A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
It is so strange, to be home.
He had not thought about how close he would be to the little wood-and-daub structure he’d grown up in, when he fled with the queen’s stone-turned-gold down to the docks. He’d only thought of proximity to the ships, and anonymity among the sailors and merchants. Now, with the cries of the gulls and rough-throated shouts of stallions unloading barrels of goods, the summer sun playing over the water as gossamer morning clouds crept through the blue, Abel is sick with memory.
It’s a strange texture of emotions - guilt and fear and cautious, fragile hope. He tries not to wonder why the unicorn queen spared him. He tries not to wonder whether Raum knows of his imprisonment or his release, or whether someone (the golden man, the one who could disappear) might be hunting him even now. If death found him, he thinks he might welcome it.
But he knows these docks and boat-slips and cobbled alleys leading up to the city like a rabbit knows the warren it was born in. The other urchins he’d run with or fought with have grown up and moved on, and he recognizes no one, and no one recognizes him. Abel would feel like a ghost, if it weren’t for the fear, and the hope - how they eat at him the same way.
Tomorrow is the new moon. Tomorrow he will board a merchant ship bound for the old country, his place paid for with a sliver of gold the captain had considered a long time before taking (and in those moments Abel had been considering too, shameful things, things he must do if the answer was no).
He has tried to keep his hope of seeing her like a seed in an airless, lightless box, closed tight with no hope of growing. Better to die in the dark without having lived than wither and rot. It is better, he tells himself, if she does not come. How could it be a good thing, to put her in danger? And yet every morning he has woken from fitful sleep, and combed the bay, and waited.
This morning is no different, save for a new breeze off the water. Abel makes his way along a street above the docks, a roughspun cloak loose around his shoulders, the best disguise he can afford. The air smells of salt and the remnants of last night’s fires, and the hint of smoke makes him feel as loose and thin as water, remembering how it had clung to his skin for days after the warehouse.
It doesn’t matter how he finds her. She is not there and the business of the dock might as well be carried out by ants; and then she is there, and it is a summer morning and he is a free man with no past. Only a future as wide-open as the sky (he is getting better at lying).
Abel is careless in getting to her. He weaves through other horses, incautious, the glimmer of sunlight through heartbreak blue crystal his guiding star. For once he is lucky; the eyes that follow him have no recognition, and only see a boy trying to get to a girl, and that nothing more than one of the oldest stories there is. Some even smile.
He is not smiling, when he reaches her. He is a little breathless, and his eyes are wide and guileless, and the slats of his ribs are hidden beneath the cloak. His nerves are tangled like wires and his heart seems uncertain whether it wants to settle in his throat or his gut, but he does not look like a man already dead.
“You came,” he breathes, and sounds for once like nothing more than a boy in love.
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