Work Text:
"Shit," says the Scythian. "This is like super sore."
At her feet, the Girl kneels; the cloth in her hands is bloody. Across the Scythian's belly the wound gapes like the black gates of Mingi Taw; it is cold to the touch, and leaves a tingling in the Girl's fingers when she pulls them away. Around the edges, it is turning blue; there is too much strangeness, these days, too much rain, too many wolves come down from the mountain. She has seen them on the path, great dark beasts twice her size - there is something unnatural about them. The Girl is glad the Scythian is here.
She wrings out the cloth into her bowl with a practiced hand, and dabs at the torn flesh again: the Scythian does not flinch this time, either. Her black hair falls down over her shoulder. Her mouth is set in a grim line.
"It's like - legit infected," says the Girl, holding her voice steady. "It's all black and things."
"Ugh," says the Scythian. "Trigons."
The Girl is not entirely sure what that means, except that there are prophecies about the old gods and the forms they take on earth; prophecies about the end of the world, mostly. Outside the wind howls. The sun is weak during the day. She forgets, sometimes, that it is not winter.
"Okay, well," says the Scythian, after a moment. "That's good enough I guess. Thanks, you know." It is not good enough; under the Girl's fingers the wound is still seeping evening-black blood. It is not deep, but it does not look right. "You have a bandage, yeah?" Says the Scythian.
"For sure," says the Girl.
Once it is tied and she has pulled her torn tunic back on, over her bound breasts and her man's leggings, and her cuirass over that, she will be gone again, back out into the storm. She has done her dreaming for the day. Where she goes, what she knows, the Girl can only guess at - she came from far away, after all, and has seen things the Girl never will, things of this world and the next. For now, the Girl kneels at her feet. She does not want to rise. Her father's father was a shield-bearer to the lord, and her father once was a soldier too.
"I could," she says, after a moment. "Come with." But the Scythian only smooths the Girl's hair, and presses a thumb to the corner of her mouth.
"Hey," says the Scythian. "I've got this feeling like we're gonna see each other again."
.
Her sword does not burn.
They give her a warrior's funeral, because they cannot think what else to do. It takes Logfella a day to build the raft. The Girl watches the body, laid out on the bench where so often she slept. She might be sleeping still, except she is motionless, and her tunic is stiff with blood.
They set her pyre alight before they push it out, and it burns clear and bright; the flames climb high, and swallow everything, bone and leather, book and shield, before at last the raft goes to pieces and sinks into the darkness as if it were never there at all. The Girl stands on the shore for a long time, with her face as cold and set as the Scythian's.
In the morning, against all reason, the sword washes up; of course it shouldn't float, but there it is, unscorched and unstained. The Girl hangs it on the wall of the cabin, and tells Logfella she hopes he never has to use it, ever, but at night sometimes, she takes it down, just to see how it feels in her hand.
(Good.)
.
Years after, when the storms that come down are only storms, and the sun never doubles in the sky, and the wolves are brown bony skulking things (two-eyed, always), the Girl has a dream.
She does not dream often, now that the strangeness has stopped, and when she does it's of honeycakes or growing feathers, not the great split tree or the bear-man in the wood. Logfella says she should eat more mushrooms, but Logfella is sometimes a dick.
She dreams she is standing in a clearing, and a man is playing music, and there are people all around: she is wearing other clothes, not her own, trousers and a clinging shirt of some strange fine cloth. She stands still in the press of the crowd for hours, it seems; she knows the songs, though they are strange, somewhere deep in the back of her mind. Sometimes it's like there's someone else inside her, pressing to get out. And then she sees -
The Scythian, in all her battle dress, with her long hair bound back and her sword on her back, beautiful, as always, as she pushes through the throng; the little cut at her brow is unhealed as it was on the night when she left, and the Girl is surprised that she remembers so well. She edges closer; the music seems distant, now.
She catches the Scythian's eye.
The Scythian looks away. She is young, now, younger than the Girl; it is startling. She had seemed so terribly grown-up, once. There is the faintest blush on her cheeks.
The Girl catches at her hand, laces their fingers together. The Scythian breathes in once, and swallows, and tightens her fingers around the Girl's.
"Fire walk with me," says the Girl, without knowing why.
She wakes with the sword in her hand.
END TRANSMISSION