MADE A GRAVEYARD FROM THE BONE-WHITE AFTERNOON
❀
It is easy to tell, as long as they stand there, that they might have been born on equal footing: gold in the veins, and around the wrist - heavy on the neck, where Bexley’s aureate chain still lays tight around her throat. It burns bright under the hot white eye of the sun. When she swallows it moves warm against that copper skin, and for a moment, feeling the weight of it, watching the man in front of her, she thinks briefly about her brother and the land she left and whatever slave crafted that chain around her neck and has to blink hard against the sun to keep her eyes dry.
It has been weeks, months, maybe, since she last thought of anything like that, and it hurts. Her heart throbs too-loudly in her chest. Whiteness seeps like syrup into the squinting corners of her vision. Some part of her bristles defensively at the idea that a stranger should be able to well up such intense emotions, that she has become so weak in the face of what has plagued her. Cool, faint disgust flickers over her face, then disappears.
She watches his gaze plague the desert, bright-pink and curiously intense. It seems almost like the gaze of a prey animal. As if, for all his posturing and grandiose confidence and airs of arrogance, he knows what it is like to be the hunted rather than the hunter, what it is to be the smallest thing in any scene. It’s a look that doesn’t seem to belong on him, but one Bexley recognizes intimately.
All that is forgotten as he asks his first question.
The Regent’s eyes narrow with sparkling, near-venomous humor: her gaze glints icy blue against the streaming overhead sun. Ha! Bexley answers, and her voice is thick with mischieviousness, utterly careless as she flashes him a shark-toothed smirk. It is a death trap, but it’s also a lot more. She raises a brow at him in daring. I can show you around, if you’re interested in dying a different day.
Without even pausing to answer, she shifts on her feet and turns nimbly in a half-circle, back toward the Day Court. Hidden as it is behind the vast dunes and glaring sun, Bexley knows the way back as intimately as she knows her own gold chain and white socks.
