I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

Abel has never been ashamed before that he doesn’t know how to write. But shame in all its forms is nothing new to him; this is just one more stone on the grave he’s built himself, as he trades another piece of Isra’s gold to a man who copies down the words he dictates. How much more might he say if he were wielding the quill himself? How much more would be safe? 

He knows the desire is as foolish as any dreams in his head; his words will always be clumsy things, unequal to the meaning behind them. Mutely he pays for each word, and mutely he watches as the scribe rolls up the letter, fastens it with leather, and tells him with a wink he will send it right away.

Hope feels as high and tight as a noose when he turns away.




Sabine, 

I hope this finds you safe. 

I am leaving - but I will until the new moon, if you would say goodbye. I want to keep my promise.

I’m staying near the docks in Denocte. Ask for Elijah.

I hope to see you, but if I don’t, please take care of yourself. Know that meeting you was the best thing that’s happened to me, maybe the only good thing.

-your follower, your guide

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

It is so strange, to be home.

He had not thought about how close he would be to the little wood-and-daub structure he’d grown up in, when he fled with the queen’s stone-turned-gold down to the docks. He’d only thought of proximity to the ships, and anonymity among the sailors and merchants. Now, with the cries of the gulls and rough-throated shouts of stallions unloading barrels of goods, the summer sun playing over the water as gossamer morning clouds crept through the blue, Abel is sick with memory.

It’s a strange texture of emotions - guilt and fear and cautious, fragile hope. He tries not to wonder why the unicorn queen spared him. He tries not to wonder whether Raum knows of his imprisonment or his release, or whether someone (the golden man, the one who could disappear) might be hunting him even now. If death found him, he thinks he might welcome it.

But he knows these docks and boat-slips and cobbled alleys leading up to the city like a rabbit knows the warren it was born in. The other urchins he’d run with or fought with have grown up and moved on, and he recognizes no one, and no one recognizes him. Abel would feel like a ghost, if it weren’t for the fear, and the hope - how they eat at him the same way.

Tomorrow is the new moon. Tomorrow he will board a merchant ship bound for the old country, his place paid for with a sliver of gold the captain had considered a long time before taking (and in those moments Abel had been considering too, shameful things, things he must do if the answer was no).

He has tried to keep his hope of seeing her like a seed in an airless, lightless box, closed tight with no hope of growing. Better to die in the dark without having lived than wither and rot. It is better, he tells himself, if she does not come. How could it be a good thing, to put her in danger? And yet every morning he has woken from fitful sleep, and combed the bay, and waited.

This morning is no different, save for a new breeze off the water. Abel makes his way along a street above the docks, a roughspun cloak loose around his shoulders, the best disguise he can afford. The air smells of salt and the remnants of last night’s fires, and the hint of smoke makes him feel as loose and thin as water, remembering how it had clung to his skin for days after the warehouse.

It doesn’t matter how he finds her. She is not there and the business of the dock might as well be carried out by ants; and then she is there, and it is a summer morning and he is a free man with no past. Only a future as wide-open as the sky (he is getting better at lying).

Abel is careless in getting to her. He weaves through other horses, incautious, the glimmer of sunlight through heartbreak blue crystal his guiding star. For once he is lucky; the eyes that follow him have no recognition, and only see a boy trying to get to a girl, and that nothing more than one of the oldest stories there is. Some even smile.

He is not smiling, when he reaches her. He is a little breathless, and his eyes are wide and guileless, and the slats of his ribs are hidden beneath the cloak. His nerves are tangled like wires and his heart seems uncertain whether it wants to settle in his throat or his gut, but he does not look like a man already dead.

“You came,” he breathes, and sounds for once like nothing more than a boy in love.

I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

Abel isn’t sure what to make of her tears.

A month ago he would have told her not to waste the water. A week ago he might have pretended not to notice at all, the better to assuage his own guilt for whatever part he had in it. But today with the ocean air washing clean his smoke-and-sand scoured lungs he lets himself imagine he is a new man. The kind of man who buys passage on a ship to start a new life. The kind of man who sheds his past of ash and failure, pity and pain. Not a good man (never a good man) - but maybe a better one.

And so he reaches out, touches the velvet of his nose to her cheek where a tear sparkles like a fallen sliver of her horn. As much as he wants to linger there (or maybe be more bold, maybe shift his muzzle to the crook of her throat, shoulder to shoulder, comforting each other like children) he curls his head away, butterfly-shy.

Like Sabine, he does not want to say of course I did. He doesn’t want to say anything at all; the thought of it, of promises kept (and what does he know of that, anyway, with all the good ones he’s made broken like bones and the fulfilled ones black as soot) brings a lump to his throat like charcoal.

“My life is worth very little,” he says instead, quietly, still not daring a look at her, “but I would have rather died than broken that promise.” He does not add that he almost had (you should kill me, his words, each one blackly meant); even thinking of the dragon, of the unicorn-queen, of the prison-turned-to-garden makes a shiver wend down his spine that has nothing to do with the breeze whipping off the open water.

If she knew he was here, if she knew he lingered on her shores, would Isra kill him? She would have the right. And there had been moments, in the past few days, when the sun sank below the line of the water and the world closed dark and cold around him and he didn’t know if Sabine would answer that he had wondered - he had wondered -

But Abel does not want to die today. For once, for as many moments as grace would grant him, he wants to live.

And he wants her to live, too.

The boy turns back to the girl. This time he takes in her sunken, red-rimmed eyes, the dull slats of her ribs, the wispy tangle of her hair. To him she is beautiful. He wonders how long she has been dying. Not in the way that they all had been in the desert, starved and cowed, the orphaned children of Solterra beneath the baleful sun their father, but in a way more intimate than that, and more insidious. The kind of death that comes with indifference.

“Have you seen the docks?” he says, like this noisy place of industry is his palace, and she a visiting princess. He makes his voice eager, keeps his steps light as he guides her gently to the edges of the street, out of the way of passers-by. “There’s an empty slip where otters have been coming to play, and some fool is always feeding birds. And if you don’t mind there’s a stand on the way with the best apple fritters in Denocte - I’m ravenous.” It is a lie, but not one he regrets (though to lie to her at all burns his tongue like a cinder). The truth is that he is worried for the way she looks like a kite slipping its tether, a strip of satin worn threadbare. Something perfect, in need of protection.

(Oh, what a fool he is - he can’t so much as protect his own shadow).