A hundred dandelion wishes are flying free in that space behind her eyes. They are flying fast and free in a tornado of hope and a tidal of worry. Each seed is dark as soot and soon it feels like a wasteland of black dust flecks is forming fast in her mind. It's snowing black thoughts in her mind.
But then she watches him blow a seed out to the sea (to Fable) and each of her dead snowflake thoughts turns to rain. Looking at him feels like holding the rain, cool and impossible against her dry lips. Isra is so tired of tasting sand and dust.
She's tired, tired, tired.
The brine tastes almost holy between them when she moves closer and rests her cheek against his neck. Everything about her feels like a stone in the wet and seeded sand. Everything about her feels like it's sinking. Into war, into exhaustion, into sorrow she's sinking like a boulder in the deep sea. She wants to tell him everything. She wants to tell him that she understands the need to walk and walk on until the world is nothing but a blur of a dreamscape.
Instead what she says is,
“I'm ok”, and the lie burns like salt in a fresh wound. Isra's not ok, she's bits of flesh broken down and stitched together. She's a girl who wants to cry at the same time she wants to burn the world down. All of her is broken and sharp and she's bleeding out deep beneath her skin where the world cannot see. She's bleeding violence and empathy.
And she knows that in the end there will be nothing left of the unicorn she was, nothing left of the slave who wanted to die. Isra has no idea what will be left of her in the end and it terrifies her. But she's telling herself,
do not tell him, don't say a word. The curl of her horn sings in the ocean wind and she hope he'll listen to that song instead of the off-beat hum of her weak heart.
Below that whispering wind-song she pulls her cheek from his neck and her eyes are still saying
do not tell him. Her eyes shine like snow above the sea, cold and made of salt.
“I'm going to kill Raum.” Each of her teeth feels like a blade behind her brittle lips. She feels like a blade digging a grave out of the dirt, shoveling away pile after pile of brown loam and pale worms.
“I'm going to free Solterra from him.” Fable roars in the waves and starts to make his way to the shore. The sound of his slow rage almost drowns all her words but
free. Isra almost smiles and she hopes that her white-blade teeth are still hiding the words
say nothing.
ISRA THE GRAVE DIGGING BLADE;
“Passion has brought justice where there was savagery.”
