Lonely, she named the books, as though they could feel anything at all - and though Acton had said nothing to that, had only shot her an odd crooked look, it rang and rang in his heart like the ripple of a thrown stone.
Lonely, lonely, lonely. If a book could be so isolated, so untouched - what did that make him?
All foolishness, that kind of thought and talk, the kind of thing the Crows had never bothered with. But Acton had a funny feeling it would haunt his dreams that night.
He much preferred her reaction to the garden.
Her smile bloomed better than any flower ever could, no matter whether it opened at midnight under a silver sliver of moon or at dawn in the frost or under golden hot noon. He watched that smile and when he looked back at the garden it felt a little like seeing it for the first time - all the magic, all the promise, all the maybe that it had held. He’d been little more than a lanky boy, that first night, when Reichenbach the new-crowned king gathered all his orphans and explained to them the world was theirs.
Acton smiled then, too.
It lingered even when she spoke, each word holding as much whimsy as it had when she’d called the books lonely. Never would it have occurred to him to think that way, and he opened his mouth to say so, but forgot it altogether when he watched her dip her nose into a bloom, graceful and fine-boned as any hummingbird.
How had he forgotten she was a storyteller? He is unused to this kind of dreamer, the kind that saw the silver glimmer of the stars and thought of stories instead of coins. Hers was a quieter kind of joy than any he’d known - but maybe no less fierce for that.
“I hope you do,” he said, and was surprised to find himself speaking at all. “I hope you do for a good long time.”
Only then did he break from his own stillness, shifting his gaze from hers as he walked to the cool stone of the parapet. It was only a black shape in the darkness, but beyond it the city glowed with a thousand flickering torches, an imitation of the stars above. The buckskin looked out at it for a long time, then laughed soft as soot and turned back to her.
“I was going to warn you,” he said, and there was still something black as a crow’s laugh in the timbre of his voice. “I was going to tell you to be careful, now you are queen, but I can’t think of anything worse than what you’ve already been through.”
Only a little while before, she’d said herself that there was always more bad that could happen, but the buckskin couldn’t quite believe it. For him, at least, it had been an upheaval, an unmooring, an apocalypse.
But the gods were already against them, and the power-hungry and mad had fled, and what else was there? Once, Acton and his ilk had been the blackest danger there was to Denocte.
How short-sighted he is, how boyishly cavalier, to think that it is still true.
oh, good lord, they've all gone belly-up
@Isra
