Let there be no debts between us, she says, and Asterion wants to tell her that oh, he used to live that way - nothing owed, only given - but that he has forgotten how. Long now is the list of debts he has, complicated as sailor’s knots, a hundred strands of hemp that moor him to Terrastella.
Is love the same as debt? He wonders it there in the darkness, and shivers again, and thinks of how weak his body has become, now he sleeps between stone walls.
“I’ll do my best,” he says, smiling like it’s a joke, knowing it’s all he’s ever been able to say. There is something about her that makes him feel like he’s in that place between dreaming and waking, when you could see the moonlight pooling in front of you but when you dreams are still half-real, as thick around you as fog. A place where anything could happen, where you could go back into the arms of sleep or rise to face the day.
It is nothing at all like he’d felt meeting Reichenbach. There was no dreaming to the gypsy-king, only life, richer than anything Asterion could imagine. Isra’s way is easier, to him, but no less strange.
Her question then is not wholly a question and the bay tilts his chin, almost amused and almost jealous of the way she has already mastered this. To him his questions seemed only that, and he has yet to give an order at all.
The wind catches all the fires at once, making them bend and spark higher, changing the light on her face, in her eyes, glinting off her horn. All of a sudden it isn’t a sad situation, one of sorrow and defeat - it’s an opportunity, an invitation to a ball. An open door into a story he didn’t think he would ever learn to read.
Asterion is nodding before he can catch himself, and then remembers that he is no starstuff-wanderer but a king with a broken people at his back. “Let me see to them." He turns away before he can watch any emotion move across her face - no debts, he thinks.
He speaks a few soft words to one of his chief counsellors, then looks once more at those gathered around them. If he hadn’t known them, from the journey and the long weeks before and the year before that, he wouldn’t have been able to tell who was of the court of twilight and who was of the court of stars, and he thinks that is not such a bad thing.
And then he turns back to Isra. Wonders, as he does, how many times his heart will lead him here, to starlight and to midnight, iodine and cedarsmoke.
At least one more, he thinks, and wears a smile in the shadows as he nods at her, the dark tangle of his mane falling away from the lone star, small and pale, on his forehead.
“Show me your city as you see it,” he says, and his heart rests on a current caught between excitement and guilt.
and hardly ever what we dream
@Isra
