Do not be afraid of light

[hasapoint]

They smelled the battlefield long before they saw it. The apprentices and little Sisters who hadn't been on this kind of excursion before covered their noses and exclaimed. Vena didn't. As the child of a camp follower she would know to expect this, but her tread slowed and she looked repeatedly at Sister Lashan, especially as the sound of incredible numbers of crows cawing grew louder.

"Nasty, isn't it? Decay is part of death which is part of life," Lashan said firmly, if not totally without sympathy. How young had she been, the last time she was upset by the aftermath of battle? "There's armies that immediately turn around and sort the living from the dying from the dead and take care of that then and there. Not here, they're leaving it for the locals to handle or not and we're local enough. If you fight, you may well fight for people who'll leave you if you fall and move on. Make sure you at least have friends who'll look for you." They pressed on with their wagon. The donkey put its ears back but did not balk.

It wasn't as bad as it would get over the next few days. The bodies - it was now academic who had belonged to which side of whichever meaningless conflict this was - were not much bloated and decayed yet. Flies were not yet overwhelming. Right now the field of bodies was mostly attended by carrion birds, and various other birds that were willing to take advantage of the bounty before them. Finches among them, tiny beaks dipped red. A few other people could be seen picking their way across what had been a perfectly useable pasture. They kept clear. Lashan tasked girls to keep watch for them anyway, pretended not to see the ones who were being sick, and oversaw as dead men were loaded onto the donkeycart. They'd take them away a distance, say the rites, strip them of useful things, get them buried, and come back.

She paused. Something... like a sound. Not a sound. Lashan was hearing something with her mind, closer than the pickers. A threat? She stood like a sentinel and paid attention.

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[garmr]

The story starts off regular enough, and Guts briefly slips under the table to find the peach pit that had gotten lost somewhere next to the table leg opposite to him.

He misses a word or two, but starts to pick up again around the reminder of all their mortal fates. With a thunk from his head hitting the bottom of the table, he stands up straight with indignation. Too thick-skulled to be bothered by the wood, it seems.

“What the hell are you goin’ on about?” He sounds annoyed - partially at all the vague, flowery language and partly from not getting the whole story.

There is way too much admiration of the thing for it to seem like it happened by accident. The only people he heard talk like that were fanatics - either of the Holy See or some other cultish thing. He happened to be a fan of neither, and stayed well clear of them.

“It’s creepy.” he reminds her, emphatically.

[hasapoint]

Hesri blinks up at him, calm and placid. "Isn't that what it's like to use a sword? I've wondered, but the girls mostly aren't very good, and Lashan says I'm being silly if I ask."

Then Vena is here, scrubbed pink and still damp-haired, carrying a bowl of cream. "Sorry - they were so slow!" She thunks the bowl down next to the slaughtered peaches and dips a piece in the cream before stuffing it in her mouth. Then another. And a third, indistinctly telling Guts, "Try it!"

The rich savor and faint mellow sweet of the cream and the sharper sour-sweet of the peaches go really well together, if he does. Fruit and dairy are a good combination.

Vena chews ferociously, swallows, wipes her mouth, and then says, "Are you being crazy about fire again? What's it this time? Here." She's going to feed Hesri some more cream-dripping peach chunks, which Hesri dutifully takes, the dreamy look fading.

"You'll never let me live that down, will you?" the older girl asks, with something between wistfulness, awkward self-awareness, and amusement. She glances at Guts and says, "I was delirious when I was first brought here and... I may have told a few people I was going to burn the infirmary down."

"She didn't have hair and was all over maggots!" Vena says gleefully, having moved on to briskly washing and drying Hesri's hands.

[garmr]

“No. It ain’t like that at all.”

He frowns, not seeing the connection. But before he can get into talking about swords any further, Vena bursts into the tent with her (now typical) bright cheer, plunking a big bowl of the cream in front of them. Is that what this was for?

Ever the wanderer, Guts was not very versed in sweets or dairy foods. No easy way to preserve milk in a camp or on a trail. Villages had such things on occasion, but he only ever passed through them. Stays too fleeting to properly enjoy all the delights offered. Most of his earned money went to his war tools, anyway.

So, bending over, he takes in the subtle, sweet scents of the bowl not unlike a wild animal suspicious of offered food. Milk was familiar enough, at least. Dipping a peach slice into the cream, he gets his first bite in, and going by the disappearance of the creases around his nose and brows, appears to be quite enjoying it. Tasty…

And, although Guts should have felt disgust at the story as Vena described it, he finds something a bit more conflicted rising in his chest. Something was clearly off about her in the head, and for whatever reason it annoyed him greatly but also drew out an unusual sympathy.

“The cream’s good.” He says, changing the topic awkwardly. He goes for another.

[hasapoint]

"I suspect this was supposed to end up as butter," Hesri says, adopting the topic change a bit reluctantly. She'd been hoping to sort of connect over... something that had seemed to be there earlier, but she's been recalled to the knowledge that truly no one likes her to talk about the fire, and isn't really sure how else to get there. "But there's no sense wasting it if it's here."

Vena shrugs carelessly when she's obliquely accused of theft. She could have gone on with worrying enthusiasm about festering wounds and the treatment of them but milk's a good topic too. "It's good on strawberries. And bread! And in soup. And it's good in eggs too, or sauce. Cows are great, I like to feed them carrot tops and stuff to say thanks. I never saw one up close before I got here - that was just before she did, because Master was with the women giving herbs to the camp followers and I tried to take her coinpurse and, wham! 'What do you think you're doing!' And then I bit her."

Compared to Nerine, Vena is about that same size and a similar shape, but isn't as dense and has vaguer, softer features. She's not clumsy exactly but there's much more of a rushing, thoughtless quality to how she moves. Less so at the moment, bending Hesri's fingers back, curling and stretching them in a practiced way.

Hesri herself has a little half suppressed frown through this, and sweat showing at her temples. Even with the medicine and a lot of experience it doesn't feel good or comfortable. With affection she snorts, "Vena, you're a hoyden."

[garmr]

“You were a little thief too, huh? Explains all the snacks you keep sneaking in here.”

He wonders how many of the girls were thieves and criminals. If they had to eke out a living on their own, on the outskirts, it would make sense for them to eventually wander here in the middle of nowhere.

The exercises… Weren’t entirely unfamiliar. Certain injuries that weren’t deadly, but were severe enough to take a man out of a campaign, often required quite a long recovery time. Sometimes they returned entirely healed, but most times they were never quite the same. Burns were always in the latter category.

“They got anything else out there aside from sweets?”

He could only ignore the complaints of his stomach for so long. Now that Hesri had someone else to keep her company, he takes it as opportunity to duck out for the moment being. Guts hopes that they had something more substantive waiting. Maybe a stew with real meat in it?

[hasapoint]

Vena gives an indignant, "No! I just took what I had to when I was hungry!" and scowls up at Guts in affront. This hit a nerve, apparently, calling up a bad memory. "There was a captain and he always thought it was me and it wasn't, almost never! The men did it because he was so mean and stingy!"

Some memory of that has her all tensed up, forgetting about the exercises. She's more worldly and resigned to certain things than Lashan but is after all still a child, still moved by the memory of pain and futile rage at how unfair something had been. Hesri leans forwards and bunts her forehead to Vena's in a light, affectionate gesture, and Vena relaxes a bit, enough to put her head down and resume what she was doing.

"It's early for dinner but they're into it enough to have something, I'm sure. I expect today there's black sausage again," the older girl says, and grimaces. City girl that she was, she did not grow up eating blood or so hungry that she can quickly adapt to it, and it seems appalling every time she considers the idea.

"Yeah, but it's dumplings too. They went and killed some cockerels and old mean hens for some of them," Vena grumbles, not in a mood now to defend sausages made with blood or gloat over a day with meat in it.

"Oh! Well, there you have it." Hesri smiles up at Guts, with just a hint of teasing. "Go on. If you show up without a shirt on especially, I'm sure they'll give you something good."

[garmr]

His eyebrows raise in an aloof manner as Hesri moves to comfort the girl, seemingly unmoved by the outburst. So he touched a sore topic. It didn’t take much imagination to see how Vena would have had a rough one on her own, but that wasn’t his problem to solve. Whatever drove Lashan to adopt all these scraggly village leftovers was beyond him. But now he was in that category too, he supposes.

His eyes jerk away from them when Hesri suggests he leaves half-dressed. Girls! Why do they have to be weird about things that were just more comfortable.

“I should get going.” He blurts out sheepishly. “I can bring something back for you guys.”