[Witches' Horses] Chevalier de Grammont
Title: drawing lines
’Verse/characters: Witches' Horses; Chevalier de Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 75C "observation"; a request for Sinclair by coastal_physics
Word Count: 1064
Notes: early in their partnership.
"Your name isn't 'Sinclair'," she said when he was within mirror-range, rolling herself to present her newly-scarred belly to his sledge, not her side.
"Your name isn't Chevalier de Grammont, either," he replied, rolling the sledge to follow her, nearly as graceful as her, which she found strange, in one who had to move with his hands.
"If you lie to me about your name, how am I to know if you lie about other things, too?" she swapped her ends, putting her head by his bow, projected an image of a woman standing with her arms crossed, angry, onto the mirror.
His image laughed, creasing the skin by the eye-covering he wore. "Been listening to the news, I take it."
She flicked through her stolen songs, changed to another image, one with a man shrugging. "The more information one has, when entering a new ground, the better."
"I agree," he said, against her skin, and she startled, nearly electrifying her outer layer and burning him off, before she realised that he'd dropped out of the sledge and had it on a tow line. Impatient human.
"My name is--" she began, then was drowned out by a burst of static.
She reached out, snatched him away from her side, and held him still.
"Lady," he said, all the humour gone from his voice, and she paused before she could start shaking him like a foolish colt. "What I don't know can't be taken from me."
She put him between her skins, the sledge tethered to the outermost, while she considered that.
When he didn't say anything about it, just sat down on his haunches and put his back against a wall, she revised her earlier tag from 'impatient' to 'pushy'. Wondered if he approved of being called on the pushy, or if he would try to break her to his heel.
She reeled in the sledge, pressed it up against her skin on her other side. Opened its door, carefully, ears and nose straining to see if he'd hidden poison inside it, before he tried to use anything against her.
"I want your name," she said eventually, after she'd gone through the available data three times and still hadn't come up with a satisfactory solution.
His head came up, looking at the eye, not where the voice had come from. "What can a witch command of you?"
"More than a human, less than a herd-leader."
"Can a witch--or a herd-leader--command a name of you?" he persisted, head tilted to one side like he could hear her still poking at the sledge.
She considered the idea, then, because she wasn't human and did not lie like one, "I do not know."
"I don't want my name in the hands of a witch," he said, an emotion humans might call steel, or winter, in his voice. Essentially similar--given the limitations of human vocal cords--to the way he'd refused her name.
She made a note to compare that to what the mirrors said of other humans, then slid open her inner skin, let him inside her belly as she released the sledge from her side.
Flicking her attention back to him--still an uncomfortable feeling, to have another mind inside her--she spotted something new. Adding it to the notes she was compiling, she let him cross her belly and reel in the sledge, start transferring boxes and crates from the sledge to her. He paid no attention when the weight of her coils lessened slightly, other than to make his flinging even more graceful.
Still odd, in a human. Perhaps this was what was meant by the references to the ways riders moved--the humans didn't seem good at quantifying the differences.
When the sledge was empty, he stripped off his outermost layers, stowed them where he could get at them easily, then stripped off the black layer, as well.
He looked different, without the black--not smaller, or bigger, though humans might have perceived him so. Lighter, perhaps, in the way his feet interacted with her coils and the way he touched her walls with the hand not carrying his skin and a box of tools.
When he got back into her belly, he set down the box, magnets inside it binding against her floor, then pulled a net out of the inside of the skin--the coat, she corrected herself, assigning the correct reference to the notes--then wrapped the coat in the net and pressed it against a wall, magnets seizing with precise clicks loud enough to overwhelm the sound of the box coming open.
When he touched the crooked end of a metal bar to the edge of a decorative panel--her stolen songs whispered 'crowbar', matching the shape against tools within negligible variation--she flicked the gravity beneath his feet lightly.
"What are you doing?" she asked through the closest voice, shading the tone to idle curiousity.
He shoved at the crowbar before he answered, throwing more than half his weight against it, and she felt the treads of his boots catch against the floor just before the panel tore with a scream of stressed metal.
"Horses as old as you look on the outside have more repairs visible inside," he told her, banging the panel back mostly flush to its neighbours with the bar. "Most crews can't keep their horses as beautiful as you."
She considered the matter-of-fact tone he spoke with, then, evenly, "Touch my engine and I'll give you to the reindeer."
He laughed, harder when she rippled the coils under his feet in subtle warning. "Lady, what you keep behind closed doors is your own affair--the public spaces are different."
Flicking through her references, then through her interior eyes, she marked places to add cosmetic damage in her true colours, then pushed the image-file towards the tool he wore against his eye.
He jerked, one hand moving towards his face, the other wrenching the crowbar up to a defensive pose--the man had held a hammer before, she noted, the position of body and metal and shape of his arm within the variance of the images of shipyard workers she had available--before his arm dropped, and he started laughing. "Didn't take you long to spot that."
"You brought it aboard me, human," she said, "what did you expect, that I would see it as decoration?"
’Verse/characters: Witches' Horses; Chevalier de Grammont, Sinclair
Prompt: 75C "observation"; a request for Sinclair by coastal_physics
Word Count: 1064
Notes: early in their partnership.
"Your name isn't 'Sinclair'," she said when he was within mirror-range, rolling herself to present her newly-scarred belly to his sledge, not her side.
"Your name isn't Chevalier de Grammont, either," he replied, rolling the sledge to follow her, nearly as graceful as her, which she found strange, in one who had to move with his hands.
"If you lie to me about your name, how am I to know if you lie about other things, too?" she swapped her ends, putting her head by his bow, projected an image of a woman standing with her arms crossed, angry, onto the mirror.
His image laughed, creasing the skin by the eye-covering he wore. "Been listening to the news, I take it."
She flicked through her stolen songs, changed to another image, one with a man shrugging. "The more information one has, when entering a new ground, the better."
"I agree," he said, against her skin, and she startled, nearly electrifying her outer layer and burning him off, before she realised that he'd dropped out of the sledge and had it on a tow line. Impatient human.
"My name is--" she began, then was drowned out by a burst of static.
She reached out, snatched him away from her side, and held him still.
"Lady," he said, all the humour gone from his voice, and she paused before she could start shaking him like a foolish colt. "What I don't know can't be taken from me."
She put him between her skins, the sledge tethered to the outermost, while she considered that.
When he didn't say anything about it, just sat down on his haunches and put his back against a wall, she revised her earlier tag from 'impatient' to 'pushy'. Wondered if he approved of being called on the pushy, or if he would try to break her to his heel.
She reeled in the sledge, pressed it up against her skin on her other side. Opened its door, carefully, ears and nose straining to see if he'd hidden poison inside it, before he tried to use anything against her.
"I want your name," she said eventually, after she'd gone through the available data three times and still hadn't come up with a satisfactory solution.
His head came up, looking at the eye, not where the voice had come from. "What can a witch command of you?"
"More than a human, less than a herd-leader."
"Can a witch--or a herd-leader--command a name of you?" he persisted, head tilted to one side like he could hear her still poking at the sledge.
She considered the idea, then, because she wasn't human and did not lie like one, "I do not know."
"I don't want my name in the hands of a witch," he said, an emotion humans might call steel, or winter, in his voice. Essentially similar--given the limitations of human vocal cords--to the way he'd refused her name.
She made a note to compare that to what the mirrors said of other humans, then slid open her inner skin, let him inside her belly as she released the sledge from her side.
Flicking her attention back to him--still an uncomfortable feeling, to have another mind inside her--she spotted something new. Adding it to the notes she was compiling, she let him cross her belly and reel in the sledge, start transferring boxes and crates from the sledge to her. He paid no attention when the weight of her coils lessened slightly, other than to make his flinging even more graceful.
Still odd, in a human. Perhaps this was what was meant by the references to the ways riders moved--the humans didn't seem good at quantifying the differences.
When the sledge was empty, he stripped off his outermost layers, stowed them where he could get at them easily, then stripped off the black layer, as well.
He looked different, without the black--not smaller, or bigger, though humans might have perceived him so. Lighter, perhaps, in the way his feet interacted with her coils and the way he touched her walls with the hand not carrying his skin and a box of tools.
When he got back into her belly, he set down the box, magnets inside it binding against her floor, then pulled a net out of the inside of the skin--the coat, she corrected herself, assigning the correct reference to the notes--then wrapped the coat in the net and pressed it against a wall, magnets seizing with precise clicks loud enough to overwhelm the sound of the box coming open.
When he touched the crooked end of a metal bar to the edge of a decorative panel--her stolen songs whispered 'crowbar', matching the shape against tools within negligible variation--she flicked the gravity beneath his feet lightly.
"What are you doing?" she asked through the closest voice, shading the tone to idle curiousity.
He shoved at the crowbar before he answered, throwing more than half his weight against it, and she felt the treads of his boots catch against the floor just before the panel tore with a scream of stressed metal.
"Horses as old as you look on the outside have more repairs visible inside," he told her, banging the panel back mostly flush to its neighbours with the bar. "Most crews can't keep their horses as beautiful as you."
She considered the matter-of-fact tone he spoke with, then, evenly, "Touch my engine and I'll give you to the reindeer."
He laughed, harder when she rippled the coils under his feet in subtle warning. "Lady, what you keep behind closed doors is your own affair--the public spaces are different."
Flicking through her references, then through her interior eyes, she marked places to add cosmetic damage in her true colours, then pushed the image-file towards the tool he wore against his eye.
He jerked, one hand moving towards his face, the other wrenching the crowbar up to a defensive pose--the man had held a hammer before, she noted, the position of body and metal and shape of his arm within the variance of the images of shipyard workers she had available--before his arm dropped, and he started laughing. "Didn't take you long to spot that."
"You brought it aboard me, human," she said, "what did you expect, that I would see it as decoration?"