—
« I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough. »
A
ugust is more free than he’s ever been in his life, and he’s beginning to feel it.
Maybe that’s expected of a man who spent the better part of the winter with scabs turning to scars in a cellar. But it’s less of a physical thing (though the spring air is fresh and clean, sure, and it’s good to see the sun and sea again) than a mental weightlessness. He feels like a ship that’s traveled for years under a heavy load, and has finally left it at harbor.
There’s a lightness to his step, then, that’s been missing for a couple years as he walks among the rows and rows of flowers. August has never been to Terrastella before; it seemed a natural enough place to stop off on his way back from the Delumine festival. Giving his life to the Scarab as he had, he’d never really had the chance to travel, too tied to his work and his patrons. Now he planned to relish it.
He’s far from the only one in a fair mood today. The sky is a blameless blue, the air is thick with the sweet scent of blooms, and everywhere horses wander in pairs, in groups, and, more rare, alone like him. It’s another solo figure whose eye he catches as she passes by - a gaze as pretty-blue as the spring day, as golden as he is, with flowers wound in her mane.
“How do you think they got them planted so precisely?” he asks her, smiling amiably, as though he has not just forced on her the most unimaginative small-talk possible.
Unburdened he may be, but his conversational skills could use a brush-up.
lena thought she knew about heartbreak. But she realizes now she didn't know what it truly meant until her daughter looked up at her with those forget-me-not blue eyes and told her she didn't need her mom to walk her to school today. That she could do it all on her own.
She didn't need her.
So Elena finds herself in the gardens at the spring festival, with the flowers she and other Terrastellans planted in preparation. She tries not to imagine her daughter walking the familiar path from their cottage and into the court all by herself to school. She tries not to think who she will not be there to greet her outside the school’s doors that afternoon, how she will be forced to wait at their cottage for her to come home. So much can happen between now and then. She feels like she is missing out. Elli will bring home artwork that Elena did not get to see her make, she will learn songs that she will sing in class that Elena will never hear. She never realized how much she is missing. Maybe she should have realized it sooner. All of it is starting to feel too late.
Her steps are not as light as they usually are as she moves through the flowers. They are beautiful, the tulips, how they managed to plant so many colors is beyond her. She finds the ones that are her favorites. Tulips of yellow and red, mixed together, yellow and red. Her and Lilli. That is what it reminds her of and she thinks about that so that everything else does not hurt so much.
A spring gale kisses against Elena’s skin. Her head turns into it, smelling the scents of her home, of Terrastella and this is when she meets a face of similar shade to her own. “We took a guess and let nature do all the rest,” she says and smiles like the flowers that have bloomed. “I’m Elena, are you enjoying the festival?”
—
« I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough. »
O
nce, August had been needed, too.
Once he’d been in charge of protecting a princess in hiding. He’d taught the girl swordsmanship, games of logic, how to lie with a smile, how to say no and leave the person feeling like you’d said yes.
And no matter all the duties he had, all the hours from first daylight to past midnight he spent, no matter how hard he worked and how much he gave - it was harder, far harder, to wake up one day and realize nobody needed him at all.
He had not taken it well.
But the palomino was better now - healed, even. Scars were tender things, but sometimes they didn’t even itch. He’d tell her that, if they were friends and not strangers. He’d tell her and still know it was something she’d have to learn for herself, because that kind of wisdom was never transferrable.
Her smile is a bright thing, the heart-shaped star on her forehead incredibly charming. He thinks that here is someone it must be incredibly easy to like - he used to know what that felt like, too. “I spent most of my life in a gambling parlor and let me tell you, your guesses are better than most.”You should try your luck there sometime, he almost adds, but smiles blithely back instead; the Scarab has not been his home for a while now. “I’m August, and I am. Can’t say I know much about flowers, but I like to think I can recognize beauty when I see it.”
hrough this festival, if Elena just closed her eyes tightly enough, she could imagine herself back in Paraiso, with Lilli beside her.
Paraiso.
There they had learned to build a tower of stone. Where they discovered the disconnected delights of chaos when a tower fell.
Where they learned to make a daisy chain. To intertwine the pieces together until it stretched to infinity. (Or until they were called home for bedtime.)
Where they studied silence (like the children of scholars), and learned the bright language of dragonflies.
Where they learned to wait. To watch, to think thoughts and not voice them. To gaze up at the creatures that admired their steadiness and stillness.
Where they learned to love. (Though some say they have known since the day they were born.)
But she blinks and the thoughts are gone as the golden girl looks to the palomino man. Maybe, if they were friends and not strangers, she would have asked him to build a tower of stone, make daisy chain, study dragonflies. Or ask him who he loves, who he loved, and why. But they are strangers.
“I cant take all the credit,” she says with a smile. “Dusk’s people are incredibly talented and devoted,” she says and speaks the truth. “You’ve come on one of the best days, peek booming,” she says, sending her blue gaze out and across the colors that spread out before them. She picks a flower then, a tulip of light purple (the color Elli picked out) and places it in his hair. “Tell me about this gambling, you must have some wild stories.”
—
« I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough. »
"N
aturally,” he says, a generic pleasantry, though in all honesty August isn’t sure he’s ever met anyone from Terrastella. Oh, certainly they’d come through the Scarab, and doubtlessly he’s made smalltalk with horses from Dusk in the Night Markets or along the harbor, but he had never really paid much attention to their neighbors to the west. Probably he was underrating them through his disregard, but really it was a point in their favor - better than his substantially thornier thoughts regarding Solterrans.
He’s a little surprised when she picks a flower, but dips his head gamely that she might place it, feeling the brush of her touch light as swallow’s wing. Before he can thank her, she continues speaking, and his silver eyes find the bright blue of hers. “I do at that.” The palomino’s smile then is slim and swift; he does, indeed, have days’ worth of stories, though not all of them fit for polite company. And even the memory of those sears something deep within him, the bits of August-who-was.
“Would you prefer to hear about the man who gambled away his family’s estate? We had to have him followed to make sure he didn’t end up in the harbor that night - whether on his own terms, or his wife’s.” He snorts, remembering how Aghavni and Minya, in rare agreement, had sided with the wife on that one.
“Ah, or there was the time a local merchant accused the last regime’s captain of the guard of cheating at a game of liar’s dice - we tried not to make a habit of interfering, but there was going to be a Denoctian bloodbath if we didn’t separate the gentlemen. ‘Course, he was cheating,” August adds in an afterthought, with a twitch of his lips.
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