almost wry sense of shame. “Not in the same way.”