The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
Sarkan quite liked Novus so far.
The towns were charming, the vistas impressive, the weather relatively mild. And the citizens he’d met were as welcoming as they were diverse -
Which made the matter with the unicorn all the more unfortunate.
What bothered him the most was his lack of guilt. He’d never killed another equine before - someone who spoke, walked, laughed like he did. Someone he could have met in a tavern, shared a beer and a couple stories with. In all fairness, it had been self defense. The unicorn had interrupted him as he worked; Sarkan had looked up and there he’d been standing, and the Percheron had watched his expression go from panic to fury to resolve. As for himself, he’d only tightened his cloak around his shoulders and waited, his own face impassive, until he knew which reaction was warranted. After a moment the unicorn had smiled, and stepped forward, and bid Sarkan nearer, and he could feel the little stirring of compulsion like a stray wind beneath the cathedral boughs of the forest. Maybe he shouldn’t have played along, but he did, obeying, reciting his name when asked, coming closer, closer, until the unicorn lowered his horn like a spear and sprang -
Killing him hadn’t felt different than any other quarry. They all died the same. Sarkan made the scene look like a mauling (which it could have been, in a way), had left the horn, had made it more messy than his usual. Like a beast could have done it, or any murderous bastard.
After that it seemed best to leave the Dawn court for a while.
Now he strode through a field blanketed by a thin veneer of snow, the afternoon sun tracking winter-low beside him. He’d crossed a stream a little while back, and seemed to have left the forests behind when he did; the landscape had grown rolling, and rugged, and he could taste the sea on the cold air. Sarkan hadn’t had a real destination in mind, until a fellow traveler a few miles back had told him of a winery across the border in Terrastella. “The best in the country,” he’d proclaimed, “and don’t let those Night Court merchants tell you any different.” Sarkan, long since immune to most salesmen’s tactics, had laughed and said he wouldn’t.
By the time he found it the sky was a mixed palette of washes of pink and gold. He only recognized it by the neat and narrow rows of grapes, though they were only bare and twisting silhouettes. Sarkan was surprised and pleased to see the sea, winking blue between the rows of vines, and paused to watch it as he shifted his pack, in which his cloak lay folded and clean.
Then he ambled down the lane, the wind off the water whipping his mane into frothy peaks white like waves, whistling as he went.
the birdsong might be pretty, but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
Not matter the shape of her form, or the skin held tight as a cage around her, there are things that heart has never forgotten. It still dreams, she still dreams, of swimming for the cove like a tidal-wave. It still knows the way to tremble like a field-mouse in the talons of an owl. It still knows how to run, and rush, beat a furious tune that has everything to do with war and with survival.
It still knows fear. Like a mother, a father, an entire family, it knows fear. And because she knows it, so does the slumbering vineyard.
A vine trembles above her head. It whispers in the way of root, and earth, and Red lays her cheek against the vine to settle it. She knows, deep in her belly she knows, that the worry of the vine has nothing to do with the charm she's burying at the base of it. The last time the vineyard rattled like this the rains had started. It had rained, and rained, and rained, and Horace was lost. This time she's not sure what the roots are trying to tell her, she's forgotten how he told her the way to form words out of the earth. Her heart aches to have forgotten than and not the fear.
She's still standing there, cheek pressed to a sleeping grape vine, when the stallion approaches. Her heart, her heart that still knows how to dream, flutters beneath her breast like a caught sparrow. A part of her, the one that's still seal no matter her form, thinks he's the color of a shark. He looks like the shallow sea, like she needs to find her cove and find it quickly.
Fear pours into her, like water filling up a vase.
But the part of her that is all mare, all creature pulled from skin and sea, turns away from the trembling vine. She couldn't understand the words of it anyway. “Hello.” Red shakes her head and dead leaves caught there fall to the ground. Each sounds like a whisper against the snow and for a moment she wonders if the dead leaves are trying to tell her the same words as the vine. Those leaves crunch under her hooves as she moves towards him. Suddenly there are no whispers but the inhale and exhale of their lungs.
Red lifts her eyes up, up, up to see his own. The color of them makes her heart break. And then--
Then she sees the scars mottling his skin like a map. Her next inhales is sharper, colder, a bleat underneath the echo of his whistling. Red tries to tell herself to be brave, be brave, be brave. Be. Brave. She does not lower her eyes from his gaze when she says, “are you lost?”. And with something like fury and pleading she prays that he is.
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
He did not see her at first, there among the slumbering vines, all brown wood and dark dirt and patches of snow in between. But as soon as she moved Sarkan wondered how he could have missed her.
Maybe she had sprung from the vine, he thought, when she shook her head and shed grape-leaves. He had never heard of a wine nymph, but he liked the idea of it. Sarkan wore an easy smile as he turned toward her, and tucked his nose toward his chest in acknowledgement. “Hello,” he returned, and when he met the green of her eyes it did nothing to dissuade the image.
He was a hunter and so he did not miss the change in her breathing, the way it did for prey when it caught his scent. It was easy to dismiss; she would be far from the first intimidated by him. Sarkan did nothing to try and make himself seem smaller, but neither did he draw nearer - his intent was not to frighten young unaccompanied mares.
“That depends,” he said with a laugh. “Is this the home of Galloway wines, best on the continent?” Her gaze had yet to waver when he looked away, scanning the darkening fields with his own. Sunset did not linger long in winter; soon the wind would have teeth. The thought of returning to the road for unknown hours was not terribly appealing.
“I hope I’m in the right place,” he said, and turned back to her. “I’m not sure I could find the path again in the dark, and I’d rather avoid a tumble into the sea.”
the birdsong might be pretty, but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
His voice brings her back like a noose. It drags her from the tides of her own soul. The sound of him is all dark wood and dying trees. She remembers that she is a girl now. And he, she pauses to run her eyes across the wide, fearless space between his eyes, is no shark in the black water. Below her the earth is a comfort. Between them, the path to her home, and the old roots running in highways below them, she tries to tell herself that she is safe.
She's still thinking those thoughts, closer now caught in the loop of his voice, and they do not settle completely when she steps closer. The sound of her hooves is an answer to a dare she did not realize she read in his body. Or maybe it's all challenge when a coyote cries in the distance and she closes her eyes like the sound is something holy. “You are not lost.” She says and the words are part regret and part thrill running below her young skin.
Red wonders at the thrill she feels. She wonders how it might feel to push him off the cliff instead of turning towards her house looking at the sea, and the lighthouse, and the slumbering vineyard. But she only wonders in a way that leaves nothing but spring green sorrow in her gaze.
Horace was always better at this part. She is too hungry to be alone, and found, and everything all at once, to remember all her social graces. They call her the witch of the vineyard for a reason. No horse is made to look into the eyes of a seal and name all the things living there like flotsam.
“Follow me.” It hurts every inch of her soul to turn her back to him. It emboldens every other inch of her to demand instead of ask like she's the only god this piece of lands knows. The ground softens with the promise of spring where she walks. Any leaves clinging to the vines turn belly-up towards her like she is the rain and the sun.
Red notices none of it.
All she can see is the house with a golden-glow leaking into the almost twilight. And all she can hear is the air the stallion's lungs and the way his hooves cannot fathom how to move over the ground in the same pattern of hers.
It's another things horses are not made to understand.
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
Something wild lived in her gaze. It was not like the others he had met, the sailors and the citizens of Delumine, with their sturdy houses and scholar’s way of looking at the world. When she stepped forward, just a little nearer, and the last bit of sunset caught the green of her irises, Sarkan thought he could see leaves shifting there. And, beyond them, a leaping doe, a laughing fox.
He almost asked her about it. Almost stepped forward to see what else lived there, where nothing should be but herself looking back at him, when a coyote wailed and she closed her eyes and that little-world was gone.
The sound died away, a shiver on the wind unfollowed by another - just a lone hunter. But Sarkan felt like he was still waiting for some answer beyond the one she gave.
“Good.” He said the word like a smooth round stone, unworried with how it disturbed the evening. At her command to follow, he said nothing, only waited to obey. When she turned toward the house Sarkan’s eyes lingered on her for a moment longer, all those red spots like fallen autumn leaves.
He wondered if she was alone. And then, before he could direct his thoughts elsewhere, he wondered if it would be the same, killing her, as it had been with the unicorn. Would it be as easy to walk away? It was only a thought, rootless, the idle kind of thinking that happened when you were using a knife, or walking along a ledge - what if, what if?
Then he did feel guilty, enough to shift his gaze away, and maybe that was answer enough.
Far away at the base of the cliffs the waves went shush, shush against the shore and Sarkan, road-weary, watched the landscape idly as they walked down to lamplit rooms. And then he watched less idly, when he noticed the leaves uncurling like hands, opening palm-up as they passed by.
Curious.
The grey lengthened his stride until he walked beside her, one ear turned toward her and one to the sea. “It must be lonely out here,” he said. “And I’ve heard stories of kelpies in these waters, along these coasts. Have you ever seen one?”
the birdsong might be pretty, but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
There is not enough distance to suit her between the sleeping vines and the vineyard castle. Their hooves eat up the distance too quickly, or maybe it's only the way she's trying to keep her heartbeat from stuttering just to echo the drum of his hooves. But there is hardly any distance left when he finally breaks the silence she was more than happy to fill with nothing more than the inhale, exhale of briny air into her lungs. “It is never lonely enough” Her words fluctuate in that place between rusted barb and bloody heartbreak. For a moment she debates on expanding, or filling that silence with words enough to drown him, but when the door opens and a bird with a bandaged wing shrills a welcome she settles into the silence.
Red wears it uneasily as their hooves echo on the old oak floor. And for a moment when she turns to him, the echo of her hooves, seems louder than two stones caught in the same tide. “And if there are Kelpies in the sea, they have not come to my beach when it's time to feed.” The green of her eyes blazes, briefly, as if to suggest that's it is something more the sea monsters look for. Something with more flesh on its bone, something like the stallion filling up her doorway.
Even the sparrow perched on the table seems to cock his head and listen to the words Red does not say. And maybe it's the way rabbits and birds talk to each other in the silence as the wolf roams the forest floor.
She lets the silence linger as the moves towards the bottle and the glasses (always two, always empty) waiting on the table. When she lifts the bottle the firelight at her back halos both her and the wine. This wine is the last of its kind, dark as ancient blood and almost just a thick. Once she had thought it tasted like the ichor of the gods, like ambrosia. Now she knows the magic lays not in the wine, but in the clink of two glasses before it's savored.
But there is nothing romantic in the way she pours a glass for him and holds it just out of reach. Maybe though, there is something prophetic in way her voice sounds like the sea when she says, “A name for wine, if you're brave enough for a trade.” Red smiles and the firelight halo around her form fades in the soft starlight brightness of it.
The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
When she answered him she was looking away, and so didn’t see the frown that curved his mouth like a bow. It was just as well, as the reflex was gone in the next moment; but his brow still held a furrow when he glanced at her.
He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Sarkan himself lived a solitary life, though he rarely thought of it as lonely; why shouldn’t she be as ambivalent about company? But something about the way she’d said the words, a little longingly and distant as a star, pricked him. And made him wonder how badly she wished she was alone now, instead of playing host to a stranger wandered in from the road.
But he is smart enough not to press her, and so silence stretches over them both, until it’s broken by the creak of the door and the trilling of a sparrow. The sound makes the grey pause at the door, ears pricking forward curiously; when he does enter he has to duck a little, and the dusk light bleeds in around him, pooling on the floor.
Before he could get a look at the bird, the flash of her green eyes caught him, surprisingly fierce. Sarkan attributed it to the thought of kelpies, and smiled back. All he ventured to say was “Wise of them.”
And neither of them added anything more for the next few moments, as he crossed to the table and watched her lift the bottle. The firelight turned her hair to ruby, to garnet, to every autumn leaf; it set her alight as though she were a thing of flame, too. Sarkan remembered the way the leaves had bent toward her, leaves up and open, as though they, too, believed she was light.
He was beginning to think she was something more than just a girl. And Sarkan loved to puzzle out the truths of wild things.
For the time being, he only leaned back when she kept the glass just beyond his reach. Unhurriedly he unshouldered his pack, set it down on the stone beside him. The bird was watching him, its round black eyes pricked with light from the fireplace; he huffed a soft breath its direction, still smiling, before looking back to the mare.
“I appreciate any good trade,” he said, “but how about a name for the story of the vintage, and money for the wine?” The road had been long, and company before a fire was good; Sarkan was in no hurry to go anywhere. “Name’s Daniel. Who's your friend here?”
the birdsong might be pretty, but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
It's amazing, she'll think later, how quickly she can shift from creature of the vines to jealous seal of the sea. It takes her fast, that flare of avarice. She's settling down to enjoy the wine after holding it up against the firelight to count each crystal flare of color when it hits. Perhaps he can see it in her eyes, the flash of sea-foam against the stark pearl white below her eyes. Or maybe it's nothing more than a sly look, a feral look, a look more wave that horse, that flashes across her face before she takes the first sip.
“My friend,” she says with a warning soft as a leaf turning belly in a storm, “gave me no name when he found me with a broken wing.” The avarice and sea-wave of her look fades. It is replaced by something like sadness. Horace could have known the bird's name by his song, or perhaps it was the way the feathers sang in the eastern sea wing. Red's forgotten now. Day by day it seems further away.
The melancholy doesn't leave her eyes when she tosses her nose at him like a seal might toss a bit of seaweed towards a sea monster's nest. Perhaps that's what she sees in him, a creature of the dark come to steal away her solitude. And for tonight, she's willing to let him have it, fill it, devour it. To her the cost of a story isn't so very hard to pay, not tonight, not when she wants to feel a bit of the old magic again.
She leans forward and fills his glass. The sadness leaves her face like a leaf leaves a branch in a strong wind. Something about it is reminiscent of a butterfly and of a bit of earth praying to me something other than dirt, moss and root. She smiles, fleetingly she smiles. “Settle in Daniel. It's a long story.”
Red begins with an inhale.
Deep into the night, when the wolves start howling, she tells her story. It starts with the sea and it ends with death as all good stories too. And Red, when she closes her eyes at the end, feels no regret for the giving of it.
