[P] Our irreparable yesterdays

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow*   Raymond is here, Cirrus had told him, fifteen minutes earlier. Out over the city on a blue-sky day like this she was just another gull in a score of them, unremarkable, and this suited her just fine. For a long moment Asterion had said nothing, sent no feeling down the bond between them; and then, at last, Is he alone? They both knew he did not mean guards. The answer came swiftly. Yes. Good. He waits in the throne room. It is a solemn, stately place, but Asterion has always thought it a false holiness. Your people should see you, he’s been told, again and again, but he does not think they should see him like this. Ragged, worn down like old leather, a chewed bone. His coat is dull, the twilight of it faded; his ribs are slats beneath his skin; the silver shot through his dark hair is only gray. He has never been so tired – but he is hardly alone in that. The courtier arrives, announces Raymond, Regent of the Night Court. Almost the bay smiles; he feels caught in a loop of history, like another mistake of Florentine’s dagger. He nods for the Regent to be sent in. When he sees the man, there is no remnant of the admiration he used to feel. Once when he’d looked on that blood-bright coat he had thought red, like my father’s, and the memory shames him now, a reminder of the foolish boy he was, the one he could not afford to be again. Yet there is a part of him that wants to say something cruel, something scathing – to congratulate Raymond coldly on his promotion or ask if it pleases him, to see what changes the gods have wrought in Terrastella. But it is only the voice of his weariness and the last embers of hurt and bitterness and the new king douses them, buries them like the old coals they are. Raymond is not Isorath. (Although the latter had only ever bruised his sister’s heart). Another memory: the two of them walking together through summer-swaying grasses, still salt-slick from a fight. One he had gone into knowing he would lose. How would you defend against a man like yourself? The voice of a boy who should know better, always too eager to learn. Me? I wouldn’t bother trying. Once more he meets the gaze of that red man. “If you were hoping for Florentine, I have to disappoint you.” His voice was as distant as the winter sea, and nearly as cold; he allows silence to pool between them then, studying the red stallion for any trace of sorrow, any hint of grief or remorse. The echoes from their last meeting linger – well can he remember Raymond’s careless, caustic tone, his condescension. And then he sighs, and turns his gaze to the colored-glass windows, where sunlight falls in lazy, rich hues to the cool stone floor. “Our healers are as good as is said. But they can do nothing for her mind – her memories.” Worse than her clear inability to lead, Florentine looks at him now with affection, but a vacant kind of it, as though they’d been childhood friends for a single summer. It aches, but not as bad as some things do. Asterion has lost a sister before. When he looks back, his glance touches the crisscross of fresh scars across his shoulders, pale against the red, and it makes him think of Calliope. It’s almost a relief, then, to once again meet Raymond’s gaze. “She does not remember me. I cannot say if she would remember you, Regent, or any of what has happened. But I do.” His heart is a floodplain, a sinkhole, an empty awful place he comes to drown, alone. Can Raymond see how weak he is, how weary, how afraid? Is he any better at hiding such things than he was as a careless boy? So many now depend on him. “What business, then, from your new queen?” @Raymond