He turned his nose up at her. Sabinian turned his nose up at her. Her. Osytha isn’t even angry at first, mostly just surprised. She always thought it was one of those theatrical gestures reserved for caricatures you see on stage, or who appear in stories. She didn’t think anyone actually did that. It looks bloody daft for one thing. And like you’re asking to get punched in the throat, for another.

Osytha glares at the man’s back as he swans away. “Oh aye? Well… too bad!” Her hands ball up into trembling fists at her side. “’Cause you’re still invited! An’— an’ I’m not breakin’ aht my best tea until you join!”

Water splashes, and mud splorts around the badger’s feet as she stalks after Sabinian, stopping only briefly to retrieve the spear. Guffy still watches on uncertainly, trotting along behind Osytha at a slightly safer distance than usual as they all disappear under the ranks of pale birch.

“Ah’ve real Aetochi hōjicha,” splish, splash “oh, an’ some lovely heicha too!” squelch, splat “Nilgiri from Arshaka, you can imagine ’ow hard that is to get across the border these days!” squish, stomp “A delightful assam that makes Knight-Captain Helena’s stuff taste like bogwater!” stamp, crunch “An’ et’s all goin’ to sit there turnin’ mouldy if you don’t show up.”

Her voice lowers from a shout as she draws nearer, down to a level, yet stern, hushed tone. Osytha doesn’t bother so much with stealthing back through the forest now, letting twigs snap underfoot and bushes rasp against her hosen as she ploughs on.

“Mebbe you does need tellin’ what’s what from a ‘teenager’ ivvery now an’ then,” she continues, drawing level with Sabinian. “Bein’ owder don’t make you right. Et can jus’ mean a body’s spent more time mekkin’ a habit of bein’ wrong.”
 
Damn Midnight the slowpoke, no matter how much Sabinian tugged the unicorn along, whether or not it was gentle or harsh didn't matter, the little terror somehow knowing that the elf wanted to pick up the pace and finding a way to deny him of it. Of course it makes it all too easy for Osytha to catch up to them, announcing that Sabinian was invited and that she'd let her tea get moldy unless he appeared.

Did she not know how to argue? He abruptly turns around, dark hair flying over his broad shoulders as both of his hands go to his hips. With his back to Midnight, he was left open to be pricked by the sharp horn at the back of his thigh. Midnight gave a snort of delightful victory. A heavy sigh could be felt as much as it was heard as he pulled Midnight closer to his side.

"You think wasting your tea will upset me? Syr, I have declined your invitation because...." He paused, brows raised as if he expected Osytha to answer. He couldn't trust her to answer. Any answer she could possibly give would be wrong, and if it were wrong then he'd need to correct her over that as well.

"I do not care about you or your ideas. I do not care about book club, I can read books on my own. I do not care about your tea, I have my own. So if you want to be wasteful, go ahead, that is how all humans are." Looking down his nose at her, he continued, steady and indifferent. "Let the mold fester, then you can throw it out and make believe you did something good, perhaps you will pretend it is the Blight so you can justify your poor performance today."
 
“I do not care about you or your ideas.”

“… then you can throw it out and make believe you did something good… so you can justify your poor performance for today.”

That’s not fair. That’s not fair. She thought they had worked well together; better even than she might have expected. Yet after everything that went right today, she botches one measly throw, and now — now it’s as though none of the other stuff matters.

“I do not care about you or your ideas.” He can’t really mean it, surely? “… so you can justify your poor performance for today.” He can’t mean that.

It feels so much worse to actually hear those words aloud.

“You—” Gods, his throat looks so punchable right now, “—you…!” Osytha squeezes her eyes shut, “… you fucking hypocrite!”

When she looks out again, her blue glare is the antithesis to Sabinian’s icy reserve; brow creased in fury, eyes streaming with the hurt.

“I would nivver throw away a person ower a little slip like that! An’ yersen! Hidin’ away like you does, well, when the day comes that you pop your clogs, you’ll ’ave gone well an’ truly mouldy locked in your room afore anyone notices you’re even gone! An’ you reckon I’m bein’ wasteful!” Osytha narrows her eyes. “Or is people less important to you than tea, syr?”
 
Sabinian's mouth hung open. Syr Osytha had cursed, not just any curse word, like damn or hell or bitch, but a big, bad curse word. One that Sabinian only ever thought in his head. It was a nasty word because his Mother had told him it was, it was a word used when people knew little in how to express themselves and he should never used it. A few times he did, because even Sabinian had gone through rebellious phases, but every time he had used the word upon laying in his bed to reflect upon his day there would always be a better word to have used than fuck, fucker, or fucking.

Everything Osytha said, of which Sabinian found to be all assumption and silly short-lived human notions, could be disregarded even further, null and void, because she had cursed at him. Not even the sort of good cursing, it was clearly the bad kind.

"Ha!" He turned his back to her again, jogging now back to the horses, tugging Midnight along with three clicks of his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Osytha should know the answer to the silly question she posed, the elf felt no need to deny it. Tea was more important, but not more important than a good book or a unicorn, but at the same level of his cat, Priscilla.

"I am telling the Captains you cursed at me!" Sabinian shouted, picking up his pace further. Syr Osytha spent far more time outside walking and fighting, he needed every second if he wanted to beat her back to the Monastery. "I am writing a report to Captain Helena and now Captain Selene about your poor performance and word choices, Syr Osytha, and when they talk to you, huff, I will be sitting comfortably in my room with tea so bitter you shall rue this moment for the rest of your life!" It sounded less like a victorious, glorious statement as he wheezed by the end of it.
 
“Fine! You can tell ’em I said you’re a pig-headed, mean-spirited, fuckin’ pain in the arse while you’re at it!” And now there’s a vindictive kind of glee to the thought of Syr Sabinian actually having to repeat this verbatim, delicate little flower that he is. “Put that in your report, you miserable cun— stop runnin’ away from me!”

Osytha stalks, Sabinian then strides; she ups into a trot, and he begins to jog. Stupid, stupid man. Doesn’t he know there are bears out here?

It’s a commendable effort on Guffy’s part to match pace, tiny little dog with stumpy legs that he is. But he makes up for it with through the sheer relentless enthusiasm so characteristic of both terriers and joyful, brainless hounds everywhere. So, on they both run after the dawnling and his unicorn.

… she also can’t deny there’s yet another satisfaction in seeing Sabinian huffing and puffing away while she glides along on legs built up by Dal’s gruelling regimens and regular martial training. Osytha doesn’t overtake him, though. What — abandon her dawnling over some stupid little squabble? She won’t let him win like that. So, every time Sabinian picks up his own pace, he buys a couple seconds’ head start before there she is, right back at his side. Hanging around like a foul-mouthed, athletic, bad smell.

“What kind of brew, by the by?” she asks. “… tea so bitter you shall rue this moment for the rest of your life!” has Osytha intrigued in a way that cuts through the piping hot kettle of her apoplexy. “Et don’t sound ’alf bad.”¹


¹ Osytha does value human life above tea, though it’s a close call sometimes.
 
Huffing and puffing, Sabinian kept trying to distance himself from the pesky dusker, who turned out to be remarkably fast on her feet. Not only that, she didn't wheeze with every breath she took, instead, she was talking, a lot. Sabinian would have liked it better if she would have shut up, ran ahead of him or stayed far behind him.

Instead, Syr Osytha did the most annoying thing anyone could do to someone who so happened to be one of the most unathletic Knights in the Order: she kept pace with him and asked him a question. He turned towards her incredulously, knowing she was only doing this to stick it to him, to try and make him feel bad about how he was sweating profusely beneath his armpits and his timeless elven beauty was marred by a gaping mouth and ruddy cheeks and even more sweat around his brow.

When did it get so hot? Midnight had no issues keeping up, already running ahead of Sabinian, wishing to be free with Osytha instead of chained to a slowpoke who would rather hunch over like a shrimp above a book than take a hour to walk around the Monastery every now and then.

"S-s-shut up!" He gasped, panting like a dog as he bent down, scooping up a old, musty-smelling pine cone with a shaky hand and threw it at Syr Osytha's direction.
 
Moving through the forest at any significant speed takes care. Uneven ground, slippery mud, and twisting roots don’t give a damn if they twist your ankle, nor should one expect sharp thorns and jagged branches to yield for oncomers. It’s already hard enough when everything stays put. So Osytha isn’t quite prepared to have the forest come flying at her.

Sabinian’s yell draws her attention, and she just has time to see a looming, jagged shape fill up her vision before the mouldy old pinecone smacks her right in the face.

“Wh—” Osytha staggers to a stop, and drops her spear. “—gah, fuck!” Her hands rise up to paw at her face. “That’s my ee, you bastard!”

There’s a jabbing, needle-point world of hurt lodged in her eye. Dark muck smears across her face as she tries to rub, blink, and weep the wretched splinter free, and whatever’s in those musty streaks sure doesn’t have the crisp, pleasing scent of fresh pine to it any more.

She feels an insistent scrabbling at her knee. Through the watery blur, she can see Guffy pawing at her worriedly, sensitive in his way to her pain. Osytha gives him a few assuring pats.

“Hold up, syr,” she calls out to Sabinian — wherever he is. Her hands close around the spearhaft, and Osytha’s feet start shuffling her in the direction of the horses once more, or at least, as best she’s able to tell. “We oughtn’t — ugh, Sitha’s tits, that stings — oughtn’t get separated…”
 
There she goes again, using profanities despite claiming to be a reader! Couldn't she have used a word like -- Sabinian stopped and turned to look at Syr Osytha, a weary horror creeping up on his face. Her eye? Midnight stomped his hoof into the dirt, shaking his head, frustrated that his gallivanting gallop through the forest was interrupted just right as he was getting really into it.

Sabinian considered first that Osytha was lying, faking an injury so he'd get close to her so she could wrestle him to the ground and spit in his mouth or fart on his face. The sort of bullying he faced as a child, the only elf in a village full of humans, constantly having his sensitive ears poked or his long hair pulled, teased for having skinny arms and even skinnier calves. Now that he viewed Osytha being more brutish than bookish, he couldn't deny the possibility that she would play dirty to win. She was, after all, a Dusker.

He gasped. Had he just turned Syr Osytha into another blind Dusker? Syr Noa was already too much to handle, he didn't need another one running amuck about his stables or bumping into him in the Monastery!

"If you are pretending in hopes of playing with my heart strings, Syr Osytha, may I first remind you that I prefer tea over any sort of companionship?"
 
“Nay, I’m not—” the badger jerks to another wincing stop, a hand still risen protectively over her eye. For what good it will do her now after the fact. “—you pegged me reight good…”

Osytha’s honestly a little surprised, though. She’d half-expected Syr Sabinian to keep running off without her, so she feels strangely grateful to hear that snobbish voice, and to look up to find his blurring form waiting charily beside the impatient silhouette of Midnight, almost invisible under sylvan shadows.

She adjusts the spear to slope arms; propped in one hand to rest backward over the shoulder. When Osytha starts moving again, there’s a sheepish quality in the way she holds herself, and in her expression across the half of her face visible beneath her shielding hand. Forest’s green fingers whisper against winged steelpoint and under hard-soled shoes as she begins to walk a path parallel to the dawnling.

“Thanks,” Osytha mumbles, that one good eye of hers not quite meeting Sabinian’s. “For waitin’. Um.”

It was a good throw, lucky or not. That pinecone brought more than just her velocity to a crashing halt — without the wind rushing in her ears and the raw force of her legs powering her on, with the resounding thump of her heart lulling down, so too has Osytha found her mindless, reactionary rage suddenly fled. Still angry, still struggling against the turmoil churning in her chest, yet, less sure of who she ought to be putting in its crosshairs. Less willing to corrode an already-tarnished day even further.

“… I got a bit carried away there,” Osytha ventures, in a tentative tone. “Sorry, syr.”
 
When Osytha started walking once more, so did Sabinian, having his head always slightly turned away from her. Midnight was only upset about their slow pace, his hopes of dashing through the forest soon trampled by the slow pace set for them all by the elf curmudgeon. While Midnight threw his temper tantrum hissy fit, making lots of noise and snorting and bucking every now and then in a way that was more childishly cute than scary, Sabinian remained quiet.

He was trying to catch his breath and wouldn't speak until the heat along his chest and cheeks simmered down and his heart no longer pounded against his heavy ribs. He winced. There was a pain in his side now thanks to Syr Osytha chasing after him like a hobgoblin looking for a jar of vinegar to spill all over the floor because he hadn't been given his saucer of milk.

"I am still writing to the Captains about you. Your apologies will do nothing to stop that." Sabinian believed her to be scared, and scared she should be for no one wrote better scathing reports than Field Sworn Syr Sabinian of Dawn. After his chores at the stable, and going to fix Simon's farm, and then completing his nightly stable chores, he was going to barge into that library, pull out his favorite thesaurus and get to work with quill and parchment.

He rather liked using his calligraphy skills to write out Selene or Helena in big, sloping strokes. Always elegant, nearly perfect, a piece of art. It made up for his florid recounting of events and the many, many words he chose that always somehow said the same thing as the first one.

"And I will note you only apologized to me because I was beating you back to the horses and you realized how, unlike you, I am not a liar. I stick to my words and my beliefs, as every good Knight should." Sabinian couldn't wait to write something like that in his grandiose report. The horses were where they had been left, lifting their heads.

Midnight saw Forebitter and whinnied so loudly that birds flew off from the surrounding trees. Before he could charge, Sabinian was untying Evensong and getting up on the saddle. Briefly he remembered how after he came out from the office that Osytha had both their horses all ready and waiting for him. It was easy to push the thought away as he instead chose to relive the memory of catching him with the rope, calling forth the tightness around his arms and chest.

Mad all over again, Sabinian trotted off back to the Monastery, certain that Syr Osytha would follow.
 
“I am still writing to the Captains about you. Your apologies will do nothing to stop that.”​

“Fair enough.”

Not surprising, at this point. Though, nor is Osytha especially worried. She still catches up with Scribe Sazia on the regular, so she’s heard what happens with the majority of Sabinian’s complaints. Apparently, there’s a bin for the exclusive use of their disposal in the Sanctum of Operations. Legend claims one of the previous Knight-Captains personally approved this unorthodox measure after seeing that the monastery’s archive space wouldn’t last another decade in the face of their dawnling’s prolific, literary grumpiness.

“And I will note you only apologized to me because I was beating you back to the horses and you realized how, unlike you, I am not a liar. I stick to my words and my beliefs, as every good Knight should.”​

Now that jump-starts Osytha’s heart into another spike of seething rage. Sabinian gets a hefty dose of the old side-eye (not that she’s currently able to offer much in the way of other kinds of eye), and her glove creaks ominously as it tightens against the ashen haft of her hunting spear. She recalls the vivid image of a burly, red-faced farmer laying into the elf with such vitriol as to be the envy of sadistic drill sergeants the world over; “And yew said, ‘yes, Simon, will not happen again, Simon, I am so-so-so sorry Simon, Midnight apologizes for the mess, he won’t do it again, he learned his lesson. I will make sure it never happens again, Simon, you can trust me, why me, oh my, I swear it on my Oath as a Knight!’”

‘Not a liar’, eh? And it’s not like she even lied! He didn’t say anything about only having one chance at it—!

Osytha takes careful, firm control of her breathing. Leather creaks faintly, again, as she loosens her grip on the boar-spear. And the white-hot flame of rage in her chest gives a dying little gasp as it sputters back out. There’s no point in saying anything. It’s not like he’ll listen. Besides, if Osytha lets him rile her up for the second time, there’s a good chance that Syr Sabinian will only be submitting his report via séance.

“Reight you are, syr,” she replies, in a flat sort of voice.

He wastes no time once they reach the horses; Osytha is still strapping Guffers into his basket and wondering what to do with Mr Cuddles, when Sabinian has gotten astride of Evensong and begun trotting back to Astenvale Monastery, with Midnight still on his tether keeping up alongside. The badger knight blinks a few painful, watery blinks in his direction, watching him go. She turns back to Guffy… and in his worried yet eager little face, she finds something to help finally her smile.

“Tha didst fine work aht there, m’lad.” The dog perks up at Osytha’s commendation, and she receives a few grateful licks on her wrist as she tries to pet him. “Mighty fine work. Tha shalt ’ave a little summat extra with thy supper as reward tonight.”

Forbítter gets some tender affections as well, of course, and then Osytha heaves herself up into the saddle. Sabinian, Evensong, and Midnight are a shrinking, distant blob at this point, though she can still see well enough to frown at his insufferably haughty back.

“You still owe me a bloody creamy broo-ly,” she mutters.

With that grudge sworn, she urges Forbs to follow after. No time to dilly-dally; she’s got medicants to see (courtesy of Sabinian’s unexpectedly good aim), fences to repair, reports of her own to write. And a list of books to consider, plus invitations to extend to some other syrs. Osytha does get first pick after all, and, well… Tuesday will be here before they know it.
 
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