Tahl was not happy now…but not for the reasons this stranger might have guessed. He was transfixed by the bones, magic tugging at him like marionette strings, like calling to like. It was a side of himself he preferred to ignore. To keep buried, like bones should be.
But it was impossible to ignore it, when it was staring at you. No, it can’t see, he reminded himself, a bead of sweat that was not a product of his mad dash sliding down his temple. With its head cocked like that, it was a good facsimile of sight, but Tahl knew better. He knew better. The expectation and curiosity he was reading into the gesture was all projection. A dead goddamn mouse cannot sense what I am.
Then the bones crumpled, and the spell was broken. The temptation to push the mouse-pieces deeper into the ground was powerful – they shifted minutely under the weight of his attention, before he forced his gaze from the puppet to its puppet-master, narrowing ever so slightly. The expression in his eyes was still fear (a different kind of fear, now), but it looked like impatience. Annoyance. A shade of accusation. Who was this…this tourist with his fine clothes and his weird pets, and the nerve to make him feel like a coward for running away from what turned out to be a halloween pony? In his woods?
It did not help that Tahl was hungry. He couldn’t think on an empty stomach.
“Harmless?” Tahl repeated, bracing his hands on his hips. He was still catching his breath, but his voice had slipped back into his usual baritone, a touch of gravel making him sound older than he was. “Your terrifying-looking…friend stole my dinner.” That’s not harmless to me, Tahl was thinking, but then his stomach audibly growled and he managed to reign in his tongue. This stranger obviously wouldn’t know any of that, Tahl realized. He was thin and bony, but not in the places that hungry people were, and those clothes were probably of castle-make. Which begged the question: what was some lordling doing wandering around the Kingswood alone, in times like these? The outskirts of the woods teemed with outlaws, and not all of them were Tristan’s loyalists. Not to mention lamrions, venaraptors, and everything else that had once confined itself to the swamp.
“Hunter,” he clarified, shaking his head. His own clothes clearly marked him as one – all worn wool and leather in drab colors that seemed woven from the woods themselves, darned and hemmed and patched and re-patched. Not from around here, then. “What are you doing out here? Do you even have a weapon? In these woods, if something looks like it wants to eat you, it usually does.” He paused, remembering how this uncomfortable conversation had begun, and frowned. “Did I…is your leg okay?”
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