A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
His heart is steadied by her silver words, the way they fall in patterns like spring rain, and it is bruised when she turns away from him.
Asterion is no more fooled by the easy tone of her voice than he had been before; he does not have to be a diviner to read the hurt in it, the dismissal of her cough. He has only to be her friend to know.
“But that is not yet,” he says quietly, firmly. The words are like the ghosts of others, poorly imposed on what she had told him that foggy day by the sea: not old yet. Asterion does not know if he means it more for her or for himself. Either way, he has long since forgotten the maps, the small treasures, the whiff of adventure like the salt of the sea. He is thinking only of home.
Home - and perhaps a warm bed. The bay had long preferred to bed down beneath willows and make his sheets of night-cool grasses, but this part of the king was changing, too. There was nothing so terrible, in new and chilly spring, about a fireplace and a few walls to keep out the chill.
But this is a secret of his own, far more egregious than his Commander’s bell-like recitations.
“Escort me back to the keep?” he asks her, and his own gaze does not wander. It is steady on her, now, and there is something of a gleam in the well-dark of his eye. ”I promise not to tell anyone of your love of poetry, if you promise to share more of it with me.” Deliberately he steps into her, bumping his shoulder against hers, the down of her feathers making his heart toll and ache. Why, he thinks, must all soft things be hidden away and guarded? Why did safe from hurt so often mean hard?
But Asterion pushes these thoughts away, looking instead at the bright lines painted on her wings, the shorn nape of her neck. She is almost black, beneath the moonlight, save the moon-glow below her wings and the silver of her eyes. “Can’t ruin your image,” he adds then, turning, and his star-faint smile becomes a boyish grin.
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