in sunshine and in shadow
He smiles when she calls his court the perfect place, for how could he do anything else? And, just as she buries her own memories, he pushes down and down the way the streets had looked half-submerged, the way his people shivered and feared and drowned, the look in their goddess’s eye when she set them a test they could only ever fail. It is over, he tells himself, and they are still here. There are flowers growing along the cobblestone streets and music coloring the air more brightly than birdsong and they are here.
When the brush of her feathers glances across his shoulder light as a whispered prayer he closes his eyes. It is only the sun beating down on his back, then, and the summer-wildflower scent of her beside him, and her touch a reminder that neither of them are alone. In he breathes, and gathers all these things to himself. As he exhales he opens his eyes to her smile, and it is as easy as breathing to return it. “Yes,” he agrees, “we will.” And for once there is no doubt in him.
It is easier still to follow her across the street, heedless of the eyes that turn to watch him, filling himself only with the music and summer sunlight. The musician smiles to see them approach, and bows her head back to her fiddle.
Samaira, she names herself, and he lets the name sink down and down as he studies her grin and the dark fall of her hair. “It must have been a lovely song,” he says, soft, and thinks of what his own mother used to hum to them, woven in with the sighing of the sea. “Did it have any words?”
Oh, but Asterion is beyond words then, as his feet begin a drumming against the pavement. Out, out of his head he wills all the other memories, all the other dances; he sways like the summer breeze, he raises his head to the sky, and when there is the sound of laughter, warm as bells in evening, it takes him a moment to realize it is coming from his own throat, his own mouth, his own heart.
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