asterion*
He does not expect her grin (oh, but shouldn’t he have learned to, by now? It is another way Moria is not so different than his sister; it is an other way that loving her is easy, a foregone conclusion), nor the way that she switches the tone of their conversation like a swallow shifting in flight with the sun on its wings.
Her wink, too, is a balm. Like they could be anywhere at all, back among garlands of flowers and sweet strains of music in Delumine. The new king does not answer her laugh with his own, but when she steps nearer again, so that there is no room between them for snowflakes to fall, he lips at the tangle of dark curls just before her ear. “I’m beginning to wonder if you live on sweets,” he says, a silver laugh in his voice so she knows he isn’t serious, “and never eat anything sensible, like clover. But I suppose if there is anything sweet left in the castle, we can find it.”
Moira has worked her magic on him again. Despite her bandaged wing, despite the wreckage just visible beyond the swirling veil of snow, despite the hungry sounds of the sea as it pulls and pulls against the shore, Asterion thinks we will be alright. Hope: rare but indelible, a gleam of sunlight that splinters through clouds that promise only rain. He can’t remember the last time he felt it, and he can’t imagine how he survived so long without it.
Ahead of them the keep takes shape, walls dark behind the drifting flakes. Now there are others, in pairs and threes and alone drifting to and from the archway, but the bay finds it easy to keep pretending they are alone. The snow dampens sound, acts a veil between the world and the two of them, and the king finds it impossible not to remember the kiss, not to have every heartbeat say what if, what if—
Ah, but every dream is not so easy. As she speaks again, even as he laughs, shaking his head, he lets a step grow between them, then two. Never does his gaze stray from her (especially that smile), but he keeps that small distance until his heartbeat is his own again.
“You are most welcome to them,” he says dryly. “I think I much prefer birds, at least when they are not made of storms.” Asterion smiles, a match for hers, even as he thinks down his bond with Cirrus there is no question about it.
And then the dark mouth of the keep is before them, warmth ahead and the snow behind, and the bay stallion steps alongside her again. “Tell me more of springtime at your estate,” he says, and wonders at how natural the words sound, rolling off a tongue that learned to speak alongside a lonely wild beach. Oh, many are the ways that Novus has changed him - he wonders what others are still to come. “And show me the way to the kitchens, so we can satisfy your sweet tooth for at least a little while.” This time it is Asterion that winks, and the smile he wears then is like the silver line of horizon after the storms have passed.
@
