“Aster,” he says, to call the girl’s attention away from her brother, already racing through the grass, the path of an arrow now crooked, now true. “Daughter,” he says, (though she is already looking at him) because it is such a new and strange thing to say, more precious than ichor, sweeter than ambrosia on his tongue.
When she looks up at him, her gaze full of unmoving gold, Lysander can’t help but press a kiss to her forehead, unblemished white soft as fawn-skin. She permits it, though something in the curve of her neck tells him she would rather be away, coursing through the wood like her twin, and after a moment he straightens with a grin.
“This is for you,” he says, and without a word (she’s as quiet as a willow nymph, their little girl) her gaze drops from his own to the wood-carved cheetah he holds extended. Delicately she takes it, and he watches her examine the sloping shoulders, the curve of tail, each lovingly placed spot. “It’s just as quick as your brother’s,” he says, smiling still, and then tilts his head in the direction Leonidas and Florentine had vanished in. “Are you?”
At this her gaze lifts again to him, and Lysander thinks he sees the beginnings of a grin (oh, but slow and strange as the grin of a crescent moon) before she is gone, pale as a dove flashing through the green undergrowth.
After a moment (after a sigh that he cannot quite account for, though he should be used to worry by now, the feel of it like an iron-woven cloak across his shoulders) the once-god follows. There is nothing but silence, and far ahead the sounds of his family, until he begins, softly, to sing.
a thousand teeth
and yours among them, I know
