Why, why, why would you ask of her such a silly question?
It was the only thought in
Tatyana's head that made sense to her panicking mind; really the only thought that breached through the instinctive
flight of the whole flight or fight routine. She couldn't blame herself for embracing the descriptor of the hopefully very small, very hard to notice field mouse after the sudden and jarring shift in dynamic following Montbank's introduction.
Why would any sane person choose to fight against someone... so disturbingly effective at surprise decapitations?
As a matter of fact, Tatyana didn't think she could truly blame
anyone for the choice she made; the decision to make herself small against the backdrop of this theatrical playing out before her like some abysmally twisted circus act. This was the kind of madness which she was not at all equipped to understand, even conceptually, beyond ways allowing her to very quietly extricate herself and to be permitted on her merry way.
Tatyana could feel herself unravelling.
How could you criticize someone for being at least a little concerned about the very real and very intimate fear of random beheading?
As she abruptly sidestepped (more of a scramble) to permit the heroic descent of Montbank, she made the most imperceptible of glances towards the owl-man - hiding the curiosity, the fear,
the utter confusion behind an empty bravado of a twisted smile after she was finished processing that he was actually really here and was really next to the woman who initially gawked at him as if he was one of those circus acts.
Maybe her smile was intended to be seen as some demonstration of confidence, or a sardonic jab at how incredibly non-plussed she was in the face of something she couldn't even possibly begin to describe at this point. At least not in a way that was digestible to polite company.
Not to say it was much of an act, not one that'd fool anyone, anyways. Her face dropped before even completely turning away; something to be quickly replaced by a tight-lipped frown she found herself wearing much easier.
It was easy enough to blame the lackluster performance on very understandable performance anxiety.
There was none of that courage left in her from what felt like precious seconds ago, even if it may have been the kind of courage she had always heard in those songs she so often wanted to emulate. However quietly or hopelessly in those times she permitted childlessness to have a spin on the reins. Fat chance of that.
Her last pretense to bravery having been wiped off her face, the choice was made for her to take another reflexive and wholly biological step backwards. Even if it meant nearly tripping over the body of someone that she knew by name, and now knew by the blood soaked earth she embraced with splayed fingers to soften the subsequent fall.
Too much intimacy for her - it was decided.
Tatyana hadn't even recognized what she was doing until just now, but she did recognize what came after.
That shame of taking the fraud to heart - even if you knew that you'd regret every moment of it in the morning. All those pretenses evaporating as you awoke to a new dawn and remembered that it was all a crock.
You were never that person you pretended to be.
She had thought herself brave at the moment - she had believed it with all her heart. And yet it hadn't even taken a day to fully realize the lie - it hadn't even been a minute from then to now before that lie came crashing around her.
She didn't simply pray as Skad might have, but pleaded and prayed and pleaded again to soothe raw nerves.
As it wasn't said
: how swiftly the unusual descended into the usual.
She would've vomited longer to expel that unwavering, unrelenting fear that rose up just like bile.
She wouldn't have cut her wails and moans short as she dribbled her weakness by the strings of whatever unmentionable fluids she threw up; those which hung from her mouth in the way of some sickly animal, its rapidly evaporating strings catching the reflection of an early morning's dew.
All of that said and done with a wounded, stuttered wail that she couldn't even begin to imagine summoning any other way from the deepest depths of emotion. Something she wouldn't have cut short before she was ever given an opportunity to grieve a near death experience and the definitive... death of a man who offered her a casual opportunity to learn the ways of a proper lobster harvest when their timber was no longer in such seasonal demand; when the days were longer than the work required of these simple people.
That's what would have been done, in the usual way. For people without the ample experience necessary to take a casual dip in the puddle of rapidly forming blood without so much as a flutter of the lashes.
As it was said: how swiftly the usual descended into the unusual.
Tatyana rubbed away at whatever weakness dripped from her lips with the back of her hand, having never once dropped that blade that separated her from the same end that she felt upon her skin.
There was something else, too. Some other rationale made in incomprehensible split-second logic.
It was
definitely a choice made beyond the obvious interest in having the tools to guarantee survival. A lot less conscious of a choice, maybe, yet still a choice made with the same sudden, inexplicable certainty.
Tatyana knew it separated her from more than just death; she knew it separated her from disappearing into whatever grief one may have been very well entitled to in this delay, each moment of the ever creeping lull threatening the entirety of her terribly maintained composure.
It was an anchor of sorts, something she
did understand.
"You fight?"
The delay lingered until Skad made another gesture that Tatyana only vaguely recognized in passing as a Certified People Watcher, but it was definitely not an act she would have associated with... whatever this was. Some manner of invocation? She didn't (for whatever reason) imagine it to be a gesture of sudden surrender.
How unfortunate.
That being said: it somehow seemed easier to respond to the shaky
trade tongue of the viking and the flapping of the woman's hands rather than ask one of her own questions about the feathered man standing beside her.
"I don't want to fight." is what she settled on saying, at first. They were vapid, soothing words to hopefully be construed as an attempt at peace. Tatyana's face flickered with distaste for the words she hadn't even finished speaking, somehow finding her confidence again in Skad's poorly framed question of all things.
As well as with the presence of her convenient savior.
"Are you bloody dull? What made you think that; was it the flailing, or the falling? You make that mistake because I'm the only one who stood up to you out of all the bloody peasants you chopped up?
Bloody, bloody, bloody is right. Tatyana wanted to make a quip about mistaking the three words because of the first letter they shared. She thought better of the impulse. She wanted answers too.
Tatyana admittedly had more than a few for the latest guest; seemingly also out of some posh storybook!
Had they not come now, Tatyana would've enthusiastically hedged bets on the likelihood that the only way the residents of the sleepy village of Balgrove were likely to have seen of their likeness were in those same child's fables. That luck had run out.
To give credit where it was due, Montbank made for another very appreciated anchor. She would readily admit it - even if she couldn't summon the willpower to meet his gaze or his odd eyes a second time, not while she was still openly questioning her sanity.
She stepped a pace closer to him after the possibly ill-advised comments.
Tatyana knew there was only so much confidence to discover beneath the palm she had so neatly wrapped around the handle of the blade, so yes - he kept her standing on her own two feet no matter how brittle she might've felt. Even if she was an image more reminiscent of a gutter urchin, rather than a warrior out of the sagas like the two between her. But let's ignore that for now.
More than enough complications already without more performance anxiety.
"You
definitely fight - why did you come here to do it?"
Tatyana finally looked to Montbank for an apparent confirmation of what they'd do next, even just a pithy insight to drive the narrative. She made a poor attempt of hiding her nerves by disregarding eye contact altogether this time around, her frame still facing the viking; only from the corner of her tawny-brown eyes did she look to him for acknowledgement.