"upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty."
Caine had always disliked the ocean.
Vast churning depths, impenetrable black surfaces that revealed nothing yet encompassed everything; in his youth he'd come across a drawing in a tattered diary—broad brush strokes, a scholar's hasty scrawl—that depicted the ocean as if one had trapped it all in a glass and looked at it from the side. Floating at the top was a strip of land (Dratheria, it was labeled), thin as a layer of oil, sepia washed. Not even a tenth of the black spill of ink stretching below it to the edge of the page, leaking into the very binding.
Creatures the likes of which have never been seen, scrawled in what little margin remained, nor caught. Imagine! Dissections preserved in pickled jars, rows and rows of unfathomable life lining the Institute's dark cellar shelves like jam.
It was at that moment that he'd decided: he was a desert creature, as much a slave to the sands as he was in love with it. The poets were wrong. A sea of sand was not remotely the same thing as the Sea.
Absently Caine dragged a lock of wet hair out of his lashes. The sound of the waves foaming upon the shore sounded less like a crooning hush, hush and more like an omen. Thick as a heartbeat, a symphony of crow wings.
The red crow on his shoulder shifted from foot to foot, docile as a lamb, and pecked at a piece of seagrass hanging from his neck. He couldn't feel it doing so; rather he knew that it did, like one knew the whereabouts of one's limbs without seeing them.
Softly he clicked his tongue twice and the crow quieted, nesting into his mane like a hatchling.
The girl he kept to the very edges of his awareness as he moved glaze-eyed and sullen down the path. A dark little wisp; he would not do her the misfortune of speaking to her. Yet the crow had other ideas. What Caine had mistaken for obedience was instead a mask for cunning—they were no less than a yard away, him carefully ignorant, it calm on his neck, when suddenly it leapt into the air like a spooking cat and dove straight for the girl, talons outstretched.
He bit back an order and simply watched.
The crow hit the boundaries of his magic before it could touch her (though she would not have felt it) and dissolved into a shower of red motes, then—nothing. Quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. Yet it had not even dust to return to. Inexplicably, Caine felt a pang of old sadness.
Carefully he moved his eyes to her, wary yet unrepentant. Up close she was so slender, bird-like, that he did not know whether he would call her delicate or a wraith. Her hair, sleek and lush, cascaded like water down her neck. And her eyes. He startled, a bit, when he saw them—it was like looking into a mirror.
No—(he had drawn closer but had yet to realize it)—her eyes were so bright silver it was like looking into a star. His own, flat as coins, pale as a gaunt moon, were mere reflections to her image.
She stepped closer, stardust on her skin, and Caine stood so still he could feel the sea breeze whisper salt into his wings, slip coyly over his legs like a ribbon, teasing, teasing. When she drew so near he could smell her (smoke and galaxies—strange as it sounded he couldn't describe it any other way) he flinched, yet still—did not move.
And then she withdrew, quick and effortless, as darting as a doe. A strip of limp seaweed dangled from her teeth. It looked scarcely different from a lock of his hair.
"Why?" she asked, so calm and soft that he became, suddenly, angry. It disorientated him—his anger, her closeness, the fact that she had almost touched him when he had always thought himself untouchable, like his Saints.
"Why—" he said, equally soft, though his was cold and hoarse while hers was a clear spring river, "—do you wish to know?"
High above them, two white gulls screeched high and keening, and in their despair he felt his own.
