"hold fast to dreams”
She wonders what love still has to make out of Katniss.
When her friend turns to go Isra makes no move to follow, or to head back toward the capital. Her tangled twins kick again and her magic ripples like a wave beneath them. For once the silence, broken up only by the cry of a hawk and the answering fury of a mother songbird, feels like the end of a storm (instead of the eye of it). Isra lets her magic loose and the whippoorwills turn to golden towers of wheat. The mice come out from the shade to nibble on the falling seeds of it.
Tell me a story about the lions. Fable says as he tucks his head into the grass. His eyes swirl like a shallow tide and Isra can see patterns only she understands in the algae floating there.
“Of course.” She replies as she lays her head against his shoulder. She inhales, just once, like the pause of a breeze right before it starts to howl through the mountain pass. And when she beings it's the same way all her stories begin. “Once there was a lion--” A pause. “and he was so very lonely.”
The story goes on to sunset and all the mice eating the wheat are sleeping in the tangle of grass by the time she finishes.
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