Is this what she had felt, watching him wake from that deep-below, that drowning depth? Had her heart perched in her throat, a treed pheasant with the dogs slavering below? Had she felt as though she were the one dying, so still, so snared in bandages and blood?
It was never supposed to be like this. In how many worlds, in how many bodies have they met and re-met, untangling their long story ever further? If anyone should forget it should be he, bound to a timeline as he is, more mortal now than she –
But Lysander smiles nonetheless, and draws near to her across the heart of the tree, until the shadow of his antlers slants across the golden spill of her hair. Surely it is his imagination that has her flowers wilting, limp and pale. His dark smile never reaches his eyes, and those slide to the dagger at her bedside. The scabbard has been carefully cleaned of blood, but some is still black on the links that make up the silver chain. Left much longer and it would rust there.
Only a moment later his gaze falls back to her, eyes the color of hyacinths made dull by medicine. Her smile is not her smile; the gleam in her eye is not the one she shares only for him.
“Once you named me husband,” he says softly, and touches the velvet of his nose to the smooth plane of her cheek. “We have called each other many things. But I am Lysander.”
Oh, he does not want to pull away; if he could he would stay with his muzzle to her throat forever, inhaling flowers and sunlight on gold, and never pull back to see her body so broken. But with a sigh he does, forcing himself steady as his dark gaze catalogues every injury, from the bruises that bloom beneath her skin to the way her wing and leg is so tightly bound, seeping blood making terrible rosettes against the white.
Careful, he thinks, but there is wrath in him still, all the blacker to find her here like this. Was it gods or men who left her so? He thinks of Calliope, trailing him like a predator in the forest to the north, and what she had said of revenge. Never has he wanted it for himself – it had seemed less important than anything.
Now he understands. Now he would slay a dozen men to find the one that had left her broken; now he would paint the bone-pale tines of his antlers with their blood. Man or god or monster, it mattered not which – for Florentine, Lysander would carve out his retribution.
All this passes in the dim green of his eyes, yet still he wears that easy smile. It should frighten him, the way his heart churns black and blacker still, the way he feels so calm on the outside.
”Can you tell me, Florentine,” he says, as idly, as gently, as though asking her the time, “how you came to be in this sickbed?”
babe, there's something wretched about this
something so precious about this
@
