asterion,
Sometimes, the king agrees, but he does not say the word aloud. Even without Eik’s gift, the sentiment would be clear by the way the silence unrolls between them, the curve of Asterion’s neck, the way he blows out his breath. One day, he hopes that they all might dream again - the same dream, a thousand roots reaching back to one marvelous tree, up and up to fill the sky, to bear sweet fruit. Such a dream of Novus as could never be felled.
But they cannot rest so easy yet.
It is his friend’s body, before his voice, that tells the bay to slow, and he steps to the side where there is just enough room in the narrow trail for a column of sunlight to slant between them. Within it motes of dust or leaf or magic seem to hang suspended, golden in the light, invisible in shadow. With one ear he listens to Eik’s voice, low and easy, but Asterion is not fooled: he knows what depths such calm currents bely. With the other he tracks the interminable conversation of insects and birds, though he has given up trying to distinguish which is which. There is only which danger is immediate, and which is not.
Each time the thought surfaces (like a body just beyond the shore), it surprises him how little the idea of killing makes him flinch. Neither is it hard to picture how he might do it; he can feel the magic in him the way he can feel his lungs expand with breath or his heartbeat shift, and he knows it will obey as easily as his legs do when he thinks run. He catches Eik’s dark-eyed gaze and thinks of drowning Raum with the water in the ghost’s own cells, a backwards kind of baptism where there would be no rising reborn.
If only it had been done before. Before Seraphina, before Isra. Years ago, on a midwinter’s eve, when a gypsy king (long gone, now, though Asterion can still remember the way it felt to meet him, like an alternate vision of himself, made bold and careless) and his band of crooked thieves made a bloody angel of Lysander in the snow. How far the consequences of that night had echoed, how many it had encircled, like ripples on a lake. He wonders if all life is just a long line of ifs.
For a long moment he says nothing, just meets his friend’s eye. The forest around them lives and breathes, real and not-real, as improbable as the magic in them both. At last Asterion nods and steps on down the path that no horse had made.
“Tell me,” he says, as easily as though they still speak of dreams, “what a happy ending is for you, after all of this.”
king of dusk.
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