Asterion came to the training yards to remind Theodosia that she needed rest.
He did not miss the way she pushed herself, the way she never answered no to a question despite the shadows like bruises beneath her eyes. The king has learned how sickness can be a black dog that always trails you, keeping to the shadows until it is hungry enough to hunt. He knows, too, how often it is she spars, the pale of her unmissable against the stark colors of autumn.
He is not wrong. Clear across the courtyard is the shape of her, though he can’t tell if it is sweat or lightning she gleams with, here at the end of autumn. The bay is inconspicuous, languid as he leans his shoulder against a fencepost and observes. The day is bright but the air is growing brittle and cool, and for a moment he wonders what it feels like to her, to have her wings spread with the sun on her feathers.
Absent-mindedly he runs the edge of his magic like fingers against the spears and swords and arrows in their wooden racks beside him, testing each tip and each smooth shaft, watching the Halycon train.
He thinks of Isra, missing. He thinks of Seraphina, dead. He thinks of Vespera and the destruction she had led into the gates of the city, all those lives lost for a test they could not pass. He decides then that he cannot tell Theodosia to stop, cannot order her to be careful. What care is there for any of them?
When Asterion steps into the training ring he is empty-handed, but there is a whirlpool beneath his skin and it wants something to drown.
“Do you need a partner, Champion?” he says, and the smile slanting across his mouth then does not belong to a dreamer.
There is a storm between her ribs and it aches to be released.
She has no time for rest, not when there is chaos nipping at her heels, not when she is barely treading water in a pool full of piranhas -- she knows there are eyes on her now, always, waiting to see her hesitate or to falter, determining if she will live up to her new title or if she will fall like the rest.
There is war on the horizon and enough graves amongst the grasses of their court that she cannot bear the thought of stopping, not when even considering a break feels like treason. Static ripples across her wings with every strike of her hooves against the training dummy, begging to be used, and she can taste the ozone in the back of her throat every time she swallows.
“Asterion,” she greets him with the barest dip of her head, her smile almost feral, and for the first time, she realizes how much her still-healing wounds have begun to ache. “I would be honored if you would join me.”
She thinks of the graves now covered in grass and it is death that Asterion thinks of, too, those behind and those to still come, queens with carvings of their likeness and vagabonds with nothing but their names. Perhaps to the gods each generation of them is something faceless, a crop of locusts to die in droves and leave nothing but their husks.
But whatever comes for them next, Asterion will fight it. Not just with shelter and soft words of comfort that lingered like woodsmoke before dying away, not only with running away, but with every ounce of his bright blood. And he knows he is not alone - knows he is only following the example set by those like Theodosia who would rather die than quit.
He watches her now and is satisfied to see a smile that mirrors the way his own feels carve its way across her mouth. He thinks again of what he had meant to say - slow down, be easy - but he can no more tell her that now than ask her to raise the dead. Anyway, she does not look weak; she looks like a winter storm.
When she accepts his offer he tilts his head down and scrapes a hoof experimentally against the dirt. Between them is a rack of spears and he pauses when he reaches them, studying the smooth wooden shafts and training-dull edges. “I’ve never even held a weapon,” he muses aloud, and wonders for a moment which is worse: that he has passed so many years in Novus without lifting so much as a knife, or that he wants so badly to learn now. In the end he decides that it does not much matter.
He leans away, stretching autumn-cold muscles, and searches out her eye. “Would you show me how to use these?”
As he draws a spear from the small forest of them he wonders if a training-blade ever dreamed of taking a life.
Beneath them, the dirt floor is packed solid from many lifetimes of hooves beating a drumbeat across it -- how many times has it tasted blood, she wonders, how often does sweat and salt mix into it as the cadets train? It has become almost a second home to her, as familiar as the barracks where she lays her head at night.
As she watches her companion, she wonders -- how did a nation of healers become so hardened into warriors, that even their dreamer of a king would begin to pick up weapons?
Her smile is something dark and fierce when she draws a spear from the rack, something as cold as the winter winds that have already started to sweep over Terrastella, aching with the knowledge that none of them would ever be the same in the wake of Vespera’s betrayal.
“I usually prefer daggers, or arrows,” and she thinks of the sleek wooden handles of the arrows she has fletched with her own feathers, the curving steel of the dagger she keeps tucked against her leg, and she knows it will not be long before she has reason to use them.
“I’m assuming you’re smart enough to know you stab people with the pointed end first.”
”I ought to learn to use those, too,” he answers her, though nothing in him can picture it. No matter what weapon, he can’t imagine cutting a hole in anything; is that, then, the burden that made a unicorn? To be born with such a killing-thing upon their brow? But he reminds himself that some violence is done in defense, and he can never again give his people a murmured word of grief when he could have saved them with a sword.
It is not a time for dreamers.
When she speaks again he flahes her a grin, wry and boyish and gone again in the same breath. “I had figured that much.”
The spear feels alien in his grip, cool silver, as if aware of the ignorance of the man who holds it. As he makes his way toward her, his steps casual despite the eager increase of his heartbeat, he tests the weight of it: tilts it horizontal and upright, sweeps it in a hesitant feint and jab. Already he cannot imagine it piercing flesh, drinking blood; he ignores the want to set it down, to lift a dagger instead or nothing at all. Asterion has scars enough on his hide and on his heart - is he so eager for more?
He faces her now with several lengths between them, the shadow of the spear reaching toward her as he works to keep it balanced in his grip. When he glances up at her, his gaze is eager and nervous both. “If it was Marisol and her spear you were fighting - how would you win?”
There is a war brewing on the horizon and a drumbeat in her veins, a lion in her chest just aching to unsheathe its claws and roar. When she does sleep, she dreams of battle, of leaping into the fray with a dagger in her grip and murder in her eyes -- she does not dream of softness, anymore, only the spilling of blood and the way tension has wrapped around her home like a noose.
The mention of Marisol is salt on a wound she’s not willing to reveal, so all she can do is grit her teeth in a facsimile of a smile, ears sweeping back to pin against her head. “Pray that she does not gut me,” She states flatly before sweeping the spear forward, jabbing it towards the boy-king’s shoulder without much mercy to be shown, her hooves drumming against the packed dirt beneath the two of them when she steps forward.
“That’s not a strategy,” he says, but he is almost grinning even as his breath comes quick and sharp as he ducks away from the point of her spear. When he huffs a laugh at her next comment, it could just as easily be a swear.
There was only so much you could curse your god, so much you could sorrow and fear, before all that tension melted into something near to ridicule. How could they ever hope to stand against her, if she chose to smite them all? Better not to worry - to train and prepare as best you could, but to go on living too. “Yes, I’m afraid we must answer our own prayers now.” But something like worry clouds his gaze, for a moment, at the grit of her teeth and the way her ears are flat as a viper’s hood.
Asterion may not know his Champion as well as he would like, but he knows her enough by now to see something more than eagerness for a training-spar. But how can he judge? It is not peace, it is not joy, that has driven them both to this blood-salted patch of dirt.
He allows the fraction of a pause - probably a wealth of time, for such a fighter as she - before he feints left and sweeps the spear, low, in a swift arc toward her forelegs. Asterion’s grip on the shaft feels unsteady, imbalanced -
“I never said it was,” She shoots back, although there is a rough edge to her words that makes them far more serious than the jest they are meant to be -- right now, she does not feel much like joking, cannot afford to waste her time with laughter. There could only be the continuous cycle of training and patrolling, of carving her body into a weapon and holding on fiercely to the thought that she couldn’t disappoint Asterion and Israfel, too, not when she has already disappointed the Commander.
There will be no rest until she can redeem herself -- she will not allow herself weakness any longer.
She sees his feint in the fraction he allows her, the way the spear jerks so unsteadily in his grip, and she moves so that the handle of her own weapon blocks his with the spearhead pointed toward the ground. Deftly, she upturns the spear so that it is hooked behind his and yanks, seeking to disarm him.
“A weapon is no use if you cannot keep hold of it.”
She fires sharp-edged words back at him, barbed enough to cut if he was an easier man to bleed. Asterion knows her fiery passion - that storm in her - surges just as strongly as her loyalty to the Dusk Court, but his eyes still gleam hard as river-stones at her. He sees nothing in need of redemption.
But she is not the only one to find a wealth of faults in herself, the only one to flay herself to threadbare edges in the name of duty or guilt.
The king says nothing, only carries through his feint - and is startled by the smack and the force of her spear’s shaft striking his. It’s followed at once by a clatter as his weapon is thrown free to crash and roll across the hard-packed dirt, nothing but a stick again.
He is frustrated in himself, his mouth a firm line as she speaks, his gaze regarding hers. Yet when Asterion nods there is no stiffness in it, though the usual softness is still gone from his eyes when he answers. “And a champion is no use if she doesn’t rest as well as train.” For a beat he holds her gaze - and then he shakes his head and the tension out of his neck and shoulders and turns to retrieve the spear. The bay rests it, butt on the ground beside him, as he faces her again.
There is no pity in his gaze, but there is understanding, and care, and some amount of command.
"These are hard times, Theodosia, and I don’t know that there will be an end soon. I hope you can find balance - Terrastella will take all you can give her and be grateful for it, but her king would see you whole, as well.”Their country is nothing if its people are broken - for Asterion the Dusk Court is not its borders, not its swamps and fields or even cliffs.
It is Theo, and Flora, and Fiona, and Auru. All of them, all deserving to be whole.
In the end he knows he can change her mind no more than he would allow anyone to change his. The king blows out a breath that is not quite a sigh and moves back toward the castle. Before he replaces his wooden spear with its brethren, he looks to her once more.
“Meet me here again, next week?” he asks. “And I will keep my grip.”
“I do rest,” It is only a half-lie; she has, in fact, laid down to rest recently. For about ten minutes before she’d decided that the exhaustion was only minor and that there were far more important things that she could be doing, like being out here in the training arena, honing herself even further. The deep bruises beneath her eyes give her away, however, the way her eyes are bloodshot and her shoulders slump just slightly.
She is no use to Terrastella if she is exhausted -- but she is no use if she is sleeping, or resting, either, not when she has been so recently reprimanded for her failure to comply with her duty. “I’ll keep that under advisement, sir.” And she is not lying, not on purpose -- and yet she still has no plans to rest.
“I think I can make some time for that.” And with a wry smile, the Champion turns back to her training.
