#...man its been a long time since ive posted regularly i dont remember how tags work 😭 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thewhumperinwhite · 6 months

Text

WKW: The Voice That Shakes The Stones (Part 2)

Continued directly from this, but will make more sense if you've also read The Rose Queen parts 1 and 2.

This one follows part one in terms of getting some plot stuff out of the way up top and then some Really Heavy Whump in the back half lmao

TW for: broken bones (including ribs and spine), blood, aftermath of beating/caning, past/referenced child abuse, referenced parental death, referenced decapitation, Again Broken Bones To The Extent That It Is Essentially Body Horror.

----

Morden raises a sculpted eyebrow at Tern. “Been opening my mail, have you?”

Tern looks at him; or at least Morden assumes he does. Tern wears an elaborately constructed mask sewn out of feathers and leather and bone, and removes it very rarely.

“I open everyone’s mail,” Tern says.

Morden knows this, of course. He has no secrets to keep from his own Falconers, and if and when such secrets do arise, he will simply have Thorne deliver them. If Morden feels—caught off guard, set on edge, it is no fault of Tern’s, and snapping at his own Scout will not help him feel more in control, anyway. Morden arranges himself more casually at his desk with a bit of effort.

“What do you think of the Lady’s proposal?” he asks, forcing his voice back into its usual light and airy register.

Tern tilts his head. The mask makes him the most actually-birdlike of all the Falconers, a fact Morden usually finds endearing, though he is struggling not to be annoyed by it at the moment.

“It’s my job to know things, not to act on them,” Tern says finally. Which is a letdown after such a long thoughtful pause, even though it is also true. Morden does not roll his eyes, but the temptation is there. “What do you think, Mord?”

Morden sits up straight and brushes his hair from his face. What he thinks is, she must have eyes in the Castle that Morden can’t see, to be able to time this missive so exactly. But that thought is uselessly paranoid—Tern would know, and Tern would tell him—so he is not entertaining it. Or vocalizing it, either.

“I think she’s audacious,” he says instead, which is true. “And I think I had better consider carefully before I think anything much else.” He folds the letter back up, so that he will not keep reading it uselessly over and over, and looks up at Tern, pretending to make eye contact through the mask. “In the meantime, make sure the Prince doesn’t die, will you? I may finally be able to put him to some use.”

Tern nods, and stalks out silently, still in his soft-soled scouting boots.

Morden makes it, optimistically, another five minutes before he unfolds the letter to read it again.

“Your desires have aligned neatly with our own, dear Crane,” reads the now-familiar script, “and the appropriate sacrifices have been made.”

Morden has not yet opened the accompanying jeweled and gilded casket, but the size and heft of it—and, more importantly, the smell—makes him fairly confident he knows what will be inside.

“A healthy partnership ought be reciprocal, however,” the letter goes on.

Morden chews his thumbnail, a nervous habit he does not often indulge. He scolds himself; he is only now realizing how he has begun to enjoy his exchanges with the Rose Queen, how they have begun to feel so like a game of chess against an interesting opponent as to make him forget the stakes. It has left him feeling—exposed, now, at best; trapped if he is not careful.

He needs to make a plan.

----

This is not part of Crow’s job.

It’s all very well for Tern, who relays Crane’s instructions—“Fix up the Summer Prince; the White Crane had his fun and now wants not to play with broken toys”—and then scurry off with the excuse of some Important Scouting Duty, which Crow suspects is probably bullshit.

When Morden introduces the Falconer’s, he says that Crow’s job is “Throatcutter,” the one who makes sure everyone’s theatrics have resulted in actual corpses at the end of every ambush and skirmish. And although that isn’t all he does—far from it—that is certainly part of his job. If the White Crane had said, “I’m too busy to finish killing the Summer Prince, finish that up for me, will you?” Crow would have done it, and with a whistle and a spring in his step.

Crow is built for ending lives, it’s truly what he’s best at. He doesn’t prolong pain on purpose; he isn’t Raven. Once a creature is past a certain threshold of injury, keeping it alive becomes—boring and sad, and little else.

The Summer Prince flops slightly at Crow’s feet, as if hearing him think this. He is moving like a deboned fish. Sounds a bit like one, as well.

Morden is going to owe him, and Morden doesn’t enjoy owing things, even to his own Falconers. So at least, Crow thinks, there is that.

“I don’t suppose you can walk,” Crow says. He slides the toe of his boot underneath the writhing shape of the Summer Prince, meaning only to nudge him slightly.

There is—more give in the ribs than there should be.

The body at his feet spasms violently as the Prince tries to curl in around himself. He manages to twist his torso in a way that makes Crow’s gorge rise a bit in spite of himself, his handless arm flopping over and up to haphazardly cover his face. His legs don’t move at all.

Crow contemplates, very briefly, the idea of picking the Summer Prince up off the floor and carrying him to Heron’s quarters, or more probably to the Castle’s Healer. He doesn’t mind blood, as a rule. The blood would not be the problem.

The Prince heaves in what must be his first full breath since Crow entered the room several minutes ago. It scrapes audibly against his throat; the effort of taking it arcs his back up off the floor, except that his legs still haven’t moved. Something—either ribs or spine, Crow isn’t sure which—grinds audibly inside him and he loses whatever air he has managed to take in in a single quiet, bubbly-sounding wail.

“Eugh,” Crow says, and turns his back on what is rapidly becoming the corpse of the Summer Prince. Where has that bloody wolf pup got himself to? Cleaning up Morden’s messes is literally that kid’s whole job.

----

(Andry can’t see. He can almost breathe, if he tries very hard. It feels like lifting a very heavy weight, and at the height of each breath there is a sudden stabbing pain in his back, just left of the center, that makes him twitch. He is in—water, maybe. Or anyway his face and shoulders and ears feel wet. His lips feel wet, too, although the inside of his mouth feels very dry indeed.)

(He must have hit his head, he thinks. He knows that burning cracked-egg feeling well enough, in his temple and below his right ear and on the high point of his opposite cheek. And his back is cracked open that way too, not sharp and bone deep like the whip but broad and blunt and shattered like his father’s cane.)

(His father is—dead, he thinks, around the buzzing in his head, like bees tangled up in cotton wool. The White Crane cut off his father’s head, and Andry could not catch it when it was thrown. And now he cannot even tell if he is sorry. His father did kill him once, after all.)

(He had known where he stood with his father, though. His father was not elegant and smiling, like the White Crane.)

(Although the White Crane was not smiling this time, was he, Andry thinks; no, this time he was angry, and the worst part is that Andry does not even know why.)

(…Andry thinks that is the worst part. Then he tries to move his legs.)

----

Heron is the Falconers’ battlefield medic, and he is not a healer. He has smelling salts in his bag that will get a man to his feet and into the fray with an arrow through the stomach; and skill enough with a needle and a bandage to patch up even serious punctures well enough to heal on their own. He even knows the basic alchemy needed to keep a wound from going septic about seven times out of ten.

In this situation he is useful only in that he has a stretcher he is willing to bring to Thorne’s chamber in exchange for the privilege of seeing a mutilated body.

Crow returns with Thorne and Heron after about five minutes, and it is clear as he nears the threshold and begins to hear the Prince’s breath whistling in and out, like wind blowing across a broken bottle, that the boy has not done him the great favor of dying in the interim.

One of the Prince’s eyes is open when Crow stands over him again, but it is rolled back in his head far enough to hide all but a thin ring of blue-purple iris. The other eye is already swollen too far to open more than a crack. Every time he takes a far-too-audible breath he shudders, violently, exactly twice. His torso is still twisted at that odd angle, as though he has tried to roll over onto his side without lifting his hips.

Thorne has been helping Heron carry the stretcher. When he enters the room he drops his end of it with a loud clatter.

Heron does not seem to notice, though he gamely drops his end of the stretcher, too, so that he can dart closer to the body, his pale eyes glittering behind his physician’s mask.

(Tern and Heron are both masked more often than they aren’t; both masks, as far as Crow is concerned, are products of paranoia. Tern is convinced some authority or other is going to discover his identity, as though that would matter now that he is at the right hand of the conqueror of a whole damned country. Heron is concerned about inhalants. This seems sensible sometimes, even to Crow; Heron takes apart something like a half-dozen cadavers a week in pursuit of his craft. However he also wears the mask when it is just the eight of them alone in the Nest or in their rooms here at the castle, and that seems like overkill to Crow.)

As always, Heron’s hands are light, and clever, and ruthless. He pulls the Prince’s fluttering eyelid up and peers closely into his eye, tipping his head back quite gently. Then he presses his fingers against the Prince’s shattered ribs with slow, deliberate pressure, using his hand in the Prince’s hair to keep the Prince from curling up in a ball at what must be excruciating pain. Heron’s face is quite close to the Prince’s answering gasp. Crow, a safe distance away with his arms crossed, thinks to himself that perhaps Heron wouldn’t need the mask if he was willing to do his job without getting so very close.

When the Prince has relaxed out of his pain-spasm, Heron taps twice on the sharp edge of the Prince’s sharp recently-starved hip bone with a gloved fist. The Prince’s gasp this time is much quieter, more of a hiccup than an airless scream.

When Heron stretches out a booted foot to give the Prince’s calf a not-particularly-gentle kick, the Prince doesn’t react at all.

“That’s interesting,” Heron says, his voice dark with things Crow finds professionally distasteful.

----

Thorne left Andry—what, thirty minutes ago? An hour? Surely no more than that. Thorne left Andry asleep on the couch at the foot of his bed, wrapped in Thorne’s borrowed sheets, curled up like a child with the stump of his missing hand tucked under his chin.

Thorne’s bedsheets are in disarray, now, on the floor in front of the couch. There is blood on them. There seems, at least to Thorne’s suddenly spotty and blurred vision, to be blood more places than there isn’t.

Heron’s hand is on Andry’s throat, now, prodding narrow deep bruise that is forming there. Heron is hovering over Andry with the same excited twitchy over-interest with which he treats any sick or injured person. Thorne is familiar enough with Heron’s attention to remember the growing unease and sick, crawling discomfort it inspires.

He usually finds it easier to look away.

“Well go on,” Crow snaps at him from where leaning against the wall, looking mildly disgusted but little else. “Get him on the fucking stretcher already.”

Thorne’s instinct to obey is honed sharply enough that he moves to follow the order without thinking. So at least there is that relief.

#the winter king's ward #whump #original whump #fantasy whump #royalty whump #beaten #caning #broken bones #whumper pov #broken ribs #broken spine #parental death mention #parental abuse mention #...man its been a long time since ive posted regularly i dont remember how tags work 😭#i will TRY and remember who the taglist was for this by the time i do a next day reblog

11 notes · View notes

usercass · 4 years

Text

50 Question Tag

yeah im making this a seperate post or it'll be waaayyy too long but thank you for the tag!! @apatheticanvas67482

1. What is the color of your hairbrush?

i dont actually own a hairbrush.....

2. Name a food you never eat

cooked carrots, love them raw but i cannot i will gag

3. Are you typically too warm or too cold?

too warm i will keep my fan on in the winter bc id rather bundle up

4. What were you doing 45min ago?

facetiming my fam i miss them so much 😭

5. Favorite candy bar?

uhh prob symphony bar

6. Have you ever been to a professional sports game?

once i think i was 6 or 7 and it was a seattle mariners game and i hated it

7. What is the last thing you said outloud?

either love you bye to my fam or saying hello to my cat

8. Favorite ice cream?

lotta sweet questions i dont eat a lot of sweets but ummmm this specific huckleberey ice cream in my college town

9. What is the last thing you had to drink?

water always i drink water religiously

10. Do you like your wallet?

yeaaahhh its a mans wallet but i like it bc i like small purses

11. What is the last thing you ate?

currently eating hot cheetos while doing this...

12. Did you buy any new clothes last week?

i bought my bridesmaids dress for my sisters wedding :):):)

13. What's the last sporting event you watched?

probably the last game i worked in sports medicine in high school which was probably baseball

14. Favorite flavor of popcorn?

some of these are such obscure questions but ummm idk classic salt and butter

15. Who is the last person you sent a text to?

My bro as usual hes my best friend

16. Ever go camping?

oh hell yea my family has gone camping at least once every year since before i can remember but thats pretty common on the west coast i think

17. Do you take vitamins?

seriously what are these questions no i dont and dont come for me

18. Do you regularly attend a place of worship?

yes ma'am can i get a hallelu

19. Do you have a tan?

nooo im pasty

20. Do you prefer chinese or pizza?

probablt chinese bc variety and ragoons

21. Do you drink soda out of a straw?

not exclusively

22. What color socks do you usually wear?

black always and forever

23. Do you ever drive above the speed limit?

i aint no wuss

24. What terrifies you?

things i cant control especially people's preception of me

25. Look to you left what do you see?

my florence + the machine shirts hung up on my dorm wall bc im too lazy to decorate

26. What chore do you hate the most?

dusting i hate having to move shit, dust, then move it back

27. What do you think when you hear an australian accent?

who came up w these i wanna know why australlian specifically

but nicole kidman

28. What is your favorite soda?

uhhhhhhhh baja blast

29. Do you go inside fast food places or use the drive thru?

drive thru

30. What is your favorite number?

currently its the gas rate constant .08206 bc fuck chemistry but i like that number

31. Last person you talked to?

fam already established

32. Favorite cut of beef?

this is a no beef house we tryna destroy the beef industry thank you

33. Last song you listened to?

it was hamilton.... but i said that last tag game so imma say the one before that which was Les Amours Dévouées by Cœur De Pirate

34. Last book you read?

if webtoons and textbooks dont count Inside the Criminal Mind

35. Favorite day of the week?

probably sunday bc i love going to church and chilling w the fam

36. Can you say the alphabet backwards?

i actually can i learned in middle school so i could flex

37. How do you like your coffee?

i like it just the right amount of sweetness and bitter and nutty tho ive been drinking tea more

38. Favorite pair of shoes?

prob my teeva sandals made from recycled materials and comfy af

39. Time you normally get up?

9:30-10ish if i dont have class

40. Sunrise or sunset?

now im singing fiddler on the roof i love sunrises but im rarely awake for them

41. How many blankets on your bed?

single comforter bc im always warm

42. Describe your kitchen plates

well im at college rn so theyre teal plastic disks could be a frisbee honestly

43. Describe your kitchen at the moment

again at college so its p big to accomadate 6 girls but its actually p clean all the time

44. Do you have a favorite alcoholic drink?

i dont drink anymore but when i did i loved crown royal whiskey

45. Do you play cards?

i play card games but if you mean poker nope

46. What color is your car?

hes a gorgeous silver 2010 volvo xc60 with a peridot sticker on the side that says clod

47. Can you change a tire?

i know how to but bolts are rlly tight and idk if im strong enough

48. Favorite state?

ummm i have a fondness for washington because its where i grew up and i loooove the rain

49. Favorite job you've had?

ive only had two sooo i guess caption call we used voice to text to print what was being said on the phone so people w hard of hearing can read the convo

50. Tagging EVERYOONE bc im too much of a wuss to tag people yaaaayyy

but tag me if you do it i wanna get to know you guys

also someone teach me how to do the continue reading thing

#tag game #i spent so long doing this #focuses on some weird stuff but uhh #get to know me #id love to get to know you

2 notes · View notes