TovrikWhat the Whelp Chewed
What the Whelp Chewed
The fight was a mess of clubs and breath and the hatchet doing work the borrowed axe would have failed. He dropped one trogg. He turned the second. The third, the one in the vest, hit him in the chest with a full swing, and the shelf, the snow, and the sound in his ears all went out together.
There is a quiet the living do not get to use. He walked in it. His boots left nothing. The way back was the same path, stripped of weather, and at the end of it his body lay in the snow with the hatchet still in one hand, because he had not had time to be disarmed. The quiet was willing to keep him. He was not willing to stay.
He got up.
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TovrikWhat the Whelp Chewed
Air hurt, which was how he knew it was his again. The trogg in the vest had not expected the argument to resume. Tovrik resumed it from one knee, then from his feet, then from the close distance where a hatchet is a better idea than a club. He did not make a speech. He finished the fight he had already lost once, and when it was done he was shaking so hard the new weight on the ground seemed to shiver with him.
The vest had come off the trogg in the struggle. Frost still rimed the hide. It smelled like a cellar and a kennel that had made a treaty. He put it on anyway, because his chest hurt and the wind knew it.
He sat on the shelf a long while. The troggs’ coals were a sulk of red. He fed them twigs until they would warm his hands, and he kept his eyes on the path, and he did not lie down. Lying down had already been tried.
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