A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
Asterion must look away from that smile.
It is wrong on her face, as wrong as the two of them walking this path to this castle beneath this foreboding sky. It is a smile thin and wane, a pale haunting of the wicked grin she’d given him when they’d first met in the secret-shadows of a treeline, when she was all soaked from a summer storm.
How strange it is, that a memory can hurt as sharply and surely as a wound.
He follows her gaze instead to a window - one that he does not know, one that he guesses at nonetheless. It is no open window he is thinking of; it is a lake lit with fireflies, it is an infirmary that smells sharp with medicine and bitter with blood, it is a haunting of words. I love you.
He was so young, then. He didn’t know anything at all.
At last she looks at him, but he does not turn his own gaze back until she speaks. Each word settles on his back, a stoning - from her they are weightier than anyone else’s could be. What would be a pebble from anyone else, a stone, could crush him coming from her golden lips.
Yet Asterion lifts his chin, and the dark of his gaze is like the parts of the sea where the sunlight cannot reach when it meets hers, like the parts of the night between the stars. “It wasn’t safe to stay,” he says. There is no hesitation in his voice, no uncertainty; for the first time, perhaps, he speaks as a king would.
What if I left?
Though she leans into him then, though she is warm and soft and smells like a bower, Asterion goes cold as suddenly as though he has plunged from the cliffside into the thrashing sea. The question does not come as a surprise to him, and he does not consider for a moment that she might only mean Denocte.
He remembers when he believed in fate, when he thought that the stars told a story just for him, mapping his path in their glitter and shine. He remembers how sure he had been, when he first came to Ravos, when he first stumbled upon his twin of gold, whose heartbeat his own had developed beside. They had shared a thing no one else could hope to, they had dreamed and reached together in the dark, and yet, and yet -
(Do not follow me. If you do I will kill you. Do you understand?)
Oh, Talia, he never understood. He still does not understand - but maybe he begins to.
He can feel her breathing against him, each slow expansion of her ribs. But Florentine, you cannot fly, he thinks, but he knows (of course he knows) that she has never needed wings to go. That she could travel from Novus as neatly and easily as flipping a page in a book, and leave him behind.
Alone, he would have thought once, but he knows now that, at least, is not true. And somehow it keeps him moored, keeps him from sinking, keeps him from squeezing his eyes tight enough to hurt and begging like a boy for her to stay.
Asterion is not a boy, not any longer, and this time he does not need Cirrus to tell him so.
“I would not stop you,” he says, and his voice is level and even but there is a sadness beneath it as terrible and secret as a shipwreck forgotten. “But I would miss you, like a death, even as I wondered what adventures you were having.”
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