Complicated because he had risked - and lost - in her name and felt the sting of that half-formed resentment like a wicked thorn in his throat. Because given the chance he could not promise Ruth he would have done anything differently. Her loss seemed preordained, and for someone who believed in neither fate nor coincidence it was a bitter pill to swallow.
He valued very little beyond his own principles, and this moment here reminded him why.
Raymond didn't have to say the crossing had gone gone poorly. She knew by his naked solitude in Ruth's absence, how his muscles spoiled for a fight when he would not. He straightened, retreating behind the obfuscating correctness of a soldier's stance, and offered a perfunctory salute with the flat of his blade. She pressed past sparring reach and into killing range, the touch laid against his wounded shoulder a queer mixture of remorse and her usual brazenness. His skin shuddered as though fly-bitten.
Clearing his throat, the red stallion tried to win back the momentum of a debate they weren't having. Calliope's softness - so different from her usual predatory silk - caught him off-guard.
"So it goes," Raymond replied, the adage delivered perhaps a touch more harshly than the spirit in which it was meant. He brushed a reassuring lip along her striped shoulder.
She felt solid enough.
"Do you know anything about where we are? I hope you haven't been waiting here on my account." In that, he sounded almost cheerful; a stranger would never sense the fire beneath his skin.
Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
@Calliope
