[P] you lift your eyes up from the dust

[Hugo]

⚒

You think about Bella a lot. More than you should. More than you want to.

In your defense, there is not much else to do: man the forge, certainly, lean against the front counter with an expression of fixed disinterest, playing cards with yourself while you wait for the next order-- which always comes, in spite of your best attempts at self-sabotage. The only thing left when all else has been done is to sleep, and sleep deeply-- and once it holds the reins the mind tends to wander.

It started simply enough: she brought you designs for a quiver, lovingly sketched curves and baroque depictions of flowers and ginkgo leaves. You had gazed at it first with a keen sense of suffering, the kind of familiar ache that duty always brings out of you. You begin to worry that it will start seeping out through the bright violet of your eyes, that she'll look at you, looking at the sheaf of new parchment and charcoal and wishing that just hoping hard enough would make you dissolve-- but somehow you don't, and she doesn't really look at you much at all, and before you can protest Isabella Foster has walked out of your shop with her bag full of books and left you with... something.

Work. Longing. You think work, again, for good measure.

It isn't hard to make. Two weeks down the line you hang her the result: expertly tooled leather, ginkgo leaves and tulips as the arms of the rising sun, a buttoned pouch on the side with her initials twisted into the branches of empty winter trees. She takes it and smiles.

There are so few things that make you feel light. There are so few things that fill you with joy at the thought of creation. Every time she hands you a new stack of drawings your heart twists with panic then settles into a steady, sure rhythm. It is a familiar feeling. You used to feel this when you were young, when it was not so hard to pretend to be worthy because you knew you were. You felt it when you made your first knife. You feel it, fleetingly, when you hold your hammer up and it strikes the blade of a sword and the ting matches the ever quieter song in the back of your mind.

You think about her this morning, more than you should. More than you want to. A soldier picks up their spear with a newly made tip, sharp and black and shining. You hand it over with a smile that doesn't quite look like a smile. You are trying, but when they thank you it is with the kind of hurried tone of voice you've come to recognize as a failure on your part, to be charming, or warm.

It is winter, you think. You don't know how warm they can expect you to be, in the dead of winter. It's snowing outside, just after dawn. There is no warmth in the air, or in you. Until you see her, books in hand, and wrestle an unexpected lightheadedness into the back ground.

Be cool, you think. You're fine. Everything is fine.
"Welcome back," you say. It is a surprisingly successful attempt at nonchalance, considering.

And when my time is up, have I done enough?
Will they tell my story?

❂ | ❂

@Isabella

[Isabella]

Isabella Foster

I like a look of agony
because I know it's true

I

would pretend to be a cadet when i was younger, would even take runs on our family’s beach in the morning like I heard the cadets did. The fact that i even say my family’s beach immediately separates me from any Halcyon cadets. They had their barracks, living modestly as they do. I, on the other hand, have everything I could ask for and then some. Our family could donate enough money to clothe and feed cadets for a lifetime, but we don’t. We offer them some money in the form of a donation. It is enough to provide clothing for a few cadets, a weapon or two. We could afford to do it for all and still have plenty of money leftover, and still we don’t. It is about power, my family likes seeing them stare with grateful eyes up at us.

It is because of the Halcyon that I had taken up archery. I hear their archers can shoot a bullseye from up in the air, above the clouds. I had, even at a young age, known I needed the best bow possible. And that is how I came to know Hugo. Now, I would trust no one else to build my bow, nor my arrows. I hand him drawings, an assortment, usually with feathers or flowers that I had seen in Dusk’s gardens, vines that sit outside my bedroom window. He always turns these simple, pencil, charcoal drawings into something magnificent. I have seen wood turn into weapons in ways I did not think possible.

I have more than books with me today, wandering through the streets of the Court. I have a break from my lessons and bundles of parchment with a new bow design. Feathers, like the one in my hair, that is what I am thinking of. I move through the crowd, a crowd I have known since I was young, these streets I have walked since my father first took me to get my first bow, my first arrow, my first quiver to hold it. There is bargaining for silk on my left, a merchant from Night Court. Another selling plants, a botanist from Day. But I pass it all, there is only one face in mind.

I enter and our eyes meet quickly just as I pass a solider with his spear. “Hugo,” I say pleasantly. He knows why I am here, he is a seller and I a buyer, but I would not say our relationship is so black and white. It cannot be, when my weapon has always been such an intimate part of me. “Been busy today?” I ask approaching him. “Are you staying warm?” I watch him with steel eyes as I stand with snow on my feet. “I think I ought to start shooting flaming arrows in an attempt to stay warm,” I comment with an offhanded way of speaking, pretending that having arrows that were set aflame from the moment they were shot from my string would not be a life’s dream. “I have not come empty handed—want to see some new sketches?”

code by rallidae
picture colored by Elidhu
@Hugo