A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
Abel has been waiting for her.
He had hoped it would be she who came, and not the paint with her burning, kicking hooves or the mare of crimson-and-black with death in her eyes. He does not see - his eyes remain on waving branches, on light filtering through leaves, so much green he could live on it after the wastes of the desert, and the blue sky behind. He does not see but he hears when the steel bars sigh away to gold and melt to ash. And he wonders if it means he won’t be kept here, or if it means he won’t be leaving.
When he must, he turns to face her. Abel thinks of her body, carried on the back of his own. It seems impossible, now: she is taller than him but she is also more than him, so much more, heavy and rich as gold against his hollow bones and shadow-soul. The boy sways beneath the swing of her twisting horn like a blade of wheat shivers as it waits for the scythe.
Yet when she speaks the boy shakes his head. It does not feel brave to him, or like defying her - it feels urgent that he correct her. He does not like the feeling; it was so much easier not to care. And he still does not meet her eyes when he says, “I don’t hate you. I’m afraid of you. Of your magic and your dragon and all the things you could do.” When he swallows it’s like being back in the desert, no water anywhere, a new dune in his throat.
(But she had been in the desert, the unicorn girl with her horns like blue glass. Sabine, little sparrow - even the thought of her and her name makes his heart test its wings. But there, as always, are the bars.)
Because of that thought, because he is staring at a garden and thinking of a girl, her question makes him laugh. If some people laugh like gemstones and some like smoke, Abel’s laugh is like a small, mean piece of coal, cutting the sides of his raw throat. Now he does look at her, but the bay doesn’t see her at all. Maybe he sees a shoreline or a tsunami or a dragon far overhead, wonder and horror. Maybe he sees a mother.
“I love Denocte. But the city and her people and her god don’t love me, or the ones like me. We are chaff to burn first when the fire comes licking. We are rotting timber to feed the rising sea.” A Crow had seemed a fine, noble thing to be, from the point of view of an orphan boy - a crow, at least, had a flock to call family and the wits to thrive. Abel had been tired of being among the shadows where the rats hid, maybe a rat himself.
Now he is just tired. And if this is the end - if this is where his justice comes for him (perhaps he had only been eluding it when the sea came hungry and took his father, and the pass burned in dragon-fire and scorched his dam) than does he not deserve a confessional?
He shifts where he stands, casts down his gaze again (for her eyes are burning him up, all his sins reflected there in that ocean blue, and they are too much like another set of blue eyes he cannot now bear to face). “But I am sorry,” he says, still rough-voiced, “for the deaths. None of them were supposed to die.” Not that he knows - yet he wonders if that had been a lie. It seems a ridiculous thing to believe now, that Raum would spare anybody anything. He thinks of Solterra, of men and women turned to stone. He thinks of children starving the way he had starved and it feels like stones piling low in his belly; it feels like a grave being built.
@Isra
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