[ Respond | Andarin: The Mountains ]
Posted by Arawn on March 6, 2009, 8:50 pm
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Arawn is a skilful liar.
He has studied his craft for years and years, noted and numbered and traced the way deception has woven through truth all down the long days of his life. Arawn knows faces, knows the ways and tracks that emotion, the language of lies, writes across a face. He can tell a true smile from false by the wrinkles in the corners of the eye; knows honesty by a certain tilt of the head and slackness of the mouth. He knows that in a lie the worst mistake is to stare straight into the other’s eyes, wide-eyed and earnest, because only a liar would do it. Those who speak the truth are rarely so desperate to prove their honesty. He takes these things now and puts them into practice - a relaxed jaw, careless, irregular breaths, one hoof resting. He is, for all intents and purposes, calm and at ease, though one laid back ear and the subtle hunch of his body suggests embarrassment, even contrition. Arawn can play upon his body like an instrument.
And so it is with the force of long habit that he reads her body language almost unconsciously. Distraction - he finds it in the hesitation, just a fraction of a second, between her sentences, and in the careful, deliberate shape of her breath. The whole of her attention is not on him, and there is something, perhaps something small but persistent, nagging away at her thoughts. Arawn notes this almost absentmindedly - his attention is on other things.
Whatever she had said mere moments before vanishes from his mind the moment the knife reappears, a savage slash of light in the grey world. For a breath Arawn fears he has not lied well enough and that this, however carefully worded, is a threat, a subtle and exquisite danger, but the smile on her face is genuine so far as he can tell. Glaïsenre, he thinks, turning the name over in his mind. It has a heavy and curiously hollow sound; it is a name of twists and turns. It suits its bearer, he thinks.
The mention of the elements, and the reverence with which she speaks their name he puts aside, to mull over in some quiet, small hour in the dead watches. The bruising weight of stone, the susurrus of the rain and the glitter of the lightning are to him just that - light and sound and substance, nothing more. He does not understand.
He struggled to keep his up calm, steady front when she looked at him with her great, luminous eyes, as he could feel the skin knitting across his throat. His skin was crawling. This is the difference between he and she: what she understands as a courtesy, a kindness extended, he sees as the next shift in the interplay of power, a display of unrivalled dominance. What can be made, can also be unmade, it says to him, what can be made whole can easily be broken.
The mention of others will dog his footsteps for days after this.
Just then the distraction that had been tugging at her features snaps, blossoming into what he recognises as pain. The strange red wolf at her side yelps, high and strained, and with a few mumbled words both horse and wolf are gone, disappearing into the shadows and the rain. There is nothing but a handful of muddy prints to tell that they had ever been.
Two days pass in silence, and solitude. Across the mountain’s broad flanks the forest grows thick - it is easy enough to avoid those few horses he sees walking the woods. Arawn bends himself to the task of learning the mountain slopes - where the rabbit holes lie waiting to trip the unwary traveller, where streams have cut through the earth, right down to the bedrock, where the slope falls too steeply to cross and where the undergrowth grows so close as to be impassable. It’s nothing compared to native knowledge, but in this strange land that sets his teeth on edge Arawn reverts to the careful patterns and precautions that have kept him safe all his tumultuous life.
When next their paths cross again she is an illusion in the light and green-shadow of the forest, a flicker and a flash of white in the middle-distance. The foal by her side (and, strangely, he feels no surprise) is a pale ghost through the undergrowth. Arawn is reminded dispassionately of himself at that age - a pale foal is a rare thing, at least amongst the herds of his native country, and the dark-faced, dark-eyed horses of the plains had not looked kindly upon the cremello colt. This infant, he thinks, this strange creature from the witch’s womb will never face such opposition, and the thought brings a bitter laugh to his lips. Which, of them, is the greater freak after all?
He goes to them smiling, light-footed and easy, his face reflective in the benevolent light of the sun. He cannot pick the shape of the red wolf in the undergrowth, but he does not doubt it is somewhere near. Up close the foal is stranger still, with a line of strange markings tracking the shape of her eyes. The mare looks to his eyes none the worse for wear - perhaps more tired, more sad than she had been.
“Oceantree,” he says, “congratulations.
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