he is not particularly surprised that this is the place Bexley chose to settle. Where else for a lion-hearted bitch?
On each side tower walls of horizontally striated red and gold; Angharad thinks she sees the imprints of bones once or twice, fossilized in between layers of old stone; she catches sight of a small, flat-toothed skull bleached white by eons of sun; overhead the sun simmers even against the cold bite of an autumn breeze and an opalescent shield of clouds, and oh, if Angharad only knew what waited to be found in the capitol.
But she is only a girl, and a stranger at that, so terribly outcast she has not even quite heard of Solterra’s turmoil. She hears only the nagging voice in the back of her head: find her, find her.
Cervine and dark and showered in pale red dust from the bottom of the earth, Angharad winds her way through the corridors of Elatus with an uneducated sense of purpose. She does not know any better way to spend her time than searching every corner of the world for her cowardly niece. So this is what she does - scours every square inch with those Briar-blue eyes, ignoring the dull ache pitted against her leg, and tries to imagine she is being something useful.
From above, or from far away, it would be easy to think Angharad belongs here. The fawn of her skin melts in easily with the sand. The gold strung around her horns and ankle is so common it might have been forged in a Solterran shop. The dark, sweet stripes that strike her body are that of a well-camouflaged desert predator.
But then you see how the bones in the canyon shudder and creak as she walks past them, and how stubby, underwatered plants spring back to life, and think that if she were from here, there would already be stories about it.
This land, it squeezes him tight. It makes him feel like a dry root, twisted and skeletal, and sometimes when he glances down at his feet he is surprised to see there is enough of him to cast a shadow.
His prints, at least, are scrubbed away from the sand and dust not long after he leaves them.
Abel winds the wind-carved hallways of the canyons and thinks, of course, of the maze. It had seemed a grand thing that night, with the smokey tang of magic still clinging to it like a heap of rubble after a structure fire, and all those green leaves a-whispering as he walked alone among them. But it was nothing to this - and so it must be, he thinks, for what is magic to time and wind and nothingness?
The thought makes him bitter and glad.
The boy (for that is all he is, no matter how long his shadow) does not notice the fossils or the skulls; he has seen enough of the dying and dead, and bleached bones hold no interest for him. Abel cares little enough for the business of death - for he is doing his duty to live, just a gnarled root reaching for the sun, knowing it must push a little decay out of the way to find it.
But he does notice when he is no longer alone. He notices the round moons of hoof prints, before they are scoured away again; he notices the scent of green and growing things (though thick, as though they hover at the edge of decay) and cannot discover where they’re coming from. And then he winds around a shoulder of red stone and sees her, and thinks Ah.
For now he keeps his pace - even slows it down - only wanting to trail her, only wanting to observe.
It has been a long time since Abel was a person entire. Of late he is only pieces of himself, whatever is most useful - teeth, or ears, or burden-bearing shoulders, or eyes.
ngharad stops, or slows enough to feel like stopping, to look at a particularly bent-backed ocotillo backed up against the bright wall of the canyon. She ignores the voice that says to keep moving; the situation cannot possibly be so dire. The sky is silent overhead, and she is still a child, or most of one, and the world is still beautiful in a few small places -
Who is she to ignore that?
The ocotillo is strange and spidery. Its legs, a dark piney-green, are striated with little bumps and ridges, and each one spirals upward and curls and sprouts a cone of bright-red flowers and antenna. It reminds her of something she can’t quite remember - something vibrant and nearly aquatic - it smells bright and somehow dusty and the combination of that and the glaring sun pulls her almost to a sneeze. Everything is new, the plants, the sand, the towering walls - she wrinkles her nose, turns away and starts to walk again, watching the world carefully.
It is because of this caution (and the brief pause in her step) that she notices him.
She hears the sound of his steps clicking against the rock. The smell of something too-alive picked up by the wind. The nagging worry of a presence, faint as it is annoying, standing just beyond the edge of her vision. She inhales deeply, carefully, measured, and rolls her shoulders like she is preparing for a pounce.
Her ear flicks, and it jingles the little whip of gold circled around her horns.
Like a cat, Angharad ducks her head, snaps her tail against her back legs and turns a lazy half-circle, criss-crossing steps on the dusty red rock. She narrows her gaze and snakes it across the wide slit of the canyon. There he is - and she is surprised to see him looking like that, so small, so wasted away, but it at least it settles her nerves a little to realize she could feasibly fight back.
She raises her chin at him, standing on the ridge above like a bird of prey. Her horns spiral out, dark against the bright rock.
Aren’t you going to say hi?Angharad challenges, though it is almost pleasant, a twinge of humor bright in her voice.
As she turns to face him Abel comes to a stop like a toy wound down, slow slower slowest until he is not moving at all, only observing. She stands above him on a shelf of red rock and her horns are thick limbs silhouetted against the canyon walls, a warning that does not need spoken.
From his place he cannot tell how young she is, only how tall. Only how well-made for the desert, striped like him but not like him at all. For not the first time (and never the last) he thinks how small I am, how bare of weapons and when he sighs is it swept away like a handful of dust.
She raises her chin and he dips his, like a see-saw, like a mismatched mirror.
Hadn’t he had friends once? Hadn’t he been a boy, spindle-legged on the shoreline, making monsters of the waves that he might outrun? Now he only feels like a shadow, or maybe a golem, some thing fashioned of dust and made to obey with no thoughts of its own beneath the clay skin. In a way he was made by god.
“Hi,” he says, and pitches his voice loud enough to echo against the sun-warmed rock. For a moment more he only stands, watchful, wondering if she is one of the Davke he has heard about or whether she might have some other reason to wear his blood on her horns. It does not seem like a terrible stretch.
In the end he decides it is unlikely; too much trouble. Blood is difficult to wash off here, he knows; not only the lack of water but how fast it dries, how iron it smells, how it draws scavengers.
Abel begins to walk again, following her trail still, picking his way up toward her between the rocks and the alien-looking plants he has no name for. “Where are you heading?” he asks, genial enough, and tries to remember what it was like, having an interest in strangers that was other than calculating.
Now the only thing he ever wonders is will you hurt me? or will I hurt you?
rom her spot just above him (as slightly above as she is) she can see just how scrawny he is, he slats of his ribs shining through like a web of moonlight, his narrow shoulders hulking, his emaciated cheeks catching the light. Ah! She pities him. Is it pity or sympathy? Does it matter? All at once she is thankful for the way Una built her, brick from brick: no matter what, at her bones Angharad is still strong and tough and hard to kill.
That knowledge is more comforting than anything else she can think of.
His voice only barely reaches her, never mind the dead silence of the canyon around them. Hi, she calls back, and grins momentarily, flashing a smile so bright it sparkles like the sunlight above them. Angharad shakes her head as if clearing off an eon of dust. A cloud of multi-colored silk hair goes swirling around her neck like a river, the slick of gold wrapped around her horn goes clattering and tinkling against the keratin; she leans over the edge of the tiny ridge to watch him more closely, eyes wide with sinless curiosity.
Where are you heading? asks the boy, and Angharad pauses briefly in her watchfulness. She blinks against the sun and against the weight of his stare, and, little girl that she is, cannot think to say anything but the truth: I’m not sure, comes the answer, more doleful than it is truly embarrassed, and her lip twists in a sheepish frown. Her brow furrows slightly. I’m looking for someone, she says at last. Somewhere.
Una’s voice rings in her head, as sharp as teeth scraping rock. Whoosh goes the breeze over the canyon’s loose sand.
Where are you going? Angharad shuffles a tiny step forward, down the slope. Her gaze narrows.
“Nowhere.” He does not say it mournfully, only matter-of-fact. Only he knows how fiercely he misses Denocte, how under the hollow beetle-shell of his heart the homesickness pierces like a knife. He’s never known anything like that before, has never left the Night Court except, once, for a pilgrimage up to the gods’ mountain. That was Before, back when everyone thought the gods listened and loved you.
A heartbeat, two, and then he begins climbing up toward her. She does not frighten him, not her horns or her gold or the easy way she speaks, no matter how meaningless the words are, empty as the desert with its spiraling buzzards. Her hair, long and unbound, beckons for him as the wind stirs through the canyon.
Of course he knows she is lying, of course he wonders why. It seems unlikely to him that a girl could find anything at all out here by chance, and the past few weeks have instilled a strong interest in him of someones. He does not need Raum to tell him that there are vipers everywhere, waiting for a misstep. The desert, he knows, is always a snake-pit, even when you didn’t come in with the previous queen’s blood smeared red on your chest.
But Abel does not have a monster or magic to keep threats in check. Even his shadow is starving and thin, crowding his heels.
She still towers over him when he reaches her, and he still shows no sign of minding. Abel is used to being small, smaller, smallest. He does not often mind it. A bigger dog had a harder time getting out of the way of a kick.
“I can help you look,” he says, and it is not so much a suggestion as a statement of what he would be doing next. “There’s a lot of somewhere.” There is almost something real in his quick and guilty smile, beyond the gleaming bones of his teeth, but his eyes are still pitted and empty as the moon.
owhere. Oh, that cannot possibly be true. Angharad cannot imagine a life in which she would have the luxury to go nowhere, and the scrawniness and fear she sees in this boy is doing nothing to convince her that he is any better off than she is. Her eyes narrow; she drops her head, wide and striped-dark, to a place where it is almost level with Abel’s. In the desert light, the bright blue of her gaze shines like ice. They are unnervingly contrasted against the black swath of hair seeping down from her eyes like tears.
She does not lean back as he starts to climb toward her. No, the curl of her lip is not fear but amusement, that a skinny little thing like this is so confident accosting her. And yet there is something impressive about it: in another world, maybe, they could be two sides of a coin, a body and a shadow, each other’s tethered halves.
This is not anywhere close to that world.
Finally she sidesteps, so that he can fit next to her on the ledge. Not without some measure of hesitation. Up close he is almost worthy of pity - the way his hair falls so thinly against his neck, the sharpness of his hip bones against his skin, poking out like an arrowhead. The feminine instinct in her wants almost to put him out of his misery. But she is young, and not so hard-headed, and so she merely watches him and wishes she had been born a little less soft.
Hm, she answers. And still watches him - heavy-eyed, still against the brief wind, swishing her tail absent-mindedly against her back legs. That would only help if you knew what I was looking for.
Angharad cocks her head at him, wearing a dry kind of smirk. At her feet, underneath those dark, dished hooves, little pieces of desert brush start to curl, wilt and fall away to dust, and she pushes it over the edge of the ledge with nothing more than a little blink of surprise.
Up he climbs toward her, paying her no more mind than a shadow on the wall, watching instead his feet as he picks his way among rocks and ledges. A little lizard skitters into a crevice no wider than his hoof but what must, to it, be a cave; he wishes he was so small, to make the world full of hiding-places.
The only surprise he shows is in a little blink when he reaches her, when she shuffles aside to make room. He might have done the same thing if she had instead pushed him, or butted him with those fine arching horns. Instead they stand beside each other and he looks back for a moment, the way they had both come. There isn’t much of their path left to see; too many curves, too much red rock. A wind gusts through the canyon like the breath of a witch.
His mouth feels dry, gritted with dust and sand. If he licked is teeth Abel isn’t sure he’d find enough moisture to spit.
Though he is still young - still growing - here in Solterra he feels as though his body is echoing the barren places of his mind. It dries him out, it withers him, it makes each cell parched in the same way that his loneliness is a yawning desert. If he is not careful, he thinks, anything could blow him away.
He is not sure why he still clings, a stubborn root.
Abel does not avert his gaze, not even as the wind whines between them, threatening his eyes with more sand. At last he nods, just a little, like a dead winter bloom bobbing its head in the wind. “Yes,” he agrees, and says nothing more. When little bits of dried-out scrub flake and crumble at her feet there is no surprise in him, and he only glances mildly as she pushes it away and the wind takes it, greedy.
It has taken him no time at all to learn that everything dies in the desert, just as it did at home.
es, he says, and Angharad - even Angharad, only weeks old at this point - knows that he is asking for an explanation. It is one he will not come even close to getting?
What is there to explain? Too much, and all of it far too complex. An explanation: I am made of more bones than anyone else. A confession: I came not from blood but from dirt. A little song, soft and sweet and black: You will never know me as more than a quest, because I am only alive as long as there is something to be done.
But he does not care, why would he care? and so she says nothing, only smiles at him, a bright, sharp smirk that turns the blue of her eyes just a little darker. They seem to glow against the dark that drips from her brow to the slice of her mouth. Wind rattles the threads of gold twirling against those huge umber horns. And in her chest, though no one (including her) could ever see it, something loud and excited with sharp pearl teeth rears and begs to be fed a new friend.
She cannot know, yet, that this is the curse of all Briars: to hunger no matter what.
The only thing stronger than that hunger (though for her it is nothing more a child’s desire, lusting only for love) is Una’s voice scolding her from the back of her head. She tenses at the sound of it reverberating through her skull. Her muscles coil, her gaze narrows, she watches Abel with a cool, stolid wariness, and then she turns mildly away and takes a step down the ledge.
Wish me luck, she sings over her shoulder, giddy as it is naive, and starts to traverse the slopes closer to the court.
Let him follow. Or not. She will leave either way.
He might have nodded at her, understanding - or at least as close as he could come. Might have said Most of the time I feel like only bones, like all the rest of me has withered up and blown away, rattling my ribs as it went. Might have asked Will you be afraid to die, when your quest is done? Or are you eager for it. (Sometimes he feels like he is eager for it, like he is only a golem of mud and bad luck, only moving because nobody has told him to stop. It might be a relief to die.)
But she says nothing, and he says nothing, and when she smiles at him he does not return the expression. How can he? She is something alien and fierce, more powerful than he could hope to be even without whatever it is that withers the scant plant life at her feet and sends it blowing out into the channel of the canyon like chaff.
Oh, when her gaze shifts and narrows, when it turns into something a wild animal would wear and not a girl, Abel is glad that she looks away. There is still curiosity gnawing at him, a restless coyote at a well-worried bone, but nothing about her had been inviting.
She did not want him, and he could not blame her.
“Good luck,” he tells her, and it sounds sincere. And then, for a long span of moments, he only watches her pick her way nimble as a goat down the ledge, watching her stripes and gold and swaying horns until the canyon swallows her up from view.
When at last he turns away he feels no less like a shadow than he had before.
