asterion,
She speaks of masks and all Asterion can think of is the Ilati, with their terrible skulls of roe deer and wolves. He thinks of the masquerade in Denocte, hidden behind a mask in gilded silver and yet had felt his truest self. And he wonders, too, what masks she wears, and if she is wearing one now.
He always forgets how easy it is with her, how intimate she has always been - not unlike Florentine, in a way, who could disarm you with a smile and a funny observation. Yet it is not the only way she breaches his defenses (weak enough to begin with) - there is the curve of her neck, the fall of the shadows on her hair, the fire in her eye.
But Asterion has never been able to keep peace with fire. Those that burned too hot, changed too quickly; he feels like the surf pulling at their feet, begging stay.
She speaks of her family, not for the first time; but now Asterion does not think of grand halls and gardens, and there is no smile when he replies. “Then I hope never to meet them. No one should ever be made to earn love.” His gaze flicks from the tip of her brush to her eyes, wondering if he will see anger spark there. Would he have said it, if she had not just beseeched him for his honesty? Asterion does not regret it, because they had hurt her, and yet she still calls them family. Because the idea of berating a girl for lack of perfection over something so trivial as painting portraits makes him angry when held against all the grief they’ve seen.
Still, he does not want to hurt her. Not even after how she had hurt him, become a nymph escaped to stone beneath his touch. When he imagined himself in stories he had always been a knight, noble and true, and not a king whose kiss turned girls to stone.
Asterion has yet to pick up his brush; instead he is watching her face, the sharp lines of it in the flickering light of the hall. He finds himself surprised at how steady his breathing is, how even the beat of his heart.
“You kissed me first,” he says at last. “And the way you looked at me, and spoke of love not being a game-” and it is so easy for him to remember how he’d told her he agreed with her, and then caught for himself the kiss she meant to leave on his shoulder. “I suppose I may have misunderstood,” he continues, slowly, his voice little more than a murmur that reaches only her. “But I - I was trying to tell you I chose you. And I thought you wanted me.”
Only then does he look away, dropping his gaze, unseeing, to the rest of the room. He can make out none of the faces of his people; all is only shadows and light, soft and unsure as the breath in his lungs. When he breathes out it feels like a release, rustling the corners of the blank page before him.
He had meant to ask her the source of her anger, why she had shattered a glass, why she had sworn off his name. Had his crime been so great? But Asterion finds that there is only one thing he is still desperate to know.
One last time he lifts his eyes to her and they may as well have been alone, back on the cliffside where they had first met, for the way the room falls away from around him. “Perhaps there is nothing to explain, after all. I just wonder - what is it you want?”
king of dusk.
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