asterion,
It takes him too long to spot her.
The night has turned into a full one - proud fires crackle in the grates, throwing up sparks like stars to the ceiling of the hall. The shadows have been herded to the corners where they twist and flicker and accentuate the gleam of firelight in each glass of wine and each bright eye. Laughter rises like an offering, filling the room the same way the warmth does, and for one evening winter is kept outside the door.
But not all that is cold is so easily kept away. Even as the king moves among his people, or scribbles out failed attempts at art, or downs a third glass of wine, there is a shard of worry in his heart. There are too many for whom the night is dark, and Asterion can’t shake the way that Novus feels like a python circling ever tighter. It is strange to celebrate anything at all - he has never been good at this kind of pretending.
Yet when he sees her he forgets all of it. At least for the moment it takes his heart to rise and plummet like a swallow until it alights, trembling, in his chest. Oh, what emotions have surged up like wind drawn beneath its wings - shame, confusion, anger, and a longing like the tide that pulls him to her. For a long moment Asterion resists, and only watches her from across the room, the casual fall of her braid and the firelight that sets her skin ablaze. Even from here she is a torch and he is burning already.
From across the room Cirrus stirs at the change in him, but he does not watch her dark head turning, her keen gaze searching the room for clues to understanding. She is the first to see Florentine, and to guess how they have both appeared, but Asterion barely listens to her words against the maelstrom of his mind.
He ought to have gone to his sister, then - ought to have asked what was wrong, that she is here and not wherever she had been planning to go with Lysander. But Flora is laughing, and talking with Theodosia, and his dark-eyed gaze keeps finding itself on Moira like the trembling needle of a compass. This room is so similar to the kitchens of the Night Court, down to the snow whispering up against the glass and the talk and laughter from the crowd.
And still that bird in his breast is beating its wings over and over, as the shadows and flames blur the edges of the room into a dream. He feels like a man asleep when he crosses to her, a dark ship drifting through the crowd, and he still has not remembered how to breathe when at last he stops before her.
“Miss Tonnerre,” he says, the name shaped so carefully in his mouth, held there like a petal he might bruise if he presses down. It takes him a moment, but he pulls his gaze from the slim end of her brush to her bright and burning gaze. “Thank you for seeing my sister home.” Asterion inhales then, as though there is more might say - but the breath catches and holds in his throat, a barb with edges as fine and sharp as shattered china.
king of dusk.
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