elif
It’s O, says her friend, just as Elif had known she would, and she smiles a little because at least this is something right, something natural.
Not like everything else going on, not like their dead queen’s body missing from the battlefield, not like the memory of snow cold against her legs.
She settles back when Caine corrects himself, does nothing to hide her sharp curiosity watching him watch the weapons; he does it with the same ease with which she tests the breeze each morning, or assesses the clouds and what they mean for flying. Oh, to be so at ease with a weapon! Elif’s only tools for fighting are her sharp tongue and teeth and hooves, and she is always too quick to wield them. So it is a relief to hold the weapon and test its weight like someone experienced, to give it back without cutting anything but air.
But then!
Elif’s eyes widen in shock as the dagger becomes a sword, wavering like a mirage in the heat above the sand. At first her mind tumbles in the bare moments before it reaches Caine, thinks what did I do? - and then she remembers O, mysterious, three-eyed O, and their talk of illusions after the maze.
She turns at once, even as the blade becomes just what it always was and clatters like a collapsing star to the table. Her mouth is open to speak (to praise? to rebuke? she hasn’t even gotten there yet) but Caine does first. Also, he says, Just like your father, and all at once it is Elif who is cut from the conversation by a phantom blade.
Her eyes flash, fierce, on O before she looks back to the boy, and finds herself shocked for the second time in a handful of moments. His eyes are aflame, the runes carved along the fine bones of his face alight; he does not look like a boy but a god and Elif steps back, bumping into the table of knives without noticing. They clatter and gnash like teeth and are still, but her eyes never leave Caine’s, although it almost hurts to look, how bright they are, how strange.
Yet sharper and more terrible than that hurt is the one that bites at her to be so excluded, made all the worse for how childish she knows it is and how little she can do to stop it. How wrong, she thinks, to feel this way knowing that O’s father is so recently dead -
“And what are your illusions?” she asks, bright and brash, telling herself she only wants to steer the conversation away from such a new wound.
At the same time, the weapons-merchant has decided he’s finally had enough; he stands, barrel-chested, slit-eyed. “Leave,” he hisses, “or I shall call the guards on you, and I promise their swords are very real.”
And Elif twists back her ears and glances between her companions (and oh, they seem so strange now, so apart from her, when only moments ago they’d seemed as knowable as her own shadow), and wishes she already had something keen and hungry strapped to her side. Maybe then she would not feel so small.
