It'd be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose / same clothes homegrown a stone's throw from a creek we used to roam
❦
I
n the hours just before dawn, the world shudders to a halt as it is polished anew. The flowers receive fresh coats of paint; the leaves, a daub of wax and ochre. Songbirds sprout new tail feathers, soft and drooping, and twig-legged deer powder the white back into their tails.
Every morning I am up before the dawn, and I have yet to see these small miracles.
The house is so quiet and still that as I feel my way unsteadily over the raised stone path leading out to the gardens I grow more and more uncertain if I am dreaming or awake. I have not slept—it never seems like I do—and when a day is unending it begins to grow dreamlike appendages by the hour. I have not taken a lantern, and the darkness looms so thickly over me I feel it slipping down my throat like wisps of black wool.
Eventually I find the garden path, and by then I am no longer the only one awake. Blue dawn stretches endless beyond me, the sun a red disc on the horizon; the dark heads of gardeners rise out of the flowerbeds like waking nymphs. Their dreary eyes see me only when I am almost upon them, and they startle into low, hasty bows.
I drift aimlessly this way—gardener’s bows rippling before me like a wave, like I am some sort of god they must appease, or a wandering spirit they must acknowledge—past dewy gardens and hidden greenhouses, palm trees heavy with fruit, lindens drooping with unnatural bloom. I wear nothing but my own skin and it punishes me by contracting my muscles in tiny, violent spasms whenever a breeze so much as whispers my way.
A bee drones sleepily by my ear and I watch as it hovers over a rosebud, pollen sacks heavy and fragrant. I envy its freedom, its movement, even it's looming death. It is so vibrantly alive I feel less than a corpse besides it.
My lyre is strapped to my back, and as I walk I pluck out odd notes, testing their resonance and harmony.
Our grounds are labyrinthine and prone to trickery. Before, I had known them better than anyone, as Mernatius had lived at the end and I at the beginning. But the red-brick cottage stands empty, shuttered windows like staring eyes, and my own memory is riddled with holes. I can recall specific things at odd hours or nothing at all. By the time the sleek white domes of the house rise like spires above me, it is noon. The hours have passed like seconds.
I have not eaten since yesterday afternoon, and as I creep sluggishly over the flagstones my hunger makes itself known first with a dull ache, and then—when that is not enough—barrels like a bull into my stomach. I keel over at the foot of a marble lion, gasping.
“Prince Adonai!” Vaguely I hear the sloshing of water as a gardener sets down his bucket and rushes towards me. I silence him with a desperate shake of my head, my heart lurching and butterfly quick. The act is pitiful but I lack the time to care. Somehow I stop him from running to fetch the doctors; he returns instead with a plate of grapes and I eat them greedily, handfuls at a time, like a child. He nods knowingly at my watchful silence when he takes back the plate, piled with bare stems like bramble. He will tell none of what he has witnessed.
Yet before the gardener, who is little more than a boy, turns to leave (and then I see it: the mouth twisted down in pity—and anger slices white-hot through the pain: you dare to pity me, a prince?) he says: “Are you expecting a visitor, Prince Adonai? Someone waits at the gates.”
I am not. But I know that recently, Pilate has. It is only noon. My brother is still in his room, busy with business that should have been mine, and my sisters have gone out for a picnic, or a hunt, or whatever they do now for leisure. I am the only one here.
Suddenly the thought of taking something from Pilate—the thought of that power—thrills me to my bones. A lover or a friend with a pretty face—does it matter? The only thing that matters is that he is Pilate's, and I savor the revelation like a starving man.
Recovery in the face of such an opportunity is appallingly easy. I thank the boy and when he is gone, turn down the path that leads through a thatch of olive trees, fruitless yet full-leaved, planted there for the sole purpose of obscuring the blemish on our marble splendor: the looming, ironclad gates.
I am not at all surprised when I find a figure of purest black, thin-limbed and sleek-winged, pacing a groove into the ground worn smooth by centuries of Ieshan heirs and servants. My steps hardly falter as I navigate carefully down the earth-cut stairs that end in wrought-iron bars, my eyes a frosty, forget-me-not-blue.
The air around Pilate's dark visitor is faintly electrified. I lift my brows when I realize I am not imagining it. It is oddly reassuring: my dreams cannot conjure such strange details. His eyes are a stormier version of mine, more gray than blue, edged with steel. I peer into them, unblinking, unflinching, and slowly—but then quicker and quicker—my mind shuffles into an echo of my old self. I do not smile, but I have never needed to.
The guard, sweat dripping in lines down his chest, stares at me, perplexed at my presence, and I ignore him. The sun beats hot and drumbeat-thick at my back. My lyre casts a halo of light at my hooves as I think over what I will say; I know I have been silent for a beat too long but as the First Prince I was accustomed to keeping others waiting, and as the Second I am entitled to more. Even Pilate humors me. What can anyone say to me now?
Finally, I settle for an innocuous lie.
“If you are looking for my brother,” I say, quiet and so serious it can only be made in jest, “then I will save you the trouble. He is not here.
scream when captured, arch your back
let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
The feeling–the one that came to him in Solterra, the nameless one somewhere between dread and desire and desperate, desperate joy–had not left.
At first it was painful, like being pinched, or something intercostal cramping in time with the beat of his heart. Andras rises with the morning sun and Oriens follows him into town with the voices of birds or the fog burning away from his path or the crack of his magic as it arcs off his spine, or his heels.
Day in, and day out, Andras rises, and walks, and sits, and walks again back to the library until it has become monotonous enough that he can find the raised edge of each path with his eyes closed, until he can make out the shape of each knotted trunk through the red of his eyelids. Day in, and day out, Andras pours himself through the door in a rush of black feathers and lightning and tucks himself away with a book about plants, or beetles, or the chronological history of jewelry made by Denocte artisans–
–and still the feeling does not leave. Rather it haunts him like some sun-soaked desert ghost with eyes like orange, molten steel and a wreath made of snakes. Andras sets his jaw and closes his eyes and throws the book across the room.
Eventually, the pain gives way. The sameness of each day becomes less of a comfort and more of a strain. One morning he wakes with the sun and it falls on his face and Andras thinks of skin like the earth, half-obscured by an impossibly green philodendron and he is not run through with ice but instead the pinch is just pressure, warm and smooth.
There it is again. That silence, as his magic drains into his chest–but just for a second, before it roars back to life.
–
The guard at the gate looks at Andras with thinly veiled contempt, as if just by being employed by the rich and the powerful makes him more than the Warden. Andras meets his gaze with something level and bitter– if it is veiled at all it is only with gossamer.
(This is not the first time he’s come back to Solterra, or at least looped through the sky over its shoulders, always holding his breath, always knowing it’s as easy as tipping his wings and he’d be there, in the heart of the city, where he can see the estate as he steps through the Sun Court’s doors.
But flying is easy, and falling–plummeting, even, into whatever cold water awaits him–is not.)
Andras picks through his thoughts while he waits, a knot of contrition and grief and the words to express them, though they’re never the right words, or in the right order. All the dread-need-joy drips into the rage-hurt-impatience until it is a messy blend of both. Andras stops to think that if hell is real it is literally every time he’s stood at this wrought-iron gate with his heart in his hands.
He thinks someday the warmth in him might be comfortable, thinks it might not feel so much like he’s choking to death, but that won’t be today.
A shape comes toward him, sliding down the front steps like a ghost, and Andras thinks he might look familiar but can’t quite place how. For a moment–a long one–they stare at each other, black on almost-white, and then the man speaks: If you’re looking for my brother–
He sees it now. The straight, long nose. The unholy patience. It’s endearing until it isn’t.
Andras’ mouth twitches. He clenches his jaw. What should have been relief–because it isn’t Pilate, and he is spared a few seconds of complete panic, and there is still so, so much time to run like the coward he’s finding he is–is just anger. The sort of anger that licks at his heels and plays light off the rim of his glasses.
The sort that’s more comfortable than whatever else is in him.
“What do you want?” he barks, eloquent as ever.
andras demyan
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
04-22-2020, 12:31 AM - This post was last modified: 04-25-2020, 11:53 PM by Andras
brother, my cup is empty and I haven't got a penny for to buy no more whiskey
❦
I
n retrospect, the warning had been there in the electricity.
"What do you want?" Pilate's visitor spits, and there is enough of a pause between his question and my answer that I see the guard, sweat running down his back in rivulets, angle his helmeted gaze carefully towards me.
I know then that this will be their entertainment tonight. Though our servants feast upon larger helpings of hearsay than their counterparts do in the other Great Houses, this particular script has all the makings of a delicacy rarely seen and rarer still indulged. Pilate will hear of it tonight, embellished to extravagance. I picture his anger and hold it to my chest like a silk-swaddled gift.
My gaze is glancing when I look at Andras, (Andras the Warden of Delumine, Andras the scholar, Andras the soldier—my brother suspects, I think, but he does not know just how much I still know) at the little whorl of white on his lip, sharp as a gash against the black. If by his insolence he had meant to anger me, then he has done everything that is the opposite.
"He really hasn't told you anything about us," I say lightly, as if he had said 'Greetings, Prince, and how do you do' instead of spitting like Pilate's snakes.
Pilate has told you everything and nothing at once, and you are here either because you have had enough of him or because my brother has finally gotten you to love him enough to find out.
My lyre, baked by the sun, burns its shadow into my back. He is too easy to read and then some. It is refreshing and discomfiting—it reminds me of Mernatius—it is refreshing because it is discomfiting.
I have been imprisoned in my room for too long, to think so much about so little. If nothing else, it is this realisation that finally elicits from me a glancing blow of anger. A wobbly note startles forth from my lyre as I set my shoulders back and jerk a nod towards the gates. The morning sun has crested the olive trees, half of the way to noon, and I imagine the stacks of papers stretched like an ocean in front of Pilate waning to salt by the second.
"Let him in."
The sands shift with a warning hiss as the massive iron gates shudder upwards. I step back, slitting my eyes against the sun and debris; wordlessly, the guard moves in front of me.
"Stand down," I say, quietly, though he hears me still over the grinding of the gates. Startled, he turns to look at me. In my cold gaze he finds his answer: today, everything is mine. Do not try to take anything from me."He will be my guest."
And I have no intention of bringing him to my brother.
i am angry. i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
A
ndras is smiling but it is more like a snarl than anything else, little more than a feral curling of the lips, a show of teeth. It is not, by any standard, the kind of smile someone should show to a prince, or a noble, or, really, anyone else. When Andras smiles at Adonai it is mirthless, and cold, and hollow.
Adonai shrugs, Adonai glances and then looks away-- a gesture the warden is coming to be familiar with, the mark of an Ieshan feigning disinterest.
With equal care, something that is growing in familiarity also, Andras wrenches his jaw shut and speaks through clenched teeth: "What does that mean?" The guard's armor creaks as he inclines his head, just a little. He does not know what they expect-- that Andras will roar? That he will bow? He is sure it is something, anything other than this fixed defiance, the hard line of his jaw, the cruel glint of his lenses.
Pilate never had to tell. He still does not have to. A small part of Andras thinks that anything he could find out--anything at all--would not surprise him. A smaller part knows that it would not make a difference. Still Andras smiles unkindly, as beads of sweat form on his brow, as his jaw starts to ache from the clenching.
The prince shifts with a note of finality, adjusting the lyre on his back with a sickly little twang just before Andras does the same with his wings, setting ruffled feathers back in their places. He is looking over Adonai's shoulder at servants carrying oranges and newly cleaned linen and looking up at them from under dark eyelashes or the brims of their veils. Andras thinks that if there is anything he hates, anything he truly loathes more than anything else, it is the ravenous interest with which this family's staff seem to watch him.
It gives one the feeling that he does not know all he should. He really hasn't told you anything about us, his host says in the back of Andras' mind, followed by his own voice that insists it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, though far quieter each time.
His eyes shift back to the bright, bright blue ones before him. Andras tries to shield what tepid curiosity he feels. Andras is not often successful.
"Your family is very presumptuous." the Warden states stubbornly, looking from the house in the back, to Adonai, to the guard, to the street outside all of it. Even now he is searching for any reason to leave. He is still searching when his body draws him forward and the gate screeches shut at his heels. Andras looks down the long lawn, at the white marble of the front steps, at the columns and the palms and the soft red flowers hung from them, and he feels an ache he hadn't expected.
Longing, he will know later. Much later.
He turns to his host, eyes as dark as his skin before it starts crackling again--and Andras did not get a chance to wonder when it had stopped. "Who are you, then?"
