I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

Abel had braced himself for the cold and the dark. For the rooms far below the castle, the ones he’d heard low whispers of when he’d been running with the band of orphans among the shadowed streets after the tidal wave battered his life like an old ship. It had been a reminder to themselves not to get caught, that talk of rats, of hunger, of damp cellars far from the sunlight. 

But the unicorn-queen’s prison is a paradise. 

Oh, it is still a cage - but Abel feels trapped less like a dog and more like a bird. The smell of burning still clings to his skin, and his eyes are still red-rimmed with smoke, but as the day dawns the air is filled with the scent of flowers unfurling, opening to the sun. Light streams through glass high above him, and though they are bars they are more trellis than cell, wound with ivy, blooming with trumpeter-vines. How strange to be caught and yet to feel safe. There is no one he can hurt here.

The boy does not slink like a tiger beneath the shadows of the bars. Instead he waits beneath the wide leaves of a flowering palm, and even his relief feels like an anchor. Abel wonders if smoke still hangs over the city from the previous night’s trespasses; he wonders if the golden stallion has already informed Raum of his capture. Though his body aches and his bones are bruised, though his throat is raw, though his fate is a question he can’t answer - 

Abel feels almost free. 

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

Abel has been waiting for her.

He had hoped it would be she who came, and not the paint with her burning, kicking hooves or the mare of crimson-and-black with death in her eyes. He does not see - his eyes remain on waving branches, on light filtering through leaves, so much green he could live on it after the wastes of the desert, and the blue sky behind. He does not see but he hears when the steel bars sigh away to gold and melt to ash. And he wonders if it means he won’t be kept here, or if it means he won’t be leaving.


When he must, he turns to face her. Abel thinks of her body, carried on the back of his own. It seems impossible, now: she is taller than him but she is also more than him, so much more, heavy and rich as gold against his hollow bones and shadow-soul. The boy sways beneath the swing of her twisting horn like a blade of wheat shivers as it waits for the scythe.

Yet when she speaks the boy shakes his head. It does not feel brave to him, or like defying her - it feels urgent that he correct her. He does not like the feeling; it was so much easier not to care. And he still does not meet her eyes when he says, “I don’t hate you. I’m afraid of you. Of your magic and your dragon and all the things you could do.” When he swallows it’s like being back in the desert, no water anywhere, a new dune in his throat.

(But she had been in the desert, the unicorn girl with her horns like blue glass. Sabine, little sparrow - even the thought of her and her name makes his heart test its wings. But there, as always, are the bars.)

Because of that thought, because he is staring at a garden and thinking of a girl, her question makes him laugh. If some people laugh like gemstones and some like smoke, Abel’s laugh is like a small, mean piece of coal, cutting the sides of his raw throat. Now he does look at her, but the bay doesn’t see her at all. Maybe he sees a shoreline or a tsunami or a dragon far overhead, wonder and horror. Maybe he sees a mother.

“I love Denocte. But the city and her people and her god don’t love me, or the ones like me. We are chaff to burn first when the fire comes licking. We are rotting timber to feed the rising sea.” A Crow had seemed a fine, noble thing to be, from the point of view of an orphan boy - a crow, at least, had a flock to call family and the wits to thrive. Abel had been tired of being among the shadows where the rats hid, maybe a rat himself.

Now he is just tired. And if this is the end - if this is where his justice comes for him (perhaps he had only been eluding it when the sea came hungry and took his father, and the pass burned in dragon-fire and scorched his dam) than does he not deserve a confessional?

He shifts where he stands, casts down his gaze again (for her eyes are burning him up, all his sins reflected there in that ocean blue, and they are too much like another set of blue eyes he cannot now bear to face). “But I am sorry,” he says, still rough-voiced, “for the deaths. None of them were supposed to die.” Not that he knows - yet he wonders if that had been a lie. It seems a ridiculous thing to believe now, that Raum would spare anybody anything. He thinks of Solterra, of men and women turned to stone. He thinks of children starving the way he had starved and it feels like stones piling low in his belly; it feels like a grave being built.

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

He is watching the ground when she steps closer, and he sees a blossom become more like a weapon, petals turning to knives, all the life leaching out of it and leaving it more beautiful, more dangerous, more dead. Even now the boy wants to say See, see what you are doing, what things you leave behind you!

But she is a queen, and she is a unicorn, and she is speaking to him again and he cannot meet her gaze (so colored like the sea, which surprised him at first) without fear of drowning there. Or being turned to something not-himself, something dull and dead inside but beautiful, oh beautiful, and sharp.

Maybe it would not be such a bad change, to become the lovely dead.

And maybe his father now wears pearls for eyes (but no, he knows that isn’t true, he’d seen the body washed up with broken wood, slats of buildings that once sheltered families. No pearls, no pretty stones, only dead-rot, only saltwater bloat. His mother, now, her body is a mystery still. Ashes, or charred dinner for wolves?)

Part of him wants to laugh at her words, then. Instead he only drops his head further, tarnishes the silver flower with his breath. “Everything makes a fool of me,” he says to the dirt, to the roots, to whatever lies below. It is better than a desert, it is better than a cave, this prison he’s in. He could die here, he thinks, and be content.

He only lifts his head when she draws away the blade of her twisting dark horn. He only lifts his head when roots become bone and jut up from the ground, and memory fills his head with the sick low buzzing of a thousand hornets, mindless but wanting. He is afraid and he is a fool but he is too weary to care for either of those things; there is white shining around his eyes and his breath comes quicker even as he tries to drag it slow in the face of this magic. But he does not flinch beneath the ash that falls along the bars of his back. That, at least, feels right.

Her angry words, her angry mouth; he wants to back away every inch she closes between them, but he stays as though rooted by bone. Not alone, she says, but oh! he feels alone as she touches her horn against his cheek, and when his breath shudders out and his eyes settle closed he thinks of Sabine. Her clear eyes, her crystal horns, the steadiness they looked at each other with, orphans together, and there should have been hate between them (if she knew more of him, and he of her, she would hate him) but there wasn’t, only strange sorrow, only thirst.

Like a hare beneath the shadow of a hawk, like a boy with a blade to his throat, he doesn’t move - except for his throat and the wide curve of his nostrils, working to inhale the smells of ash and brine.

“Did you save that flower?” he asks, so softly it might only be another drift of ash upon the wind. “Did you save the bee that might have fed from its pollen? Can you feed a city on gemstones or drive out hate and fear with a dragon? Raum found me, fed me, gave me something to work for. He isn’t good, he isn’t right. But I’m not sure anything is.”

Now they are staring at one another, now he is breathing harder, now he, too, bears his teeth, and they are a lion and a cur and between them there is nothing but living roots that have become bone.

“Why ask me what you should do, queen? I am only a fool.” For a moment his bared teeth becomes a gallow-grin, like his throat’s already cut, like his eyes already see nothing - and then he shakes his head again, turns his face away. Out, beyond, to blue sky. And then, flatly: “You should kill me.”

And then there would be nothing left to be sorry for, and he would know they were the same.

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

Abel was not made to talk morality with unicorn queens.

He is not a clever man; he can answer her questions no better than Job could answer God’s. He can only stand and shake and wish he was in his humble home with his kind mother and his foolish dreaming father and that they could all die together and not alone.

There are none of these things he can say. Her words sound like weapons drawn and sharp; Abel knows the tones a voice takes before a fist follows.

He was not made to look a dragon in the eye and he cannot do it now; amid all the other changes the garden undertakes the one that makes him shiver and shake is the shadow that falls over it from the mighty spread of wings. When the dragon lands behind its queen, so big he can feel its breath and hear each inhale he trembles like a leaf dying, like a leaf dead, like a leaf falling from the tree. He remembers another dragon flying over, and watching the smoke rise up from the pass like a black offering to every god, and in his head it seems he can hear his mother screaming as she burns.

Abel can’t believe in just monsters.

There is no part of him that isn’t expecting to die then. Even when she says “but I am not Raum he waits stiff-necked for her to remake him into something, to turn him to bones or dust or food for the beast behind her. His breaths sear his lungs with each inhale as though they know they are the last and they, too, are punishing him for it.

It isn’t until she says run that he opens his eyes. Around them is a garden, as beautiful as the first that was ever made; there are fat bees humming and the smell of ripe fruit. There is wheat that dances golden in the breeze. And there is the unicorn who he can barely stand to turn his gaze to and the dragon that he can’t. Abel listens and his heart is beating, thrashing, a caught bird in his chest that wants him to obey. What else is he good for, but running? But surviving? But slipping away like a rat into the next black alley that will have him?

When he nods it takes all the bravery he has.

Abel does not want to take her gold. It might burn him, it might melt into his skin and scald him and whisper sinner as it breaks him down to bones and teeth. But he needs lodging, and food, and passage on a ship, and there is gold or there is thievery, and both are unbearable.

As soon as he hefts it (so heavy, this gold-from-stones) the dragon roars and the trees shake the same way Abel does and it is like an earthquake, that sound, like a tsunami, like something that could break him apart into a hundred pieces like scattered shells upon a beach.

Abel runs but it still feels like dying.