Elchanan GOOD SENSE COMES THE HARD WAY
Elchanan is… comfortable here, in a way that he hasn’t felt comfortable for weeks, maybe since he first arrived in Novus. Here it’s comfortably strange; here magic whispers through the air and kisses him just like it did at home. Here the moonlight laps at him like a lover’s tongue. Here he is nothing but the suggestion of a man draped in silver and covered by stars, and the wind, when it does caress him, is as sweet and as cold as being reborn. He closes his eyes and tilts his head up against the waxing moon. In the places that the light comes down on him, though it should freeze, it fills him to the bone with warmth. He cracks his eyes open again, and by the time he’s done blinking the stranger is watching him again. Intently. Her eyes glow wild mauve, and she is looking with unending, rapt attention, as if marking down every line of his body down to the way he stands or flutters his feathers. (He can’t blame her. He’s doing the same, though attempting to make it less conspicuous.) The space between them is short enough that he can make out the fine lines of her face and the blaze that slips down it like a river. He can see that she is starting to move—toward him, and not away. With a little grin like moonshine he does the same.
Her voice is surprisingly formal; he can’t help blinking, startled, as he hears it. Somehow it manages to be both clipped and song-like, the timber of her voice arguing with the tone. It confuses him. But Elchanan has always been good with people, and rather than remark upon it he only dips his head and sweeps his wing into a bow, one knee bending into the iron-white sand. It’s a practiced motion. “Charmed,” he says, and grins; the sound his voice reverberates in the night air like a plucked string, somewhere between a song and a purr.
When the archpriest pulls himself back up, a shower of white sand falls away from his feathers, purer than the foam of a waterfall. “I’m Elchanan.” In the dark his eyes are mottled, patterned in so many rings like the finest, richest wood, and when he blinks at her it is with sultry, heavy lashes that suggest more than he bothers to say. “What brings you here, Maerys?” And if his mouth rests a little long on the syllables of her name, or draws it out just more than needed—well, there’s no one else to notice it, nor the raise of one pale brow. |
