Spring is more beautiful with freedom; with flight. The temperatures on land are rising, steadily, slowly. The world is waking, birds singing, creatures stirring from their slumbers. On Irindor Samaira’s favorite time in the forest had been spring, and here in this world, her new home, it’s no different. She wakes each morning to the rising sun and the melody of birds and is grateful to be alive.
The pegasus drifts through the sky, the tips of her wings brushing against the low-lying, early morning clouds. “Come on Alaunus! We’re almost there,” her words float over her shoulder toward her bonded, as the young heron flies just behind her. ”The ocean won’t go anywhere if we take our time,” Alaunus replies, but Samaira can hear the amusement in his words. Oh, how Samaira loves the ocean. Ever since she set foot on its shores for the first time.
She doesn’t think that she’ll ever not love it.
It is wide and far and still and roaring and deep. It is beautiful, especially in the morning when the sun rises to the east and the soft first rays of light reflect off its surface. Her heart sighs in contentment just to think about it, and she beats her wings a little harder, a little faster. ”No stopping to smell the roses… got it,” her bonded remarks, and Samaira can’t help the laugh that bubbles past her lips.
At last they reach the sea, and Samaira looks at the horizon, where it stretches and stretches and stretches. She wants to touch it, to fly to that distant line and discover where it takes her. Someday, she consents, but not today. Whatever mysteries the world holds for her, she has many years to discover them. For now, she is happy to be here. To have purpose, and life.
As the pair circles slowly up in the sky, Samaira spots a dark shape on the sands below. At first she thinks of the kelpie she had met the first time she had gone to see the ocean, whose name he had not given to her. He was as much a mystery as the sea he called home. But the darkness of this shape is as unmistakable as the colors he wears upon his back. King of the Dusk Court, who looks as the twilight sky.
Samaira drops down to the beach, her eyes as wide and bright as the setting moon, and makes her way toward him. “Asterion,” she greets gently, as gently as the water that rushes up to embrace the sand, to kiss their hooves. Soon she is beside him, and her wings rest against her sides as she speaks. “If I recall, you never told me your position that day I first stepped foot in the court,” a smile turns up the corner of her lips as she glances at him curiously.
She remembers how they danced, and laughed, and she wonders if she would have done such things with him if she had known, then. “You should wear your title with pride, knowing how much you do for your people.” The earthen woman shifts a little in the sand and Alaunus, resting somewhere behind them, clears his throat. Samaira only smiles more and thinks, the day is new and full of promises.
It is spring, and the spray from the sea feels like a cool kiss against his skin and not the bite that made him shiver in midwinter. It is spring and all the birds are coming home, the prairie and the forest blooming green and full of the music of thrushes and wrens, the chorus of frogs and crickets. Each small bloom that unfolds on the path to the beach feels like a gift, for how grateful Asterion is to see Terrastella through another winter. Once, he had taken seasons for granted - but the king has learned that nothing is certain, not even the first day of the year when the sun is warm enough on his shoulders to make something uncurl inside him like a fern.
He has been on the shoreline since before dawn. The dew is still wet on the sea-grass but the clouds are turning from violet to lilac and lilac to rose and sunlight is breaking through, a spill of gold across the water. Somewhere, Cirrus is among her kind, stalking the pebbles and tidepools for crabs, but the gull’s bonded is content to stand with the breeze stiffening his hair with salt and watch two harbor seals playing in the surf.
A part of Asterion is waiting for another rogue island to shove its stubborn shoulders above the horizon line and spew ash and disaster and magic. A part of him is tense as he gazes over the rolling waves, wondering what he would do if the horn and crest and seafoam mane of a kelpie broke a wave, heading for shore. But mostly he is glad to keep watch in relative peace, where sandpipers scurry after snails and the gulls sound more laughing than mournful.
It is no bird that catches his eye as he lingers on the beach, and Asterion doesn’t hide his grin nor the way he tilts his head to watch Samaira land, his gaze only leaving her to touch curiously on the stately heron that follows her. She is not alone in thinking of the day they met; he remembers the way she’d been touched by the music, and how good it felt to laugh, and how he had always kept an eye out for her afterward. It is, he thinks, the first time he’s seen her fly, and he is glad to see no sign of the bandage that had been on her wing.
“Samaira,” he returns with a dip of his head, and as she continues his smile turns from warm to wry and his eyes gleam like pearls. “It may have slipped my mind,” he allows, and grins at her sidelong. When she speaks again his expression smooths to something more solemn. “And it’s an honor to serve them - but I’d like to get to know them, too, and I find it’s much easier when I’m only Asterion. At least for me.” His smile resurfaces like a seal slipping bright into the sunshine from the depths.
“It’s good to see you flying,” he says, and feels almost shy when he catches her eyes, as pale and strange and drawing as the moon. She is a striking figure against the pale of the beach, with the tattoos that pattern her dark skin and the bright of gold against rich brown. The king is studying her still when the heron makes a rough sound, and his eyes go to the bird as he tries to guess what else is different about her - perhaps a sense of peace and contentment, a serenity he wants to share.
But he finds plenty to occupy him with her companion, too, and looks with soft wonder at the white feathers that shimmer like a pearl, at the eyes that even from a distance shine a pale blue. “How did you meet?” he asks her, voice quiet as the shushing waves, and turns his dark eyes back to the mare.
His response is not what she expects. Of course, the only King she ever knew had a price out for her wings, and any others like her that might exist. But if Samaira has learned anything at all since coming to Terrastella, she knows that Asterion is not him. "How would you have me know you?" the earthen woman asks, her moon-silver eyes resting on his night-dark ones.
She wonders.
As her King, her friend? Something else? How has she wanted to know him, since that sun bright morning filled with life and laughter and song. Again the thought crosses her mind—would she have known him the way she had, if he had introduced himself as King?
Something in her aches, soft and quiet and thumping, and she turns her gaze to the sky before it can free itself.
"It's good to be flying," Samaira responds in kind, with wistful words. There is so much more behind them than he can ever assume, she knows. So much of her that nobody sees—so much of what is behind her that she has yet to share with anyone. But to finally fly brings her more tranquility than she has ever known in her life. How much she had been missing, ever since she was a girl. How much they had kept from her, out of selfishness and greed.
But Samaira need not fear those evils anymore. They are left behind her, somewhere so far away in the world that she does not even know where anymore. But why, then, do the memories still follow her. Lurking, lingering, clinging to her like the buzz of the insects in the swamp.
She doesn't rest too long on the thought, as Asterion turns toward Alaunus and asks after their meeting. She smiles and gestures toward her bonded with grateful eyes. "Alaunus found me on the cliffs, when my wing was still bandaged," the appendage moves on reflex, ruffling her feathers against her side. "He has healing abilities, it's quite miraculous really. He healed what was left of the tender tissues and muscle."
"Actually, because of him and your healers, I've become a bit of a medic myself," she smiles a bit sheepishly, her dark lashes fluttering against her cheeks as she looks back toward the man at her side. "Knowing that I can help those who have been hurt… it eases me." Knowing that she will never be like those from her homeland. Knowing that none need ever be alone and in pain as she.
Quiet falls between them and her gaze drifts out to sea, bright and wondering. "You are strangely talkative today," Alaunus says, and there is mischief in his voice as the words reach her. "And you are strangely quiet," Samaira counters. Behind her, Alaunus ruffles his wings and preens for a moment, contemplating. "I just like to see you being so candid, with someone other than me."
Something inside her shifts, like a distant storm cloud filling the horizon.
"Asterion," she says softly, suddenly, her voice floating through the silence like a petal on the breeze, "Would you tell me something about yourself? Anything." And she thinks, standing there by the sea at his side, knowing somehow for certain, I would know you, King or not. But there is a haunting in the bright silver of her eyes. A yearning in the smokiness of her words. A longing, for that thing that has been so elusive since those days in the forest of her youth.
Trust.
And how badly does she want to find it, to grasp it in her fingers and never release it again. How badly Samaira aches, to allow herself the connection she is missing between those around her and herself. Her life here is such a gift, and yet some part of her still feels empty. Searching. Will she ever fill it?
Oh, the question makes him fall still at the same time it makes him flush, though he does not falter from the hold of her silver eyes. It seems too intimate, and a part of him envies her boldness even as he wonders how to answer. What might his words change, what currents could they alter?
When she looks to the sky, he looks to the sea. “As a man,” he says at last, “who does what he can with what he has.” The words are no hardly spoken than he laughs, and a breeze tugs at his forelock, and the look he shoots her is boyish and grinning. “My sister would say that answer is nothing but evasion.” And she would not be wrong, but Asterion offers no more: indecision has always been his worst sin. Instead he only tilts his chin to watch a family of sandpipers dart by, hardly leaving traces on the sand.
“I’ve always wished I could,” he replies softly, and his tone is wistful even now. Often he tries to console himself with the truth: that if he had wings, it would be too easy to run away. How could anyone hold him, when the next hill was only a tilt of feathers and a running start? Every horizon would be a promise he could keep, and the king would find it hard to swear fealty to anything else. Sometimes, Cirrus would try to tell him what it was like in what mean ways she could, but they both knew it was nowhere near the same. How do you explain sight to the blind?
So he smiles, when Samaira speaks of Alaunus and how they found one another, and he thinks of them flying above him. At the mention of his healing powers the bay’s interest sharpens further, both ears turning forward in curiosity as he regards the heron. “An especially good friend to have,” he says, and his gaze turns back to the pegasus as she continues. Now his smile curves once more into a grin, and he crosses the short distance between them to touch his nose once, briefly, to her cheek. The sand is cool against his fetlocks but both of their bodies are warm in the early morning; when he draws away the scent of flowers lingers. “I’m so glad to hear it, and hope it means you’ll stay. There’s much to learn from the healers here - and no shortage of reasons to use those skills, more seriously.” The smile he wears turns wry, then fades like the horizon-line into a fog.
It’s the horizon he’s watching as silence descends between them again, save for the breathing of the sea. The light is growing bolder on the clouds, sharpening into what will become a warm late spring day. One of his ears is still tuned to her, and when she says his name - as if surprised to - he turns his head. Asterion is silent as she asks her question, but however difficult it is to read those moon-silver eyes he does not miss the near urgency, the weight, in her words. The bay dips his muzzle, thinking.
There are so many things he could tell her, from the inane - strawberries make me sneeze - to the truths that lie heavy next to his heart (I’m still learning that not everyone is going to leave me, given time and opportunity).
“I still prefer to sleep outside,” he says at last, carefully conversational. When he glances at her, there is still something almost conspiratory in his eye. “I never feel myself, in buildings. When I can’t see the sky or hear or feel the wind, there’s no hope for me of relaxing. It’s why I sneak away to the sea so often. Sometimes I think I must have heard it before I was born - the sea and the sound of my mother’s breathing.” As his gaze rests on her, he wonders if it is enough, an answer that will sate her, that does not feel like an evasion.
“Also I’m allergic to strawberries,” he says, and there is his grin again, there and gone like a cloud torn gently to bits by the wind.
Samaira wants to ask him if it's still true, even if it's not the truth. She wants to ask him what his sister would say he's evading, but she can't ask that of him when she knows her own heart is as evasive as a will-o-wisp. "I think your sister might have some things to say about my own answers, at times," she settles with at last.
It feels like kinship, maybe. Like understanding. The pegasus thinks of the first day they had met and the questions in his eyes that she had avoided. She still has not told a soul about the cause of her injury, for it makes her heart weak and weep and unsteady. Will she ever be ready?
Samaira looks at him when he speaks of flying, and she tries to picture him with wings. Big, beautiful wings made of twilight and stars. He has been made for the sky and yet kept from it. The irony, she thinks, as she imagines such things. She wants to tell him she knows how it feels to be kept from something you ache for so dearly.
She wants to tell him she knows what it's like to want and not be able to have.
She wonders if he would ask what she means.
Oh, and then Samaira remembers that there are ways to get wings that are made of things other than feathers and bones, and her heart shudders and her silver eyes close for half a second too long at the memory of inky shadows and spilling blackness. "If you ever find a way, find me and I will happily fly with you."
Asterion is not Cassius. He is not.
His sharp curiosity makes her smile, however. Alaunus' abilities are beautiful and mysterious indeed. Samaira still isn't sure how it works, even though he's tried many times to explain it. Some things, she supposes, are better left to their mysticism.
And when Asterion steps closer, she, for a moment, wants nothing more than to lean into that smallest of touches. To take it and keep it close to her heart forever, to never release the feeling of his warmth against her. "I can think of nowhere else I would rather be than here," the earthen woman says, even as he pulls away. It is cold, where he leaves her. She is cold, and longing, longing, longing.
Samaira watches him as he thinks, as silence has settled over them waiting to be broken. In the end, she knows what he says must be true because she remembers how he had once said he didn't think he would ever be used to crowds. It makes her wonder who he was, before King. Before Novus.
How far apart are their worlds, that both brought them here to this same one?
She smiles softly when Asterion says he is allergic to strawberries. It might seem like a small thing, but she likes it. It is a piece of him and any piece of him, no matter how small, is important to her. "The sea to you is the sound of the wind in the trees to me. Nature has been my life's lullaby." Her expression grows fonder, and then, as a dying fire, slowly dims.
Samaira looks at Asterion for what feels like a long time, considering. Breaking. Breathing. She looks at him for so long that she can no longer see him standing there but Cassius, devilish and mad and oh so wicked.
She blinks Cassius away and there are wet stars in her moon eyes when she says it, at last. "Love nearly cost me my wings. And my life."
“My sister has plenty to say about everything,” he answers, and his grin is true, if fleeting. Indeed, Florentine could talk the ears off of a hare if she had a mind to, and be so charming the creature wouldn’t notice; sometimes he wonders how they came from the same blood (but oh, how glad he is).
The king’s smile is turned to something softer with what she says next; his gaze touches on her face, her lashes dark against her cheek, and wonders what grief she sees. “I will.” It’s far easier to promise such a thing than it is to imagine it; even in such a world of magic and medicine Asterion has never heard of a horse without wings gaining flight. Some dreams stay dreams.
It is easy, he thinks, standing here with her and breathing in the salt of the summer sea. The bay doesn’t feel like a king at all, in this moment - only like himself without the weight of titles that would mean nothing in the wild, that in the end are only words. And it is easy to nod when she says she can think of nowhere else she would rather be. Countless are the times he’s had the same thought, looking over the Terminus (but countless are the times his fickle heart has whispered except-).
“There’s none better,” he says, even as the surf proves his words true with its endless rhythm and the gulls cry out with agreement.
Something is different in Samaria’s gaze when she settles it on him, then. There is a weight there that he can feel, even as he keeps his own dark eyes turned out to sea and horizon and sunrise. And as silence stretches between them like a skein of spiderweb it seems his heart is knocking harder, waiting and worried.
When she speaks at last that tension breaks, and a roil of other emotions rush in to fill the space; searing sorrow, a rage dark and hot. Were he less in control of his magic a wave might crash up, might scatter to pieces like glass, might take the shape of his emotions - but the next one rolls up to kiss their feet and recedes, leaving nothing more than bits of shell and wet sand.
“Samaira,” he says, and the smooth syllables of her name only convey a little of what he’s feeling. They are near enough anyway that it doesn’t feel unnatural when he shifts to lean his shoulder against hers, her feathers soft as down against his star-scattered sides. “You can tell me,” he says softly, “if you want. But know that you are safe here, that no one would dare hunt you or hurt you for what is yours. And love-”
Here he falters, for how could he tell her that it was safe? He knows better; Talia had taught him, long ago, that love could be a sentence, or a sin. And yet, hasn’t he learned since then that the fault was not his own? That his love, at least, was never a crime?
Her heart is beating, wildly, and broken somehow all at the same time. It is thundering in her chest like a stampeding herd of deer but fluttering weakly like a butterfly against a powerful wind. Samaira wants to believe Asterion, more than anything, and she leans gratefully into his touch. If only it were this easy.
But her heart, it remembers the way she had loved him. Sometimes, she thinks it still loves who he had been, once. When they had been young, and the world had seemed simpler. And even after they had been separated and grown up, he had spent his whole life looking for her. But he had never really been looking for her, had he?
“The world I came from is called Irindor. Many years ago, there was a war between the pegasi and the rest of the equines. The pegasi were eradicated—none were allowed to live, not with their wings.” Samaira only knew about her world’s history from what her parents had told her of it or what few books they ever had as she was growing up. “Over the years, pegasi were no longer around. What ones had survived no doubt fled, and none were being born.”
“But then I was born.” She flexes the wing that is not pressed gently between their bodies, the feathers extending in the air. “I was an anomaly, I guess. But my parents… they refused to give me up to the Kingdom, as they were required to do. They went into hiding; we went into hiding.”
Her parents' love for her had cost them many things. They had taken up a life essentially on the run, with their little girl that had been born with wings but shouldn't have. They had given up security, safety, friends, a steady home, to love and to protect her. To keep her safe, over themselves. How many times had they started over? How many times had they abandoned everything they had made?
But, her parents had always been strong, and happy.
So, perhaps, it is that love might cost you everything, but it should never cost you happiness. Love should bring happiness. Perhaps that is what she had been missing, then. Sometimes she thinks she is still missing it, despite the friendships she has made and the place she has found for herself as a healer in the hospital.
Her silver eyes glance at Asterion, and she is preparing to say his name, to mention Cassius at last. To say “he was a boy,” but something in her freezes, and her heart begins to race and her throat closes as if there is a noose around it. “I was discovered,” she sighs, and looks up to the sky, and ultimately leaves him out of it. “They chased me, through the forest of my home, and I finally flew but an arrow lodged itself in my wing and I fell. Somehow, I ended up here, in Terrastella.”
Samaira had never thought about that part before. She can’t say how she went from plummeting to her death in the skies over Irindor to waking on the ground of the swamps here. Maybe someone had been looking out for her that day, or she had simply gotten lucky. Regardless, the pegasus is very grateful to be alive. Yet,
"My heart always wants for things it cannot have," she says, softly, to the wind and the waves and the sky. Flight, freedom, peace, love. She has found some of those things, yes, since arriving in Terrastella, and yet, "Perhaps one day, it will have all the things it dreams of."
He listens in silence to her story, glad that they stand close enough that she might not look at the way his mouth sets when she talks of war. But maybe she can feel the tensing of his muscles, though he keeps his breathing even, in time with the lap of waves. How he wishes, then, for power beyond his water-magic. For wings, and teeth, and most of all for savagery. There are so many more lessons he should have learned from Calliope, but back then he had never wanted blood.
Asterion says nothing until she finishes with her arrival in Terrastella. But at it his eyes widen, and he glances at her. “Your wing,” he says, and realization pitches his voice low. “When I first met you - oh, Samaira. I am so sorry. And so glad you are here.” It’s easy to remember that day - the bright, new sunshine, the bandage she wore, how she looked when she tipped her face to the light and closed her eyes, letting music wash over her. How they had danced in the street, careless of onlookers.
He’d had no idea. He is almost ashamed of his ignorance. And yet she is here now, real and warm beside him, her eyes the same color as moonlight on the sea.
But the thought of war is like a grain of sand in an oyster; his emotions snag on it, anger and disgust at the wrongness of it, and he thinks of Raum and all the evils of Novus and wonders how long until that feeling is as hard and black as a pearl.
“If you wished it, if I could - I would send the Halycon to Irindor.” It should surprise him, the savageness of the thought. The king can’t look at her in that moment, afraid that if he did he might ask Flora if there was a way to do it. He’s never wanted blood until this year. Only saltwater, only dreams. Almost he envisions it, his Commander and her army giving them war until they choked on it. Instead he adds, softer, “Your parents were very brave, and must love you very much.” And what must they believe happened to their daughter? Escape, or a quick death, or worse?
Yet he softens, when she continues and speaks of her heart. The words are familiar enough to make his own ache. The bay looks away from the dawn-light over the water and touches his muzzle to her cheek, light as a breath against the markings there. “That is the way of my heart, too,” he murmurs, “though I have so much. I have faith that yours will. Every wish and more.”
He only feels a little like he’s also talking to himself.
Samaira doesn’t say anything at Asterion’s realization. There is nothing else to say about her injury now, and on that day the one thing she had needed most was not to talk about it. He had not asked, and she had not told him about it. She hadn’t told anyone about it, not until now. It is a story she carries heavily in her heart, and parts of it still a secret.
And although he cannot look at her, she looks at him when those words pass through his lips. They surprise him, but she doesn’t see him differently for him. The earthen woman could never ask such things of him, but that he would even consider them, all for the ways in which she was hurt and wronged… it’s a strange kind of warmness. And that she has still not mentioned Cassius, has not told him the entire truth, well, that perhaps tempers it a little. What would he think, if he knew of the boy she had loved who had turned into a man filled with obsession and madness?
“I wouldn’t,” she says, solemnly, with her silver eyes cast upon his face, “even if you could. We are better than that, than what it would make of us.” Samaira doesn’t say that it makes them better than the ones in Irindor, the ones who strip the flight from pegasi and chase and hunt and kill them despite the fact that their birthright is out of their control. She doesn’t say that it makes them better than the ones who turn in a pegasus, out of fear or promises of wealth or hatred.
But she feels it, and knows it is true.
“They were, and they did.” Samaira’s moon-bright gaze turns toward the sea, and she wishes she could share it with her parents. Her father would have loved it, as wide and deep and far as it is. Like his love, and his warmth, and his strength. “They passed, a few years ago,” it’s a bittersweet thing, remembrance. But the least she can do is honor all that her parents did for her by staying alive, and enjoying the freedom she now has.
Samaira wants to believe that she will, that her heart will have every wish and more. But when Asterion touches her, gently, upon the cheek, some part of her thinks it will not be so. That she is not destined for such wonderful things. But she is content, for now, to stand here with him by the sea and watch the sun rise into the sky. To let the morning pass and wash over them, still and serene. She is content, for now, to let it be, and to let them be who they are. Because in that moment, short as it is in a lifetime, it is enough.
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