[AW] Invictus - [Meeting]

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* It is a humid early summer day, sweat slick as seaspray on his skin as he stands beside Florentine in the dull green water of the swamp. Asterion has not looked forward to this meeting, and even now his stomach is twisting with unease, though his features are serene. His sense of duty keeps him steady, his love of his sister and his court keeps him brave, but his heart wishes he were elsewhere. Little changes as he listens to his queen speak, grateful for the lightness in her tone, so long absent. Talk of the Ilati feels to him like talk of legends, and though it is all interesting enough he is bracing for what he knows will come next. When it does he cannot keep his eyes from straying to Lysander, who stood impassively amid the vines. Asterion knows little enough of the man, only that he came from the Rift, only that he seems familiar in a way the bay can’t reach, like an itch he can’t find. But all thoughts of the other man cease when Jude begins to speak. The Regent’s gaze moves to the kirin, and he falls to stillness as the stallion continues. Each word tightens his jaw, each use of the word war making his heart thunder in surprise and outrage, and he cannot even spare an apologetic look at Florentine before responding. “I can only guess where you’ve heard these rumors of war,” he says, and inside him lives a whirlpool, churning, hungry. His gaze, dark as the space between stars, dark as the seabed at night, does not waver from Jude. “Just as I can only guess how you speak with such certainty of events you were absent for.” Oh, but he can guess, and that is clear in his eyes, too; in his memory he sees them again, the day Florentine was crowned, the two kirins so striking in the sunlight. How fickle a thing he is finding trust to be. Asterion remembers when he came to Isorath’s rooms to ask for his tutelage; how nervous he was, how imposing and grand the kirin seemed. Oh, he is a fool; he will not so easily admire such men again. Guilt, too, churns inside him – that he had not been there with his queen at the festival, that he had instead been discovering what lay in his own heart. Loyalty and love. It is both that brace his tongue to speak now, however ill-thought or foolish his words. “Florentine’s actions that night and following were in the interest of the court. You will not put others’ sins on her head.” Here his own ears twist back and he stops, pulls in a breath through his teeth. It does nothing to soothe him; it is only wind on the whitecaps of his anger and incredulity. “You speak of the pride of a people who would act treasonously and then burn the court they wronged, and in the same breath tell your queen not to let her heart rule her head?” He wants to laugh, now, but manages to close his teeth on it. When he speaks again, after a pause where even the buzz of insects seems to have fallen still, it is in a voice far more level than he feels. “If anyone has been wronged, if anyone has been provoked, it is not the Night Court.” There is a smile then, slight as a shadow and without humor. “Luckily Dusk is more interested in places of healing than in naming enemies.”