traitor hoe

Only their very own silence. The land is alive, awash in voices and the thrumming of the earth’s very bones. All pitched with the same panic they tasted so often, that unspoken pain. Easier, to forget one's grievances if the world is weeping around them. A distant battle, atrocities hushed and relayed, letting the leaves tremble overhead and the grasses moan, quaking in the faint breeze. 

Days before, they had been in a tavern, a nowhere hovel in the same foothills. Warming travellers, warning them of the welcome they could expect in the frozen north beyond. Nothing unusual, had not Telmo’s boasting and challenges gone unanswered, the people terse and ducking away from trouble. Silent and glum and staring in their jugs, too preoccupied for even the basest distractions. The tension strung between them, some thread in the air threatening to snap. 

She had not wanted to bear it. 

He had obliged, sweet as he was. Too good for them all, too susceptible to the poison they all dripped down his throat. The two of them too closely bound to part ways, not now, not with war in the air and sorrow in the water. 

War finds them by a small pool, fed by a mountain spring and coaxed by their words. Gentle, in the summer warmth, a sheltered inlet to hide from it all. Hiding too the men that drew up on them, pinning them between the rock and the band. 

No danger that, for two Tongues. The mountain is too steep for an ambush. No danger at all.  And yet one man braves the approach, too close for comfort. Telmo, ever the fool, steps between them before she can draw breath. Her eyes rake the scene, counting. Three, five, nine– none of them hold her like the veiled rider on the crest of the hill, mutely staring at her. 

She finds herself frozen in place, drawn to hold eyes she cannot see, paying no heed to the soldier as he plants his sword in the dirt and delivers his master’s message, words honeyed and diplomatic and so stilted that they cannot be his own. 

The king asked to speak to you, to show you something. Out east, if you will.

They must expect no reply, for with that the band retreats, unbidden as they appeared. Even as the rider turns his horse, she stares after him, and finds him turning to look back all the same, before he disappears into the growth. 

After, there are too many Telmos to argue with, one after another with their worries and concerns and curiosity, but their minds are set and after a too short night of wasting her breath, they make their way with the first light. Careful, suspicious, beasts crawling down from the hills to sniff at the offering and shy from the trap. 

If it is a trap, it is not laid by the king who is not theirs. The plain is rotting across the horizon; she hears it first, eating the grief into herself quietly, face averted. His rage is louder, when he too tastes the poison. Between them, the ghost hangs heavy, silent to the hate and accusations. 

It is not the king who welcomes them when they make it to the broken fort, neither king in this wretched war. Svndlkoff is dressed dark, jaw set tight as he takes them aside and tells them the things they already know for themselves. Strange to hear that grief made words, told coldly and clinically in this ruined husk of wailing stone. His own doing, Svndlkoff says, and sure enough there are echoes in the cracks, passingly unfamiliar after a year of forgetting and too many years of never seeking understanding. 

Even here, she can taste the poison, the sweetness of the rot. Something stuck in her maw, putrid flesh between her teeth. A ghostly hand squeezing her throat. 

Their ghost looks like death when they see him, shrouded in shadows and hidden a world away behind those bars. He smells like his own rotting voice, and even the furious stranger seeking to shield him from their eyes cannot conceal the bitterness of disease. 

Telmo’s fingers are white around the bars, her own curled bloodless behind her back. Forbidden from entering, the bars keep them– her from her care, Telmo from his wrath. He bangs his fist against it, then his head. When he passes her to leave, she can hear him curse himself for not having let her kill that monster when he first saved it. 

In the long moment before she follows him, she wonders if he would have tasted like poison even then. 

The king’s study is strangely bright after the dungeon, one high wall crumbled in, the stone bearing the scars of recent conquest. A beam in the roof has caved, baring the sky and something circling far above. The wind slips between them, singing sorrowful of the parched lands. 

Even at this hour Olaf’s words are soft, lost under Telmo’s heavy pacing. Regret and wounds and bitterness and *healing*. He speaks of his mother with his eye cast out to the horizon, at the red rotten fields between here and his keep. What terrible vengeance he ought exhort, a head for a head– Telmo stops in his tracks, the angry curses falling silent on his lips, but Olaf shakes his head before he can ask his boon. A head too firmly on his neck. 

He returns to his talk, methodical and studied, words impossible to tune out. Where he has been gracious he turns harsh; murder when consolation was offered, running, hiding, abandonment in need. And oh the need is great is it not, when the plains burn and run with blood. Telmo has resumed his pacing, staring at her now, boring like his veiled messenger had earlier. Words so soft they might join in the air’s lament when he whispers of the price one pays, how very unfortunate his enemies. 

Her skin prickles with unease, her thoughts rush with it. That fear, as if she were inhaling it with every word spoken. All the things doomed to end, extinguished and forgotten with a whimper, so impossible to protect those who stand against the inexorable tide. A tide to ride, or a tide to be swallowed by. Frozen in time, she wishes it, but she stays silent, the fear confusingly heavy on her tongue, cold and glum. 

Beside her, Telmo is rasher, frantic in his curses and demands, helpless to turn that wrenching of his heart into action. Olaf’s face is so soft when he takes all that temper gently into his hand and squeezes. 

A waste, to destroy their young and bright. A waste to tear each other apart, to open oneself to subjugation. She concurs, words bound to her voice, but Telmo lashes. Some are too dangerous, too broken. For some it would be a kindness. 

Where is the line, Olaf asks, and oh brave stubborn Telmo bites his tongue. A king to bow to indeed.