And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
—
Still all the world is a held breath, and still Aster does not find it strange.
It’s all she knows, little daughter of a daughter of Time, and as long as her twin’s heartbeat is running fast and strong beside her what does she care for the sun, or the sea, or the birds in the sky? All the universe is woven with magic; it’s no secret to her, not when it whispered to her from the womb, when she was no more than half a dream.
But there are other secrets, buried in the soil and whispered by the trees, and Aster is hungrier for them than she is for manna, for milk. Today (though it has been today for hours and hours and hours, it is only ever today with the sun as frozen as a picture above them) she wanders through a forest gone silent as the world inside her head. Leonidas is not there (where is he? perhaps with father, perhaps with uncle; all she knows is safe but behind her is Florentine, golden, warm, laughing, good.
In a way the island is safe. There are no snakes, no wolves, no birds no bees - no wind, no storms. Just waiting. There is not even the sound of running water, although Aster is following a stream like a silver thread; its surface lies still as a mirror, and once she pauses to stare at herself in its surface. Pale face, fine bones, golden eyes. Her own face is strange to her, stranger than her brother’s. She paws the still water with a pale little hoof and the vision dissipates, and the filly is gone again before it falls back to stillness and reflects only the dead blue sky.
But she is not gone far. One more bend around the lifeless, silent stream, and the ground rises up in shoulders of rocks and a head of green canopy, and its face is another mirror, but carved rugged with lines -
a waterfall, frozen not in temperature but in time.
For a long moment Aster is frozen, too, staring up at the flat and shining face of it, and her curiosity is a flame that eats and eats. But it is also a butterfly, prone to wandering, and with a twist and a kick of her heels she’s whirling, galloping back to Florentine, racing her shadow in lieu of her brother and always winning, always losing.
When she reaches her mother she buries her face in her long golden hair, inhaling deeply the scent of flowers, of a forest at night when all things are close and safe and growing in secret. Aster closes her eyes and listens and listens to both of their heartbeats, and the sound of their feet, and there is nothing else, no other noise, and it is almost enough to imagine she is back in the womb and the universe is whispering secrets in her ear to the lulling tune of lungs and heart and rushing blood.
And then she withdraws, and touches her pale small lips to the dagger over her mother’s heart, and looks up into Florentine’s amethyst eyes with a gaze of searing gold, timeless as the frozen sun.
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Anthousai.
That was what Lysander called Florentine as he filled her mind with woodlands deep and turned her heart and soul into feral things.
Yet, as she watches his child of ivory and gold run through this slumbering island, Florentine wonders what mythical being he might name their daughter. Her soul aches with wanting to travel, to see his home as he so often asked of her.
Not now. Had been her answer, over and over until it was etched into the bonds of their love, the threads that bound them together. Not now but when? Never has Florentine feared the passage of Time. She is as fearless before it as Aster is before this world that slumbers and knows of nothing but stillness. The girl’s feet are a drum upon the earth, some ethereal chant of gods and mortal tribes. Laughter is in her throat. It presses at her lips, for how could Lysander think Florentine is anything mythical when here is a girl who hears more than silence, who sees more than nature dares reveal?
Aster returns, pressing beneath the curtain of Florentine’s hair. She feels the heat of warm lips and breath short with running. Her own lips reach with answer, as her flowers crown the child Anthousai and the waters, so still, whisper like glass of sea-born nymphs. Slowly Florentine’s touch moves along the girl’s spine, feeling how she has already grown… these children are more alive than the island knows. When will this eternal day end? When will it mark the coming on night and, if night comes, would the sun ever rise after?
Such concerns might plague others. Yet Florentine merely wonders how much her children will grow in a solitary day. With they live and die in just one day? Will they know only the one season and the one sun and a world that never breathes?
Yet Aster is life for them both and her breath is hot upon her dagger, hot upon Florentine’s chest. “What does it cut?” This phoenix girl asks with riches in her eyes that could bring kings to their knees. What magic did you steal from Solis? Florentine wonders, and the words are upon her tongue, they are pressed upon the child’s eyelids and antlers and all the places she is gilded by sunlight and magic.
“Worlds,” Her mother breathes an answer that emblazons itself across her daughter’s brow. “I use this to find Grandpa and Granny and home. Still Aster touches that blade, still it warms beneath her gaze. “Do you still dream of worlds Little Star?” Her mother asks, and wonders if her girl is as flyaway as she. She wonders if there is anything that might hold her twins in. She hopes not, she hopes they are insatiable and that Time will come kneeling for them.
And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
—
There beneath the bower of flowers and gold that is her mother’s hair, Aster is content. She leans against her mother’s shoulder until together they are as white and gold as a star, and she closes her eyes against the rise of her breathing, the beat of her heart - the oldest rhythms she knows.
She does not worry about the sun that is motionless or the birds that have vanished or the water that rests like glass when it should run and laugh like a child. It will be far stranger when everything starts up again, and Aster will ask why, why, why and trust no one to find the answers but herself.
But for now her only wondering is about the dagger that her golden eyes drink in, with its carving of leaves and vines that curl up the hilt, and the barest edge of it that glints silver in the steady sun.
Worlds, says her mother, but to Aster the answer comes as everything. Anything, anything at all, is open to a dagger that can cut open the world, and the girl wants to peel them all open like the ripe skin of a plum, and find how sweet the flesh tastes. What else, what if, what more - these are the questions her own heart beats to as she watches the knife swing and settle against Florentine’s breast.
Her fuzzy ears flick at the question and that word - dreams. When she sleeps it is like before she was born, only the bright sunlight looks red through the skin of her eyelids and the dappled shadows of leaves slide over her skin. There is the lull of her heart and her breathing, and her brother’s heart and his breathing, when she lays her head across his back. And when she wakes the world is the same as she had left it, as though caught in amber. But in between -
She doesn’t have the language for what she dreams of, the sensation of being a thing slumbering beneath the soil, in darkness so complete it ceases to be frightening, reaching out blind roots as though looking for something to grab ahold of. She doesn’t have words for the patterns of light she sees in her slumber, greens and blues and yellows and reds, bursting through the darkness of space, bright as a universe then gone altogether, the sense of nothingness that comes after not feeling hollow at all but full of potential.
“Yes,” she says simply. And then she looks up at her mother, cocking her head like a wolf-pup, sunlight glinting off the faint dapples like fallen sunlight along her back. “How do you find home?”
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Florentine thinks, as she holds her daughter close, that she has never loved anything like she loves her children. Already she knows every hair upon their slim bodies, already she knows the curl of their brows in joy and in anguish. Close to her breast she holds her daughter and, as Aster gazes upon the ornate instrument, as her fascination blooms bringing the silver alight in ways she has never seen before, Florentine knows she would, without thought, pay the price of the blade and her magic for the lives of her twins.
Aster is as fragile as porcelain beneath Florentine’s touch. She is white as china, white as bone. Idly the Dusk girl wonders when, exactly, Midas touched the Moon and created a creature such as Aster. What comets breathed their gold breath across stars to make this little star girl shine? What wonderful magic was it that forged two twins in the dark of her womb? Still they curl together in slumber with their long limbs entwined as they had within her.
Slowly, Florentine’s lips glide to and fro from the base of Aster’s neck, across her withers and along her spine. Over and over her touch glides, mindless, soothing. It was what she did when the twins twitched in sleep, their feather lashes fluttering, their thimble hooves twitching. Always she wondered what worlds they saw in the pool of their dreams and what they galloped across - clouds? seas? Universes?
Home.
And Flora’ lips stop their caressing. That word slipped from the child’s tongue innocent and bright. A mother looks down as her daughter looks up and there gazes meet, golden and lavender. Once, oh once, the word Rift would have been upon her tongue, for that is home and how she found it was in the dagger about her throat. But that stopped being so the day she first told Lysander, ‘No’. She would not return to Rift with him.
But he never left her and always they called his home, Greece. Would he call it home now?
Already she realises, as she lets her gaze roam over her daughter’s delicate features (ears that bear the same shape as her father’s, lips that curve in his same once-god smile, eyes as wide as hers, and cheeks high and angular). An elegant thing this girl of hers is. A creature carved of smiles with eyes as warm as her uncle’s. It was quite simple. Florentine was wrong.
“Home,” she begins, “Is wherever you feel most belonging, where your soul and your heart fit best. Where everything knows the shape of you and you it.” And already Florentine knows her world would be empty without her family as its walls, its doors, its windows, its water, its food and light and life. “Wherever family is, is home. Grandpa and Grandma in the Rift are home, Uncle Asterion in Dusk is home. Wherever your brother is, is home.”
She smiles and lays small butterfly kisses along her daughter’s brow, and eyes and cheeks, ticklish as wings. “If you take love with you, wherever you go, then any world can be home.”
And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
—
She can’t keep her eyes open beneath that gentle caress, feather-light and soothing across her shoulders and her neck. Her snowy lashes drift half-closed and she leans her head against her mother’s shoulder, lazy in the thick sunshine of the day, her smile a half-moon curve on her pale lips.
At the explanation she thinks of Leonidas even before Florentine mentions him; there is nothing that fits better, nothing that her soul knows more than the boy her heart first beat beside, their limbs atangle as they slept in the warm dark and waited to be born.
“Then it will never be hard to find,” she decides, but her words are already long and soft with sleep. She giggles at the kisses her mother lays across her face, shaking her head as she would beneath a cloud of butterflies, and butts her forehead gently against the golden mare’s leg.
It is that other word - love - that sounds like a mystery to her. There is a sense of it being the same golden warmth of hot summer sunshine, lulling her to sleep; but there is something else about this idea, a thing that can’t be seen but can still be carried like a garment (or a knife) wherever she goes. How did that work, what kind of magic was it, could love be grown and kept? Did everything feel, did everything love - the trees and the grass that whisper of growing? Or perhaps only moveable things. Could you take someone else’s love, and have more for yourself?
All these thoughts drift through her mind like dust-motes, half-formed, colorless as the scent of summer on the breeze. She voices none of them, only lets them pass, lets them land and sink into the fertile soil of her mind.
“Leo and I will make a home of all of them.” This is less soft and blurry with sleep, and the set of her mouth is all of a child’s seriousness; but when she looks up again at her mother her golden eyes are as innocent as dawn.
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Love. Her little daughter wonders about that word. It toys over and over in her mind and it is not far from Florentine’s mind also.
If Aster had thought to ask just what love is, Florentine might have told her. yet what need was there when the girl muses softly. She falls silent, her giggles fading like butterfly wings in the air. All around them is silent and sweet.
There is nothing but magic, sweet and strong. It is like honey upon Florentine’s tongue. So close Florentine is to telling her daughter that the world should not be like this – so still so frozen. But the words do not come and her lips continue to busy themselves with gliding like silk over the soft of her child’s skin.
This is not how the world should be. She imagines whispering into Aster’s ear. The world moves, Aster. It is not just us who move. But, “Time is a powerful magic.” She breathes instead, like it is a secret. And maybe it is, for a child who knows nothing about magic or time or existence’s mysterious ways. “One day you will know what that means.” The girl sighs and she looks into the brush and into the bushes for lavender eyes that are so full of knowing. Future eyes. Florentine has spent each day looking for those eyes since the foals came. That is what she does, move to the future, warn her past self of things that are to come or things that should not come to pass… But there has been nothing, nothing at all. There is not future Florentine to guide her present self.
And maybe that merely means that all is well within the future? Maybe she has nothing to concern herself with? Already Aster is talking again, distracting her mother with words of time travel and belonging. The lack of amethyst eyes already behind her, Florentine smiles wide and brilliant. Such children she has made! So like her, so like Lysander. “I hope so, Aster.” Florentine murmurs. “There is no world that can contain you.” Then into Aster’s ear she whispers soft and wild as magic, “Our blood is made to travel Time and bring worlds kneeling beneath our fingertips.”
As Aster’s golden gaze lifts to Florentine’s, she holds it, tight as an embrace. Already her daughter knows of love, even if she does not feel it. “Wherever your brother is, is home, Aster.” And that is a command for her daughter to abide by.
And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
—
Time is a powerful magic.
There are the words that might form the net of her life, sure as the last limits of the galaxy, sure as spider-silk weaving a web caught between each tree in the forest. Even slow with sleep (or perhaps because she is already half-dreaming) a little thrill goes through her, a crystal-moon shiver. She does not notice the way her mother is searching the ferns and the shadowed splinter-light through the forest for a pair of eyes that look like her own. She does not say but I want to know now. Already the girl is patient, as patient as a tree, slow roots reaching deep.
But oh! She does want to know, and more than that to have - to open worlds before her like ripe fruit, peaches bursting sweet beneath their soft skin. With her brother, she thinks, she will learn these mysteries. Together they will find a key of their own - a weapon of their own - a way to cut the worlds that sweeten for them on the vine of time.
She smiles to hear her name on her mother’s lips; she meets those lavender eyes with her own, a color richer than any man-touched treasure. No Midas could make her, little fawn of the wood, child of time. Her smile only grows (like a vine) when Florentine whispers in her ear, and the truth of it makes her blood sing, even as a little sigh slips out between her petal lips.
Our blood is made to travel Time and bring worlds kneeling beneath our fingertips.
For Aster it is as good as a prophecy. She nods, solemn as a saint or a judge.
And then, because she is only a little girl, after all, and not a dryad or a god, she opens her toothless mouth in a yawn. Even a creature of time cannot forego the laws of age, and she stretches up to her mother’s ear to whisper “I love you, mama.” This done, she beds down in the golden sunshine, curling her legs beneath her dappled back as tidy as any fawn. And in her dreams there is no time at all, but only home.
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Florentine does not know how tightly her daughter will cling to those words she whispers prophetically into her child’s ear. It may not have been a prophecy at all but Florentine means every word and knows with the curl of her daughter’s lips that they have sunk somewhere deep. They are the treasure guarded in the deep and Aster is the lady of the lake set to guard and uphold it.
Yet she is only a baby and she falls into slumber with the readiness of a newborn. She is sleep soft beneath her mother’s lips and never does Florentine lift her touch from the satin of her girl’s skin. Over and over and over her touch glides, slow like a lullaby, warm with love. Each touch is emblazoned upon her mind. Locust once told her she would fear for her child’s life more than her own. Florentine could not deny the truth of those words then, but now, oh now it holds a gravity and strength that Florentine can barely grasp. Her childrens’ lives are everything. She would sooner end her own than risk that they lose theirs.
And so she remembers, with every touch and kiss and scent and taste. She remembers the sound of her daughter sleeping, the laughter between a father and his children. She remembers what it felt like to have her heart soar with this bright spark love – consuming and permeating everything.
I love you, mama.
And Florentine falls still and smiles a smile she never had before. Their love is warmth but even beneath that midday sun, Florentine is not hot with it but cool and perfect. For this love is perfect.
