[AW] BONE-SAW.

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* There is something he finds strangely comforting about the severity of her. In the hard shine of her eyes, the efficient way she moves, the blunt cut of her mane, Asterion sees control. He sees a woman who knows her purpose and how best to accomplish it – someone who never wavers, never doubts. He is not a man given to jealousy, but oh, how he longs to be so certain. For a moment they are only two dark shadows that match stride-for-stride beneath the watchful moonlight. Maybe it shouldn’t, but Asterion feels something in his chest ease. Her sureness makes it easier for him to pretend his own. He even smiles, when she answers him with a brusqueness he has come to expect from her. This, too, feels somehow safe – it keeps him from sharing his own secrets, that dark wash of feelings that always seems so eager to spill. “I’ve never heard it phrased that way,” he says amicably, and side-steps a gleaming puddle before meeting her gaze again. “We’d be fewer, anyway.” His voice is still light, almost teasing, but the words are too close to truth; indeed, without healers, at least one man would have been lost in recent months. If his dark mouth hadn’t pulled down then, it would have at her next words. At first he says nothing, only drops his chin in the barest of admissions, turning his gaze away. Silence would swallow them but for the sigh of the wind, the soft clip of their steps, the even tide of their breathing. Asterion considers how easily, how quickly, things had fallen apart: was this always the way of it, a swift break no matter how careful the building? There are so many things he knows – what kind of clouds signal which change of weather, and where the sea-birds lay their nests, and what makes the best cover for a rainy night spent in the woods. But politics, and the histories of a people, and the intricacies that bind them all together and pull them once more apart – of these he is unlearned. Asterion is a willing student, but his mind was not made to bend to such things.  Duty, he thinks, and watches the way Marisol sets her shoulders, the way she takes in their surroundings like she’s reading a book. “Has it always?” He hates himself for the part of him that wants her to say yes. Yes meant that the wheel had long been in motion – that nothing he and Florentine had done or could do could alter its course. “I suppose peace wastes the skill of commanders,” he adds, and hopes he might catch another hint of a smile. @Marisol