He wishes as he stares at a blank expanse of eggshell-colored paper that he possessed any of Fiona’s talent with a pen. Asterion is no artist; he remembers how painstaking it had been to teach himself letters, the early wobbles of each line.
To turn such scratches into something beautiful feels well beyond him.
But he knows that tonight is not for perfection. It is for the fire crackling merrily in the grate, eating up cedar and pine and casting thick color and thicker shadows on the crowded hall. It is for the hum of laughter and the clatter of glasses, for cheeks warmed from wine and winter. At such events the king is always happy, but always a little uncomfortable. Never do simple pleasures seem to stay that way.
Try again, comes Cirrus’ voice, and he glances up to find her nipping her bright beak at the discarded quill. He has already attempted to draw her twice, and she has laughed, loud and rough, at each; now he huffs a breath at her and leans away from the table. “After a drink.” The big gull flicks a wing at him, but it is close enough to very well that he grins as he turns away.
For a moment his gaze drifts along those gathered, and his grin is as warm as the tapestried room. All is not well in Novus - but in here, tonight, it is close.
As he walks to a table groaning beneath the weight of casks of wine and mead a pair of pale wings catches his eye; at first he thinks Theodosia, or perhaps Israfel - but when his dark eyes regard the rest of her he finds a stranger. And yet she looks familiar, though her face is so striking he ought to have recognized it, snared in his memory the way such things were.
He finds he has drifted nearer; it would be strange, now, to suddenly turn away. So he tells himself when he closes the distance between them entirely until he is standing just over her shoulder, near enough to smell the unmistakably Terrastellan scent of her, woods and sea-wind and sweet strange smoke.
Do I know you? his eyes ask when they move to hers, but it is her paper he nods to, the last little bit of that grin still caught in the corner of his mouth. “What is that?”
and hardly ever what we dream
@
