lysander
It is quiet in this secret garden she has helped shape; no other horse has yet wandered this far. There is only the birdsong, only the wind, only the drifting strings of music like echoes from another world, one just a sigh or a shadow away.
When Lysander looks around him, he sees only beautiful things.
“Some would say the end of all things,” he answers, and his smile is a crooked thing then, the smile a fox wears as it watches the hounds far below. Oh, Lysander knows better than most (but not so well as some) that there is no ending, not when there are so many worlds, not when they tangle and weave and eat each other up again and again and again.
When his gaze finds hers - caught on the tines of his antlers - he sees the sorrow there and it ripples in his own heart, soft rings that drift in and not out. But Lysander also remembers the first time she had looked upon his crown of pale bone, the fear that had been in her eyes, the way her glance had evaded his like a hunted dove. Sorrow, he thinks, is a better thing than fear. And when he studies the dragon as it comes alongside her - surely a thing out of stories, born of sky and sea and myth - his heart aches for her a little less.
If Isra finds herself alone, it will only because she chooses it.
It is a small comfort, but he is wise enough to know no good has ever come from worrying for a unicorn. For a moment there is only the crickets and the frogs and the sound of each of their breathing, a once-god and two myths, and yet he feels more real than anything. Even when she numbers her happinesses (so few!) the last of his smile does not die away any more than the last of the sunlight.
“When I see you again we will find you a third,” he says, and his eyes catch hers with the promise (not only of the happiness, but of the return). “If you have not had that and more by then.” And oh, he wishes it for her, as much as he ever wished anything for the girls that came to him hungry and wanting when he was a laughing god in a dark wood. In his own way he had loved them all, had taken them under his crooked care - but Isra is not the same. When he is with Isra it is easy to forget which of them has lived a hundred lives, and easy to remember that if it weren’t for her he would not have this one.
The way she says her name is only another reminder. When she steps away from him the summer air feels cooler than it ought against his side and he closes his teeth on the word stay.
“You may regret it,” he says instead, and grins sidelong at her before turning to find a place to bed down beneath the trailing vines. “I do not tell them half so skillfully as you.” The air is thick and slow and golden, scented with roses and with jasmine, and his glance finds her then with an invitation. But whether she joins him or no, folded like a foal beneath a bower of leaves, he breathes deeply of the evening and begins.
“Once,” he says with his green eyes laughing, “there was a girl who was blessed with magic. But she did not see it as a blessing but a curse, for though she could bring things green and growing from the soil, they were dangerous things: bright oleander and pale hemlock, foxglove and manchineel.” When he closes his eyes he can see the girl, fretful and lovely, her eyes like windows that looked out on lashing rain. “She feared her gifts and the injury they could cause, and she cast herself from her village that she might protect them from her magic. Oh, how she prayed that one morning she might bloom primroses and not poison ivy! But every wish for narcissus turned instead to nightshade. Soon she vowed not to use her magic at all, for surely no good could come of it.”
It is Isra he looks to then, the queen with her burdensome crown, and her magic that might turn all things lovely and cold and still. He thinks of his own magic, his own long years, spiraling back centuries of blood and wine and rich black earth.
“I have never seen much use in regret,” he says then, but he feels suddenly too mortal, too fragile, and wonders at the difference between blood of iron and blood of gold.
@Isra so long, so awful
