Wrathwrought was a talker. You wouldn't think it to look at him. Tall, muscular, beard clipped, leather and plate armour in muted shades of brown, eyebrows wild as anything, battered swords crossed over his back: he looked like someone who put effort into being the rugged hero. The sort of person who probably hit those swords against a rock for a good few hours to get the well-used effect. The sort of person who'd hear that useless council's praise and pump his ego with it.
No, in retrospect, maybe I should have expected the blather.
“My job,” I ground out.
We were halfway through the cultivated lands leading up to the coast. Tame place. Paths lined with neat wooden fences. Sunlight meeting the thick foliage overhead and dappling everything gold and green down below. In the sunlight and the weak, harmless shadows, my heavily armed domestic pet grinned a soldier's grin. Fleetingly, I smelled the wraith of a specific metallic tang.
“You've certainly impressed a lot of people with that.”
There was a blessed pause; he looked at me out of the corner of his eye, appraising.
“Do you charge much extra for a dance?”
The most infuriating part about it was that I didn't stumble into red-haze fury. The hate was there. So was the indignation. But I felt that little flicker in my chest that wondered at his choice of quips and irritating compliments, that little compartment outside the anger that kept itself free to house confusion after years of being an asexual wound-binder and little else. I stomped it.
“Shut your mouth, Wrathwrought. Don't bother opening it again.”
“Not to do with wit, then. Every riposte the same, Pretty.”
I had to remember a simple fact. It was an empty word, pretty. Meant nothing. Too subjective. He was only proving me right by calling me that, calling a sour-faced medic whose hair was prematurely greying, whose face bore lines nothing to do with laughter pretty. It would be like me calling him admirable. Total fallacy. As worthless as the words of the dead.
And be sure. A compliment that once meant everything folds in neatly on itself when the mind behind it torn away and put deep down under the ground.
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