#wholeome

[fluffygif]

Louie 🐺 + Rio 🐯

[highqueenofprydain]

Red and Gold

“Does it bother you,” she asks, “killing things?”

Coll’s hands, busy scraping the fat from the deer hide stretched across the frame before him, slow to a somber pause. In silence, she waits, sensing something heavy and bleak in his stillness. “Aye,” he sighs at last, in a voice like gravel. “Aye, cariad, it does. I take no pleasure in it.” 

She reaches out her hand - strong and sun-gilded for the first time in her memory - and touches the golden-brown fur at the edge of the hide. It is silky but not soft; the winter undercoat pushes out the prickling outer hairs into a standing-up stiffness, glittering in the fading light of the smoky afternoon. She thinks of Medwyn and his valley, and the fawn that had pushed its velvet nose beneath her palm, and pulls her hand away abruptly, as though her fingers stung. 

“We could just eat turnips,” she offers sadly, a counter to the justification no one had spoken. 

Coll smiles a little, his sinewy brown hands at work again; Coll’s hands are never still for long. “You’ll get plenty tired of turnips before Spring,” he says wryly, “and cabbages and beans, hearty as they are, won’t fill your belly through a long winter, nor would there be enough for all of us. Meat we must have, at least a little, whatever, to weather the snow. And leather for shoes and caps, fur to warm your hands and ears, and tallow for candles and lamps.”

“I suppose,” she sighs, and returns to her own work: braiding the long stems of bright oak leaves together, into garlands for harvest cheer. They fill her lap like a pool of ragged fire, scarlet and crimson and gold, parchment-thin, cool in her hands. “Medwyn got along without all that, though, somehow,” she remembers, thoughtfully.

Coll grunts, and glances up at her wryly. “Maybe he did. But what do those wolves of his eat, d’y’reckon?” 

She opens her mouth in surprise and closes it again, considering. He chuckles, “You see? But he doesn’t hold it against them. He loves his beasts for what they are. We, also, are what we are.” 

She stares at the toes of her soft suede boots, stuffed with wool. Warm against the chilled air, she wriggles her feet inside them, thinking. “It’s a shame it can’t all be like wool, though, isn’t it? Or like milk and eggs, taken without harming anything.”

“Aye,” he rumbles again, “but such is the way of it. Life feeds on life. Even vegetables must die to be eaten.” He raises his gaze toward the garden plot, looking fondly upon the fallow rows, resting now. “As every living thing, one day, returns to the earth. And so we give life to others in our turn.” 

She thinks, unwittingly, of grinning white bone, and clawed fingers crumbling to dust around a sword pommel. “Not all of us,” she whispers, shivering. 

Warm brown eyes flick up quickly at her and then down again. His face is impassive, careful. “It’s how it should be, whatever,” he murmurs. “Not a cold barrow of stone, but a bed beneath a tree, if the world was at rights. I could sleep well, out there.” He nods towards the edge of the woods, where, she knows, others, precious to him, sleep already. “But it’s not given most of us to choose.” He shrugs, resigned, and continues his work.

She pulls another leaf stem through the braid and gazes out at the trees: a smudged line of glorious colors running together, a flaming banner streaked by lingering threads of clinging green. “I don’t like thinking about it,” she says slowly. “What do you think happens to us? After?”

“Oof,” he sighs, “that’s a question for Dallben, not for one such as I, whatever.”

“I already asked him,” she says, with a touch of acerbity. “He said it’s not for us to know, and trailed off into I don’t even know what-all about eternal mysteries and the energy of the universe.” All she had wanted to know was if Achren were really dead, and if there were any way of finding out, but Dallben had moved the topic elsewhere before she could get around to admitting her fears. “I don’t think even he knows, really.”

Coll’s shoulders twitch with the force of a rough chuckle, and he shakes his head. “Well, I suppose that may be a fence even his vine won’t climb.” He sticks his knife’s point into a nearby log, wipes off his hands, and picks up the end of a garland to admire it. “Here’s what I do know, cariad. Every year these leaves burn to gold, like all the light of summer blazing out of them one last time before they fall, and a beautiful death it is. And next spring, as sure as the sun rises, from every twig will come a new green leaf in place of the one that fell, and more besides. Where the seed falls, there the sprout rises, and life follows death in a circle, always, all things made over new. If that is how the earth makes and remakes its fruit, why should it be any different for us? Eh?”

He rarely makes such a long speech, and she looks at him in wonder, at his creased, open, honest face, his crinkled dark eyes as peaceful as the earth. No, the thought of returning to earth does not disturb him, not Coll; he is already such a part of it that death should be no more than stepping into the door of a home he’s loved for years. 

She is comforted, but not so resigned.

“I wish we knew for certain,” she sighs. “I wish I knew that…that my parents might be waiting for me, just on the other side, you know. That they could tell me if they were.” 

There’s a quaver in her voice, and she hates it, hates how it makes her feel small and alone, and she looks down quickly at the leaves in her lap, and braids feverishly for a few minutes, swallowing whatever it is trying to come up in her throat, blinking away the traitorous welling in her eyes. Coll is silent, settled like a tree, though from the corner of her eye she sees his hands moving. 

Then the garland rustles and he leans toward her, his arms raised. She looks up in surprise just as he settles the red-gold leaves, wound into a circlet, upon her head. He sits back, smiling, at the effect, and murmurs, “Proper crown for our princess.” His voice is a low growl like a bear’s, rough with emotion. “Suits you better than cold metal, whatever.” 

Her heart swells. It’s an answer - not to her impossible wish, but to something else, something she needs more, maybe, just now, than knowing the unknowable, and she hiccups and smiles back at him, a wavering and watery smile, full of unspoken belonging. 

“I always liked autumn,” she admits, “even though it seemed like I shouldn’t. When all it meant was that winter was coming.”

“But that’s not all it means,” he counters, twining a garland around his own bald head. It slips down around his neck, a collar of bright ruffles and spikes, and she giggles. He grins broadly. “It’s a reminder that there’s beauty even in endings. That what goes away comes back again.” With a grunt, he leans forward, and rises to his feet, taking up the deerskin. “Time to go salt this. Need more leaves?” 

“Yes,” she says, “but I’ll get them. I like gathering them up. It feels like treasure-hunting.” 

He sighs quietly, and places a warm hand on the top of her head, very briefly, as he steps past her. “Aye, the land provides treasure enough if you know where to look. And sometimes it shows up on its own when you never expected it.” 

She glances up at him, at his sweet and affectionate smile, and he winks and walks away, whistling, into the smoky air. She squints, until his bronze jacket and rust-colored breeches and leather cap are lost against the browns and reds and ochres of the orchard beyond. 

[fluffygif]

Tuscany countryside 🌸🌳