HOW DOES A MYTH COME TO BE?
Iscariot’s head pounds in the dark. The black sky feels like a blindfold—no matter how much she beats her eyelashes and blinks, she can’t seem to shake it out of her head, the impending shadow at the edges of her vision. Her pulse feels sort of sideways. It’s banging in her legs and her neck instead of her chest. Though she stands perfectly still against the crashing, foamy waves and the breeze that spits salt into her nostrils, she feels woefully off-kilter, like the nauseous churning in her stomach is too wild to bear.
Then she hears her name, and thinks for a moment she has lost her mind completely.
The girl turns. Her skin ripples with the impression of cold, and her movements are stilted from the soreness of her joints. But even incapacitated she can be a fearful thing, and her eyes are brilliantly lit when they turn to Valefor, looking him up and down with a gaze that burns full of suspicion. Something tugs at the knot in her chest, though it’s not quite recognition. The way he says her name—the fact that he knows it, even—it makes her eyes narrow in suspicion, and her shoulders tense as she turns to face him.
She does not miss the sharp edges of his teeth, poking over his lips, and it does not settle her nerves at all.
But none of it could have prepared her for what he says next.
Iscariot’s heart skips like she’s fallen down a set of stairs. Her eyes blow wide, her lips part, her head jerks back and the bones in her hair rattle as she moves, jaw tilting upward, nostrils flaring. Matthias—the name scrapes from the inside of her ears all the way into her brain, it makes her skull hurt. For a brief moment she is enraged that he lives and her mother does not, that she is left scraping up to save for a sickness while her brother lives well-fed and placid.
For a brief moment she is enraged, but then she notes the shy, sweet curl of his smile, and oh, how can she blame him for the faults of their father?
Her jaw tightens, and finally Iscariot forces herself to smile back, small though it is. “You might be right,” she says, and her voice is rough from disuse but not unsweet. Finally the shine of her eyes is interest and not panic. She reaches out to close the distance between them and brush her muzzle against his forehead; it’s been long enough since she was last around a family member that she can hardly hold back the desire to be close to him. “Forgive me that I do not know your name.”
