“I would not have changed it. A moment was all that was needed.” He smiles then, a secret, sly thing, and is glad she does not see it. Lysander is not ready to answer when she asks him why he smiles. “Besides, gods are insufferable. I wouldn’t wish to be saved by one.” Florentine, he knows, is much more pleasant to owe.
The gods preferred their debts paid in blood and worship, and there was only one creature he is willing to give either to.
She leans against him, bright gold against his darker bronze, and he wonders if his body has ever been used this way. For a moment he thinks back, back, sorting through Novus and the Rift and Ravos, too, and Lysander comes up empty.
He wonders if he had been lonely. He wonders why their embrace now feels as though it has been done a hundred, a thousand times. (His world is still a linear thing, so why does he close his eyes and smell starglass? Why does the music seem to be swallowed up by a sky where shifting things pass from darkness to darkness? Why does he want to cast off his shoes and dance?)
Oh, she is as full of mysteries as he. He would spend an eternity untangling them.
And so he smiles back when she says good, and he makes to touch that wicked smile. There is something sorry in him when she pulls away, something strange, something that misses her.
Lysander thinks that it is a more frightening feeling than dying.
“I’ll try not to die,” he vows, still smiling. “I’ll stay away from kings and kirins, just in case. You’ve too many responsibilities to make me one.”
Her smile fades and he thinks, stay. How many expressions has she given him to read, a book he’d know blind? Ah, but Lysander misreads her now. He thinks her worried again by talk of death, unhappy with mention of kings. But in the space of a heartbeat her smile is there again, new gold, and he settles once more.
I am not done with paint, she claims, and he arches a brow at her. Someone had begun the task of painting her – there are blue whorls and rose stripes, designs that might mark her ready for war were they not in such soft colors. “No?” he asks, half-laughing, but of course he follows her (will always follow her). “We’ll see what we can add, then, if I can find the space.” As if searching for a spot, his new-leaf gaze drifts over the curve of her neck, the line of her back, her sloping shoulders and whisper-soft wings.
He drives it down, down, down, this bright-dark twist of hope-fear-want. “Maybe I’ll let you paint me, too,” he says, and is relieved that his voice does not betray him. It is steady-cool as he follows her on.
She is the only gold he’s ever treasured, and how terrifying a thing that is.
we wake with bright eyes now
@
