One look around those gathered was enough to make Acton wonder what the hell he was doing there.
He had never involved himself in the affairs of the kingdom. Even as one of Reichenbach’s closest confidants, a brother in all but blood, he had been only a shadow around the palace for the duration of the former king’s reign. Acton’s business had been elsewhere, and so had his heart - Denocte as a whole had never held much interest to him.
The buckskin wondered just when that had changed.
He could feel the gaze of the unicorn - the other one, the dark one - on him, but Acton had eyes only for their queen. That, and the bird just beyond her. There was something familiar in the sound of his beak when it snapped shut, something that made his blood jump below his skin.
But it did not attack, and Isra only kept talking.
At first it was subconscious, the way he took a step forward to better listen even as the wind of a hundred wings drug its fingers through his mane. Then, as her voice continued as soft and undeniable as a wave on the shore, Acton began to close the distance between them. He never looked once at Raymond, and by now he’d decided not to look at the bird again, either - he worried it might see the bright challenge in his eyes. If it was anything like him, that was all the encouragement it would need to strike.
His magic was a livewire beneath his skin, too, by the time he reached them, but there was no help he could see for illusions here. If he needed them, if it came to it, he would find a way for them to matter. Until then he would wait, but patience had never come easy to Acton and it cost him now. Maybe it was her words that kept him from speaking, the easy rise and fall of her voice like one of the gypsy singers in the Night Market. Maybe he was like the bird in that way, too.
Whatever it was, it kept him quiet, though the line of his mouth was nowhere near to laughing. And when Acton reached Isra he lay down, too, and even in the darkness and the storm he looked like nothing more than a boy at the feet of a storyteller, hungry for the ending.
we have a flair for the shade and in-between
