Think of your favorite place.

Somehow I skip over the rest of it, or at least my subconscious brain does. This is the line I settle on obsessing over, picking apart, wondering if there is some deeper meaning. The ink is thin and pitch-black. I wonder if the feather he wrote it with is his or someone else’s (and I find myself utterly heated by even the thought of the latter). Think of your favorite place, he says, and I do not think of my room with its window and its goldenrod light, or the courtyard and its stoop-backed fig tree. I do not think, even, of my mother’s closet and the robes that still smell like her. 

What I think of immediately—what I want to say, though I would never dare—is that my favorite place is under his wing. Against the sharp line of his shoulder. Or, if I am greedy, the soft curve of his throat where he always smells like pine; where sometimes, if I am not very careful, I catch myself on the verge of biting down.

(After all: if he is dead, he cannot leave me.)

---

I stand at the edge of the creek and wonder, with a knot in my stomach, what it is that we need to “talk about”. 

Maybe—maybe it’s about his new position. Of course I noticed that he signed it Delumine Emissary, and I have goaded him with the name Warden enough times to see that his position, as tiresome as I might find it, is important to him. But I know his king is gone now, like all the rest of them but Dusk; I wonder who he is serving. Perhaps that is the cause of our discussion. He’s taking over. Or he’s leaving—running away from the empty throne.

I don’t think he would, though. And the knot in my stomach forms again.

It is mid-morning, and the world by Amare is pleasantly warm, much more temperate than I’m used to. At my feet, a long silk blanket holds a wicker picnic basket, filled with figs and dates and all the other goods that I had the kitchen staff pack up before I left this morning, when the sun was just a little smile above the horizon. 

I’m not brave enough to turn when I hear his hoofsteps.

there is no safe place
for the hunted ones.
there is no safe place
when your body is 
the site of the storm.

is sister, the second oldest of their parents’ children and the only girl in the family (even out of all the cousins, and half-cousins, and relatives by marriage) told Andras one morning over breakfast that the whole world should lit up with sound. She could feel the strings of her guitar in the beat of her heart, the sound of her flute in the way the wind sighs through the trees. To her, every miniscule twitch of the universe was something beautiful and worthy of being cherished. The world is music. One just has to learn to listen.

To Andras, things have only ever been noise.

His heart is the uneven throbbing of an old, claw-foot bath tub shuddering to life after years of disuse. Each thought, one by one, lands behind his eyes with the crash of a cymbal. Even silence, when silence was his for the taking and his god had not yet turned him into a bomb ticking away in the background, was not really silence at all-- and now, worse still, it is the constant, low-key buzz of a livewire, chattering in the rain.

The world is music, or noise, but he doesn’t want music and noise. Andras just wants Pilate.

Tonight his heart is electric. The ground below passes by at an alarming speed, punctuated every few minutes by bright flashes of light, like a spark kicked up by his heels. It cracks light bright thunder, until he is hurtling through the sky almost too fast to see. Pilate is waiting. The world as he knows it sits dormant behind him. There is nothing for him there right now other than anger and a slowly blackening wick.

He sent the letter without thinking, really, mused over it for weeks without really opening his eyes to look at what it said, for better or worse. It had come out of him like a demon, claws and teeth and hunger and nothing else. Around him, it feels like Delumine has gone insane. The river is loud, so loud, in his ears until it isn’t. All around him the crackling, the jumping wires of his magic, the loud boom as he crests the horizon and some of it flicks off the ends of his wings when he lands.

More and more, as he was writing, as he was waiting, as the slow drawl of the kingdom and its duties and its loud, desperate need caught up to his (for once justified) anger, he sank into it. Like a bed of pillows. Softer than the ones he knows.

Andras sees Pilate, turned away, hip bones and the long, lean curve of his neck edged in sunlight where it is not just softly touched by it, like it’s spread over him, and Andras sinks into that, too.

He wants to touch him, in one of those horribly personal, soft ways that he’s always afraid to. Pilate always looks both too large-- big, sharp eyes, flared nostrils, long legs in spite of his height-- and too small all at once. For the second time, and the first time since the party, Andras wants to wrap himself around Pilate like one of his snakes, and guard him just as jealously. So he does, first just a brush of his wing as he comes up to the side, which unfolds over his back like a frightened thing, inching its way open bit by torturous bit. Pilate is wrenched just as tight as he is. Andras wants to laugh, but he can’t.

There is always that moment, beautiful and still and breathtaking, where is is worried he might die-- or else Pilate might kill him. He’d take either, as long as he gets to stand close. Casually, or as casually as he can, Andras leans his shoulder into the soft silk of Pilate’s robe, and ducks his head to look at the basket.

”What’s in that?” --and then, after an impossibly deep breath, ”My letter was the worst, I’ll admit it. I'm sorry.”

And everything is silent in him.

ANDRAS, Sovereign of DELUMINE