This close to the jewels and paints strewn haphazardly across the meadow they seem brighter than the stars. The part of me that is still my mother’s daughter draws constellation lines between the ember-bright shards of color in the dark. A dragon lays waste to a field of wheat. Below him a wolf snarls at the head of a man with his mouth gap-jawed so that he might swallow him whole. In each line I draw, in the story that fills my head, there is so much violence in that there is no room for a happy ending.
I don’t think I’d want one anyway.
When I move deeper into this strange cacophony of art-not-yet-made all those stories move with me. They are still moving with me when I take a brush and dip it in blood-red paint. For a moment I consider painting my body in the marks of war and death. I imagine drawing a wound across my throat, a smear of someone’s death below my eyes, or a gaping hole right above where my heart is.
But when I turn, when I see her, I stop thinking about painting myself with remembered wounds of war. And I do not ask for permission, I am no chivalrous thing, before I draw a bloody and secret star across her cheek. The color turns her to a creature gilded in gold to one gilded in bloody promise.
Red turns her into a creature, a girl, a thing that just might be able to keep up with me.
“I thought about you,” I draw a bloody line across my cheek to mirror the star on hers, “when I went to war." Another line joins the first and still, when I look at her, all the blood-red seems pale against the white.
Aster likes Delumine - the great, imposing forest, the castle with its spires, the wildflowers that tumble over and over each other to the horizon. And she likes the festival, the dancing and the music (she has always loved music, the one thing that might draw her to the cities), all the laughter of strangers.
She likes the way they look at her a little nervously, when she walks between them with Teak at her heels, winding between her feet, making a silent snarl any time a boy tries to approach her.
But when the cheetah makes a little chirp from behind her when she sees the unicorn, Aster bids him stay with a look. She does not smile, when the girl with the sea’s colors comes toward her, but her eyes are vivid gold.
At first she thinks that Avesta is reaching toward her for a kiss. When she realizes she is not, she offers up her cheek just as eagerly as she would have before. The paint is cold, and tickles, and does not smell like blood - but she feels a little like a hunter, anyway, like a thing that has won its meat.
“When,” she says, and it is insistent, a demand in the voice of a doe. Aster wants to know specifics - had she thought about her, bedded in a field the night before a battle, with new constellations overhead and her silver sides softly rising with the faraway thoughts before sleep? Had it been before she plunged her horn into resisting skin, or been struck for the first time?
Aster takes the brush from the unicorn and, lightly as butterfly feet, paints a sliver of crimson moon below the base of her horn.
“I told the sea to bring you home,” she says, then touches her lips more softly still to the sleek curve of Avesta’s neck. “She left her scent on you.”
All it takes is a touch to remind me that she does not know how to paint war on my skin and call it a kiss. I did not know I had been waiting for it, for the paint to feel like blood tossed across my cheekbones like dapples. But I find, as we lean into each other, that touches between us are somehow easier and harder than it had been to the horses in the war-camps.
I do not regret having the chance to learn it now. And had I been another girl, a unicorn like my sister, I might have treasured the discovery.
Instead I demand more of it, more discovery, more slick paint against my cheek, more weight pressed against my side to hold all the pieces of me that are starting to flay together. There had not been a please between us when we met in a storm. We were all thunder, all rain, all frothing waves streaking like wishes across the horizon, and I will not allow us to be gentle now.
I wish she had given me something other than a moon below my horn. It does not sit as easy as it might have once there. It shines too silver in the moonlight, too bright in the firelight, and it turns the gold of her into something pale and meek instead of furious. I speak just to catch a whisper of the thunder back into the cage of my heart. “I thought about you every time someone told me I needed to be tame.” My legs ache to run, and run, and run, until I am too fast for her wings to catch.
Someday I will.
Taking the brush from her grasp is so much easier than taking a sword from a ribcage. But for her I try to gentle it, because she is a doe and I am a wolf, and I do not want her to fear my teeth. “All you smell is me.” My correction is, perhaps, crueler than my touch had been when I took the paint from her. But I will not apologize for that either.
Because if I smell like the sea, like a bit of something else, I will have to conquer that world too so the only thing left is the taste and smell of me.
Aster’s world is not a one of open battlefields, of fields pitted with holes to shatter legs and trumpets ordering a charge like a rooster calling for morning. Her knowledge is not that of weapons made of tempered steel and how to cut a city’s knees from under it.
But oh, death - that is something she knows. She has watched Teak pull down antelope with a strangling kiss and begin to feed before their eyes are dull; she has watched hawks prey on hares and wolves on hinds. She has reached out to dying things with her magic and helped their heartbeats slow and slow…
She does not think she would be afraid of war.
Of course there is no war on her mind, not tonight, not with a phantom before her silver as the mist and real as the smell of smoke and salt and blood. Aster adds two crimson, curving lines of paint beneath the winking moon; they might be waves, they might be wings.
Her smile is as small and wicked as a silver pin when Avesta’s words crash against her ear like frothing tide. And she laughs when the unicorn takes the brush from her, and her teeth flash when she does it.
“Then it’s a good thing I like the smell,” she says, and curves her chin up and up, baring her throat for touch, or paint. She wonders if there is claiming in war - if a warrior looked at another and thought yes, you will be mine, my sword will know your flesh. Her eyes, golden and bright as the fires just being lit in the field beyond the forest, do not stray from Avesta’s, as dark as the heart of the sea. (She would say those are only her own, too, Aster thinks).
Aster has never been claimed before, never been caught - only in games with her cheetah. She wonders what it is like.
