elif
It is too easy to picture herself with a weapon, too - who is there to stop her? Elif has, for the most part, still been living like a girl under watchful eye (save for one or two indiscretions), but she realizes now that there is no one to mind what she does.
Anything you want, O says, and it pulls Elif back from her thoughts. She is pleased at the answer, more pleased at the grin, and she lifts her chin skyward, letting the breeze pull fruitlessly at her short mane.
“No,” she answers, “but I’ve heard they’re unlike anywhere else.” This time there is no desert-pride burning haughty in her eyes; she is near enough to a girl yet that the only thing her head fills with is adventure. What wonders they might see, what strangers they might meet - or perhaps she might find a weapon of her own. A whip, she thinks, or perhaps a scimitar-
It takes enough of the sting out of her defeat in the maze to at last turn away from it, and put her back to the high green walls that murmur with leaves each time the wind passes by. Elif takes a last look at the strange horses positioned around the maze, little groups in sashes and silks, with their strange instruments and strangely painted faces.
And then she looks at O, at her three eyes glinting stranger than any of the Benevolent, the weapon at her hip like a thing out of a story. The grin that crosses her lips then is wide and true, and she dips her snip-nosed muzzle and starts to walk. “Have you been to Denocte before?” she asks, the tone conversational only - Elif knows nothing of Bexley or her Night-Court lover, nothing of what it might be to be torn between two cities. She only knows she likes the girl beside her, likes the music that is still rising around them like strange birdsong as they walk.
The field is a wide expanse before them, sweet-smelling summer grasses pale in the moonlight, the firelight of the city just beyond.
