A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
“Nowhere.” He does not say it mournfully, only matter-of-fact. Only he knows how fiercely he misses Denocte, how under the hollow beetle-shell of his heart the homesickness pierces like a knife. He’s never known anything like that before, has never left the Night Court except, once, for a pilgrimage up to the gods’ mountain. That was Before, back when everyone thought the gods listened and loved you.
A heartbeat, two, and then he begins climbing up toward her. She does not frighten him, not her horns or her gold or the easy way she speaks, no matter how meaningless the words are, empty as the desert with its spiraling buzzards. Her hair, long and unbound, beckons for him as the wind stirs through the canyon.
Of course he knows she is lying, of course he wonders why. It seems unlikely to him that a girl could find anything at all out here by chance, and the past few weeks have instilled a strong interest in him of someones. He does not need Raum to tell him that there are vipers everywhere, waiting for a misstep. The desert, he knows, is always a snake-pit, even when you didn’t come in with the previous queen’s blood smeared red on your chest.
But Abel does not have a monster or magic to keep threats in check. Even his shadow is starving and thin, crowding his heels.
She still towers over him when he reaches her, and he still shows no sign of minding. Abel is used to being small, smaller, smallest. He does not often mind it. A bigger dog had a harder time getting out of the way of a kick.
“I can help you look,” he says, and it is not so much a suggestion as a statement of what he would be doing next. “There’s a lot of somewhere.” There is almost something real in his quick and guilty smile, beyond the gleaming bones of his teeth, but his eyes are still pitted and empty as the moon.
@Angharad
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