a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
In
the middle of the night, when the moon was high enough that her window could not hold it, she had awoken with the taste of brine in her teeth. The roar of the sea had rung in her ears louder than it had when she pressed her ear to a shell on the library’s mantle. Her thoughts, as she blinks and blinks and blinks to shake them loose, are full of white dolphin curling sea-froth and gulls screaming along the horizon.
When she thinks of it, as she untangles herself from her sister, she begins to feel like a thing as brutal and wanting as a hurricane tide. She does not linger and wait for the feeling to settle, she starts to run.
And runs, and runs, and runs.
All the way to the sea she runs. The dawn is a pale speck of light on the horizon, a smear of rose-gold and lilac purple, by the time she walks. Down in the belly of the cliff and shore the tide has rolled out far enough that there are miles of sand begging her closer. A gull screams loud enough that her lungs sutter at the wanting in the sound of it.
The gull dives towards the sea and so does Danaë. Rocks tumble down the cliffs as she races to the shoreline. Each of her steps is as reckless as only an immortal can be, as deer-agile as a unicorn, a full of sonnet as a rose unfurling for the first time. Here, as the sand tugs at her weight, she feels like a wild thing in a way that has nothing at all do with the forest.
She cannot see a single tower of an oak to blot out the rising of the sun. And she wonders, for the first time, why her city watches the run rise through the forest and over their gardens instead of by the sea.
Across the horizon the rose-gold turns to just-gold, the lilac to royal, and the gull is joined by his flock. The sun edges up, a fat and round crown, and Danaë only shits her gaze over it quickly as a hummingbird as the gulls start to pick from the dying, forgotten creatures left behind by the shore. She watches them feast and that wild feeling, that hurricane tide of brutality, rises.
And just like she had run it rises, and rises, and rises.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
Aster races the sunrise, and like always she is winning.
Oh, sometimes she wishes that she could see herself from below! The gilded glow of her wings lit by the sunlight a slip over the horizon - she thinks it must be like seeing a phoenix. As she passes by birds - gulls, cliff-side swallows with bright red at their throats - she reaches out with her magic only to see if she is quick enough to catch them. When she does, the bird’s wings beat so slowly that it begins to fall, only catching itself when it’s beyond her influence.
One day, she thinks as she lands, one day her magic will be strong enough to keep the sun at the horizon until she says rise.
But today she is still a child, a girl with wild eyes and tangled hair and golden horns only at their third tines. Teak is far away, still asleep - the cheetah could not keep up with her flying, and he does not care much for the sea.
She lands out where the tide has crept to, lets it wash her hooves shining-slick. Now the sun is at her back, and she lifts her wings wide and high to watch her shadow stretch before her, touching starfish and tangled kelp and perfect smooth stones speckled with white.
It is another flash of white that catches her eye, and she watches a slim pale shape race from the higher cliffside down to the shore. Aster’s own heart leaps as the unicorn does, waiting for the stumble, but the girl is as sure-footed as a hind. When she smiles, it’s at the memory of another unicorn on another beach, and it is not a soft expression.
Aster begins once more to walk, and the sun turns the shoreline gold. It paints the unicorn-girl warm as honey and clear as eyesight after tears, and she notes with interest the spots dark like blood, the cruel hook at the end of her tail. It makes her forget to play with her magic, and she stops before the stranger, the sea at her back, and bends her neck and tilts her wings in a little bow before folding them up to her sides.
“Good morning,” she says in a clear sweet voice like a brook. “You’re early.” Not you’re up early - it is not clear if she means this - but as though they have been planning to meet.
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
A
gull is devouring the belly of a crab. His sister is trying to pluck out the stomach of a clam and only getting a heavy pearl in her mouth instead. The gull, the one with the pearl, is too hungry to pause before swallowing the treasure down her throat. Danaë watches it slide down her throat, so heavy that it ripples below her feathers like a snake moving into a dean. Her own tongue presses against her teeth, against the back of her throat, as if by willpower alone she might save the gull from her greedy death.
But when the gull starts to scream as the pearl lodges between throat and stomach, and as those scream turns to shrill knells of death, Danaë discovers how frail and useless a thing like hope can be.
She’s moving towards the gull, towards the arcane display of wing sprawled haphazardly across the sand where the gull choked, when the pegasus joins her. For a moment she looks past the girl instead of at her, for the brother gull is curling over his sister’s body as if he’s considering how like a crab she might taste. Her attention waivers there, as if she is the gull looking downward with both sorrow and hunger.
And how easy it is to feel both those things at once!
The gull, the brother gull, turns away and the pearl that had been in the belly of a clam weighs down the throat of a gull. Danaë turns her attention away too and shifts it (still fat with sorrow and hunger) to the girl as she bows. A smile catches on the backs of her teeth, like a pearl, and she cannot make her face do anything but shift as impassive and as bright as they dawn haloing them.
“I was dreaming.” She does not bow, or dip her horn, and she has no feathers to flutter teasingly. There is only a lift of her head, as regal as it is warning, to show that she’s accepted the company as all. Because just as the gull has paused, she had too as she decided if the mare was to be food or sorrow.
Danaë settles on sorrow. “I had thought I was late.” Late, late, late. Late as greed and early as death.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
Aster pays no attention to the little drama behind her; likely she doesn’t know it’s even happening, for there are other, less common things to look at than gulls and crabs.
She is no stranger to the way the beach is full of dead things, and bleached things, and things that smell like rot. She’s no stranger to the way everything is death and rebirth, again and again, a cycle that will one day take her too (though she is neither eager nor unwilling).
Anyway she can’t hear it, over the wind and the voices of the other gulls, who are always lamenting something. She is too busy studying the unicorn, who reminds her - standing in the new light of dawn like she is - of the figures in the temples she’s passed, on the rare occasions she’s passed them. Distant and holy, with an expression that does not quite belong in the world of woods and water.
Only this saint looks soft. Like velvet, not glass. Still, her eyes have the same sleepy-sorrowful look, like she’s woken from a dream of the end of the world.
So, when the unicorn says that she was dreaming, Aster gives a little shiver, delighted in her own sense of prophecy. It is not a thing of fear, just the riffle on top of the water when the wind moves through it; and light as the wind, she dances closer, until the only space between them is the wingspan of a gull.
“Dreaming should take all the time it needs,” she tells her. “What were you dreaming of?”
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
D
anaë finds herself caught between pegasus and sea so tightly that for a moment, an inhale and exhale of the forests in her lungs, she cannot tell where the shoreline and featherline divide. She cannot tell the gilded gold of a tine from the gilded gold of a frothing wave dusted in the sunrise. In her dreaming she had not felt like the thing divining difference but like a thing that is divine-- divine and nothing else.
The distance between them turns to bird-wing and she cocks her head like the brother gull as she counts the spaces between the girl’s ribs. Perhaps, she thinks, she had been too eager to be sorrow instead of hunger. Perhaps she had been as hasty as a gull with a pearl in her throat. “Oh.” She says with a trace of the forest in her voice, a shiver of a wind through a tall pine just starting to lean. “I had been dreaming of the sea.” And it’s to the sea that she moves, opening up a bird-wing to a dragon-wing.
Against her hooves the sea feels cold as tears and just as cold as the war in her mother’s steps when she walks through the gardens. She can feel the seaweeds trying to plant themselves into her marrow like she is more shoreline than unicorn. And she wonders, when she looks at the girl over her shoulder, if the salt in the waves is to heal the wound in the dark deep of it or to make it ache, and sting, and fester.
It feels like a silly thing, a mortal thing, to smile and so she only keeps that dead-look softness on her lips. Wind whistles through the curls of her horn, a sonnet of some horizon’s rage below the whispering pine of her voice. “I think I was the sea. But my crown was not the sunrise and my tide was not low enough to give back all the ship skeletons and whale skulls.” She blinks, slow as a risen when it learns that it must walk before running and that its rosebud lips know no language but bumblebees. “What do you think it meant?” She asks. But she does not need to, not when her tongue feels sweet as a rosebud against her teeth.
Danaë already knows what the dream-sea was trying to tell her. Just as she already knows she will try not to listen again.
And again. And again. And again.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
Aster would tell the princess, if she could pick apart the thoughts in her head like golden hairs caught in a bramble, that there are other things to feel then sorrow and hunger (though probably the girl would not listen - Aster herself would not, whether a stranger or a mother said it. Perhaps the sea itself will teach her).
She does not mind the way the unicorn looks at her, like she’s trying to see below her skin, where golden dapples still paint her back like sun-shadows. I had been dreaming of the sea, the girl says, and Aster nods, her golden tines catching and tossing back the gleaming new-day light. The waves sigh behind her, the sea, the sea, and Aster trails behind as the other girl goes to meet it.
She is a little jealous of the ocean, then, to snatch the unicorn’s attention; but she understands, too. All that open water, all that whip of foam and crest of wave, it is mother and teacher and goddess to her. There is nothing better than flying above it on the very edge of a storm, racing the leading edge of a wave as it grows and grows, near enough catch the spray when it at last dashes itself against rock. There is nothing like its hundred-hundred voices.
But it is not the sea she watches now, when she has the opportunity to study the unicorn and the bone-scythe of her tail (this is when Aster realizes she’s met this girl’s twin, and how like they are, photo negatives of one another), and each dark spot like undiscovered islands in an ocean of cream clouds, and a spiraling horn she is sure the wind might sing through.
How sharp, she wonders (as she had wondered about her own tines, before testing them) were those weapons? Did the girl know?
When the unicorn looks back, Aster does not look away, abashed; she mirrors the smile, and steps near enough to hear that she was right about the singing wind through her horn. In the dawn-light, the girl’s red eyes glow like sun through colored glass.
“I think the sea does not have to give back anything she doesn’t want to. What’s hers is hers to keep.” She shrugs, uninterested in interpretations; it certainly didn’t matter what she believed. It wasn’t her dream.
“Is that why you came?” she asks, and slips just a little closer, subtle as a wave. From here she can smell the forest on the girl, dark green pines and firs, just a little sweet; she imagines the unicorn passing beneath them in the moonlight. It makes Aster want to run with her, or after her, or before her.
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
T
here is a hill fat with heather, and vervain, and sycamores spit out from the forest, hidden in the outskirts of her city. Beneath that hill there are slumbering stones through which she can feel a heart-beat each time she lays her cheek down in the heather sheets whispering in the wind. And she had wondered, as she does now when leans into the gilded girl so her ear meets a throat, if anything in the world could sound like that hidden, slumbering hill (before she had known it was not the earth breathing but the things buried in it).
She can hear another thing slumbering now, louder even than the sea roaring a lullaby to dead night. Almost, almost, does she listen to the instinct in her telling her to step away and crack open her jaw so that the girl can hear her own song. Almost does she sing into the whipping wind as her horn does.
But, just like the earth and death, she is a greedy unicorn.
And she had been dreaming that she was the sea. “Then I shall be like the sea instead of a dream of it.” Her smile goes as quickly as it comes, a flash of teeth that is nothing more than another curl of frothing waves in the sun (blinding and then black). “I will not apologize when I keep all that I find.” Like the sound below the pegasus’s pulse. Like the sleeping stone. Like the hill fat with heather, vervain, and sycamores spit out like the night’s stars.
Like the weeds of the sea curling around her ankles when she starts to walk across the waves. Like the oyster shells cracking open around pearls underneath her weight. She has no reason not to keep them all now, not when the cracked shells start to bloom fresh-water lily pads that break up the crashing waves.
She thinks it looks like the sea is breathing just like that hill in her city when it breathes.
“I think maybe,” The looks in her eyes begs the pegasus to follow, to follow as the sleeping stones follow the beat of her magic, and as the foxes run upside down through the dirt to follow her shadow as it trails through the forest. “I dreamed of the sea to find you.” Because what doe, what predator, what thing of gold and air, does not long for the wildness of flowers that no city, no wall, can give?
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
