mother, tell your children / not to do what I have done / don't spend your life in sin and misery / in the house of the rising sun

❦

think I used to like the desert.

Think, because I am always unsure, now, of what—precisely—I had liked in my youth. Since I could walk I had nursed to maturity an unfortunate habit of dropping my favour like a hot coal. I could like something one day and disapprove of it the next, my opinions forming and breaking apart again like waves against a seashore.

My mother had thought me serene. My tutors had thought me meek. Yet close on the heels of those traits invariably came the fickleness of a prey animal. Could a lamb truly love a lion? Did she not only claim to love him, so he would spare her? When he died, she would step tragically over his body and proclaim her love to his weeping brother before his body was even cold. 

You cannot feel love when you are constantly afraid of being eaten.

Ishak, Ruth's red-haired assassin, reminds me of the desert.

Though my family is desert-bred, heirs to sand and rolling dune, neither of us looks like we belong to where we claim to rule. Pilate looks like a museum piece. I look like a marble cast given life, a statue in Medusa's garden. Miriam's hair is as red as war, and as soft as roses in summer. Corradh is a jungle animal, Delilah is devilish in a city-slick way, and Ruth—

Ruth is the bedrock before it ever erodes down to desert.

I did not mean to run into my sister's assassin (turned guard). I did not mean to run into anyone, when I had stepped into this dim, empty hallway to collapse raggedly against a tapestried wall and cough until my lungs ached with soreness. There is something warm dripping down my lips and it is not wine nor is it the memory of Vercingtorix's skin. 

It is blood, and when I see this, and when I turn towards a lone chandelier and see Ishak seeing this, I stiffen. I had forgotten to take my cloak when I had left the armoury so there is nothing for me to draw against, nothing for me to feign interest in. There is only Ishak and me and the gaping absence of Ruth.

My cheeks are flushed. My eyes are swirling pools and I catch glimpses of red hair, red paint, red. I wish to turn away, to leave, to find another empty hall to collapse against and bleed into—I do not wish to have an audience while I do it. Not, especially not, when it has been less of an hour since Vercingtorix melted back into the throng of guests and already I am frantic to find him again, to find him and to demand from him when next he is going to visit.

So I do not turn. So I resolve, darkly, to use Ruth's Ishak to keep myself from descending into a vortex of madness. (Is that not what she uses him for? I do not know. I do not know either him or her enough, in this moment, under this sallow lighting, to come to any more enlightening conclusions.) 

I force my mouth into a hollow smile, and prop myself stiffly against the tapestried wall. Blood coats my wing. I see it and tuck it smoothly behind me, my lips clean, my chin clean, my shadow under the chandelier a stronger impression of me than the one printed in flesh. 

"Ishak," I say, wincing when it is punctuated with a cough. My eyes are dark and cold. Goading for him to say something about this. 

"I don't think I have ever had the pleasure."