A S T E R I O N
in sunshine and in shadow*
It isn’t until he watches Rhone’s attention shift to him that Asterion realizes they aren’t alone in the glade. As he meets Rhone’s greeting with a smile, the king’s gaze touches on the doe and its young, with a back still speckled with rows of white. Something about the two of them - the mother watchful but unafraid of the two stallions - makes him think of Florentine, and how she would soon have a child of her own. The thought makes him feel old, and glad in a way that is almost like sorrow.
At the sound of Rhone’s sigh he looks back to the man, his slender ears pricked forward, dark eyes soft. He doesn’t know the bay well enough to translate all the feeling in that sound, though Rhone feels like the kind of horse he might have known forever, steady and quiet and kind. Yet what he says has the king’s star-marked brow furrowing in concern. “It can be,” he replies, still wearing that faraway smile, but he is waiting for Rhone to elaborate on some.
Still, he doesn’t expect what the scholar says. It takes him a moment to process the words - to picture the twins, small enough to look boyish, never out of sight of one another. He has never met them properly, a rueful thought, but every time he sees them his heart goes taut with a strange kind of sadness. It is impossible then to forget that he is also a twin.
But missing - Asterion shakes his head, at once uneasy. Too many possibilities rise at once in his mind, hazy as shadows, waiting to be made real: Raum, and the island, and more tests from a vengeful goddess. Oh, trouble is never too far away, like wolves in winter.
“I’d not heard,” he says, and there is no straying of his gaze now. It is intent on Rhone. “What do you know, and when did it happen? Where is Ard now?” As he waits for answer, he reaches out through the bond he shares with Cirrus, needing only one word to snag her attention: Trouble.
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