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‘Does she know?’ a voice asks.
The voice is familiar, the question quiet. It burrows into her left ear like a curious worm. Odd. The voices in her head tend to stay there; they wander neither left nor right, and never further than her own mouth. This one must have gone walkabout or else it belongs to one of her new companions. Laudna turns quickly; if it is one of her head's voices, she wants to catch it before it can go far.
Not one of hers.
It is Orym, the dear little thing, looking up at her with such sad eyes, such solemn eyes.
'Hmm? What's that? Who knows what?'
'Imogen. Does she know?'
Imogen, Imogen, Imogen. Just her name is a comfort. Laudna repeats it a few times, fills her mind with it. After all, if it is full of Imogen, there can be no room for anything...else to creep in.
'Imogen knows a great deal about a great many things. What is it you wonder about? You'll have to be specific. Go on, tell me. You're acting all coy,' Laudna teases when Orym hesitates. She smiles, encouraging. A closed-mouth smile. He's so on edge all the time - all nervous energy, like that rabbit, ready to leap at a moment's notice. One night, when they are better friends, she'll frighten him. See exactly how high he can leap. But not tonight.
Orym clears his throat. Scratches at an insect bite on his hand. 'About you,' he says, voice soft. 'About...what we discussed the other night.'
'My death,' she says frankly, when he doesn't seem inclined to bring it up.
'Yeah.'
Laudna twines her fingers in her hair. Draws strands of it forward across her face, in front of her ears. 'She knows plenty.'
Orym doesn't respond to that.
Laudna drifts. Insects buzz around them. A nightjar swoops, flat-headed, beak opened wide on its hinge; it catches a luckless troupe of fireflies in that wide mouth. Laudna watches the dizzy tumble of one of the lucky ones - it reorients itself, its abdomen lighting up. To show the way to any others that might have escaped? A single bug with its singular, lonely light. Forever on a lonely flight. Or was that simply chemical and the little bug felt no loss? Did fireflies love? Did fireflies have families? Was it quite frightened and upset at the loss of its swarm? Laudna stretches out a long, grey finger toward the little bug. It steps onto her finger, trudges a long path up and down and up the cresting hills of her knuckles before it flutters off.
Orym is still staring into the fire when her attention returns. Concern stirs in her chest.
'The voices are loud in your head too,' she says. When he startles, she adds, 'Not literally, like mine. Perhaps. Unless...?' He shakes his head no. Laudna pouts. 'Ah well. Even so,' she drums two fingers against her temple. 'They linger, don't they?'
He tilts a smile her way. 'They do. How did you know?'
'What can I say?' she demurs, pairs it with a coy shrug. The shoulder drops from its joint. She pops it back into place. 'One gets a sense for these things. After we die, that is. It's only fair that we get something out of the whole...unpleasantness,' she says with a cheery laugh. 'People say I reek of it.'
'You don't,' he disagrees. He has his chin set in a mulish look, the one he often gives when strangers speak ill of his companions. It is sweet that he seeks to defend her when there is no one around to hear. Well. No one but them. And the voices.
Laudna ducks her head. Eyes him from behind the curtain of dark hair. 'You're sweet,' she says, and can't help but chide him. Doesn't he understand yet? She explains, 'It matters very little to me what they think. I mean, please, the sense is all wrong! They don't even realise it's not a scent at all!' Laudna throws her head back to laugh; the motion takes her a little far, requires a quick adjustment, but she clicks back into place without a fuss.
Orym doesn't laugh. 'What is it? If it's not a scent. I'm sorry that I don't know - I'd like to, if you'd like to share.'
Earnest, kind little man.
She twists a clump of hair into a half-braid before considering it might hold better in place if there is something attached. A bone, maybe? Another tool, or a hair clip. Fearne will have something that would suffice. Laudna wriggles her fingers out of the net of hair, cups it there behind her ear as if to listen closely. In a hoarse whisper, she tells him,
'You can always hear it.'
'Voices?' Orym seems startled by the suggestion. 'You can hear - what, exactly? You hear thoughts too?'
Iron bursts hot over her tongue, her lips splitting on the inside against a too-sharp tooth when she grimaces. Nothing wrong with hearing thoughts! Nothing wrong at all!
She has been quiet - and grim-faced - a moment too long. Orym goes pale under her glare. She gentles her expression as much as she is able, blinking big black eyes as though her mind merely wandered away into less pleasant pastures. It is a reassuring act. One that she has grown quite adept at, over the years.
'Quite the opposite. They're ever so quiet, the peaceful dead. They dull the sounds around them, the hum of living fold. Not chatterboxes like you and I, eh, Pâté?’ she jokes.
Orym relaxes. Rubs at the top of his shoulder, where his tattoos paint his skin.
‘You didn’t really say,’ he points out a while later, when the fire has burned down to smouldering embers and the shadows are starting to crawl away, off into hollows and hiding places to escape the coming dawn. 'If Imogen knows everything that happened to you. That night.'
He steps softly around the truth, a mourners shuffle avoiding the fresh grave. Laudna feels her undeath keenly when he talks like that, feels a six foot hole open up between them.
'The night I died.'
Orym goes as green as his shield, and sad-eyed.
Laudna looks away. His grief is kind, it speaks well of him, but it lifts the lid of some deep dark well in her chest that she prefers to stay closed. Closed and latched.
'Yeah. That night.'
Laudna hums, shrugs a crooked shrug. 'We've talked about it.' Sudden suspicion claws at her throat; her shrugs transforms into a paranoid hunch. 'Why are you so interested?' she snaps. 'Eager to gawk at the dead girl?'
The biting words might have struck a bigger man; he lets them sail over his head.
'I guess I was thinking about how alike we are. In some ways,' he says with a smile. Still a little tilted, still a little unsure whether it is something to joke about. She smiles back - a big smile - so he knows that it is. Orym gulps. Turns his attention to the fire once more. 'I've lived a pretty ordinary life. I only really know how to be a fighter, a guard for people way more important than me. It's the only thing I know, really. That, uh,' he scratches his hand, the insect bite now a welt, 'and love.'
'And grief,' Laudna murmurs.
It comes when called, grief pulling his smile down into a grimace. He nods. 'Part and parcel with love, isn't it?'
Laudna nods too.
Orym clears his throat and continues. 'From everything you've told me - and I'm, I'm sure I don't know everything,' he assures, speaking carefully, 'you're a little like me in that way. You had a pretty ordinary life and then -' He takes a deep breath and jumps into the hole. 'Died.'
'Yes.'
'And then, Imogen.'
'Yes.'
He nods. 'I remember what it was like. Loving someone and...not wanting to tell them when you were hurt. Or the details of it. Trying to spare them that.'
'There's little point in dredging up the ills of the past. It happened. It hurt. It's over now.'
Orym frowns. He doesn't believe her, clearly, but he is kind enough - or uncomfortable enough - to let it go. He merely nods again. Laudna isn't surprised. He is a quiet soul, by nature and by company. The deaths he carries hang from his shoulders, a willing burden. They make his eyes sad. Tonight, his grief sits in the open at his side; he lets her see it plainly.
Laudna wishes she couldn't. Something claws inside the cage of her ribs.
'Well. I don't have much to say. I'm just really sorry that happened to you, Laudna. And I know I'm new here, I don't know everything about your relationship with Imogen but for what it's worth...I think you should tell her.'
'Why?' she snaps. 'So she can have a new nightmare to occupy her sleep? Hasn't she been hurt enough?'
Orym bows his head. 'Just a thought.'
'Well keep it to yourself,' she tells him in a cold hiss, turns her back.
Another swarm of fireflies clusters a nearby tree. She wonders if the survivor has found them.
Behind her, Orym shuffles through the camp. He nudges the last shift awake before returning to his bedroll. He resettles, only a few feet away from her. Eventually, he calls out, voice soft, 'Goodnight, Laudna. Goodnight, Pâté.’