in sunshine and in shadow
His dreams of late have been fractured things. Patterns of darkness and of light that wash over him like moonlight through the waves, keeping him tossing through the night. Each morning he wakes far before silver dawn, and though his days are full (a business that stretches him to his seams) he dreads each sundown, unwilling to return to the arms of sleep.
Maybe it is lucky that it is summer, and each night brief.
Always, always, he misses the sea. He knows it is close; when the breeze blows right, and the sun is hot, sometimes he lifts his head and tastes the salt on the air. Seagulls cry over the court, and Asterion imagines they beckon him home.
This evening, he listens.
For once Florentine has no tasks for him (or, perhaps more accurately, he can find none for himself – always he pushes harder than she asks, desperate to prove his worth) and he slips through the gate away from the city. For a moment the bay only stands, breathing deep of the summer evening, searching for the first fireflies of the season – and then he follows the breeze, tugging its fingers through his silver-threaded hair, leading him to the cliffs.
Up and up he winds, enjoying the burn of his muscles, the thinner air, the sunlight as it slants long and golden on the swaying wildflowers. It’s been too long since he was well and truly alone; Asterion feels like a stranger in his own head. He is afraid to search his own thoughts; he lets them stream by, driftwood on a river, unwilling to get caught up in their current. Below them, he knows, wait the pieces of his dreams.
So he is glad for the distraction, as the light shifts like a magician’s trick to rose and the horizon to violet. He can hear the water from here, crashing hungrily against the rocks, as familiar to him as breathing. Asterion glances toward the cliffside and sees the stranger. For a moment he hesitates, unwilling intrude in case she, too, was looking for solitude; when he does step toward her, it is out of a Regent’s duty as much as quiet curiosity.
“May I?” he says, glancing at her sidelong, unwilling to stare but caught by her striking appearance nonetheless. The sunset turned her even richer, crimson and gold more vivid than any horizon, and he can catch no familiar scent on her, disguised as they are by salt and sea-grass. “I’ve seen many sunsets from here, but never one in summer.”
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