Lysander is too wise to be surprised when he rounds one more lonely corner and finds Isra before him.
Still, it doesn't keep his heart from stumbling or a smile as fierce and quick and crooked as lightning from carving itself across his mouth. He wonders if it means anything, that they keep running across one another’s paths every time there is a kind of danger. Lysander wonders which one of them is bleeding this time, and which is needing saved.
They are dangerous thoughts for a man who has always thought of Fate as a girl of gold with flowers in her hair and a knife to carve up time itself, and it is with reluctance - almost guilt - that he pushes them away. Instead he runs his gaze along the queen, searching for wounds, for blood, for chains other than the one she has always worn. He is just as unsurprised and just as grateful-glad to have found her whole (as little as whole could mean, these days) as to have found her at all.
Isra makes no attempt to touch him as she stands between deep canyons, alongside rocks that she could make into castles with only a thought. And Lysander strays no nearer her, even as his skin remembers being gently bound in strips of birch-bark and painted with salve, and his tongue remembers the taste of a medicine that could so easily turn to poison. All it took was a little too much.
“I came to tell you the ending of the story,” he says, and the smile he wears then is that of an old, sly fox, with silver growing in his ruff. “When the monster came, as the monsters always come, the girl used her terrible, beautiful gifts to save her people.” For a long moment his eyes old hers, steady and dark, until a wind rattles through the canyon like it might through a graveyard and he at last looks away.
But not for long. At her question he turns back, quick enough to catch a smile that never would belong to a slave or a girl whose only wish was to drown. An answering grin curls like a vine on his own lips, and there is something wicked in it, something hungry, and all the sadness and remorse in him sinks to the sea-floor to wither and bleach.
“I don’t intend to make you stitch me up again. But I will sing any song you ask of me.” Lysander lets the statement be a question, too, and his gaze as he regards her is a green as deep and dappled as sunlight on ferns. It promises that he would fight for her, would sing a song of war and paint his tines in poison like a Grecian prince. He has never been a god of battles, but he is no stranger to killing.
Lysander wonders if the slave who is a storyteller who is a queen who is a sword is here for the same purpose as he -
to make a Ghost bleed until it dies.
you fester in the daytime hours
boy, you never sleep at night
@Isra
