When he landed she had been watching the crowd gathering around Raum's memorial. There had been dark thoughts running through her head. Things like: turn it to bone, or dust, or everything sharp and ugly. There were thoughts full of sorrow too and like rain those fell heavy and cold on her heart. And instead of making a hushed drumming sound it sounded like, traitor, over and over again, traitor.
Isra had hardly turned away before she felt the way the air pressed against her a little harder. A fire had crackled with the force of his arrival. Her first terrible thought had been that a crow had landed nearby (or perhaps a stallion crow-touched and stained). Isra turned to watch him push through her city and all her magic swelled and echoed in her ears like the sea.
Shhh. shhh. shhh. And below that there is still the drumming of sorrow and the slice of traitor.
She does not hear him say it's beautiful. All she hears is black.
So she follows him because she wants to do something terrible and he is moving quick enough that she has to focus on something other than rage. Turn after turn the fires grow further but it still feels like that memorial is nipping at her heels like one of her daughters' wolves. And oh she remembers how it feels to be chased, to be nothing more than a ghost running through a graveyard of soot (or to be nothing more than a girl in a world full of evil, selfish men).
But she remembers too that she's the darkest thing in the forest now.
He does not stop the way that she expected him to. None of the tables lure him closer, and the tiny dragons swooping low enough to knock his glasses loose do nothing to slow the way he walks like a metal horse made out of gears instead of blood. Isra wonders if she could change him. If she could change his skin to glass so that she might see the cogs turning, turning, turning endlessly inside him. It's that thought that makes her decide to stop him.
A bit of silk draped down across the alley turns to wood with knots of marble cut into it (some merchant had hung it there hoping it would add mystery to his part of the market. It did.) There is no way to go past it but back-- back to where Isra is waiting with the distant fires lighting a halo around the tip of her horn.
“Who are you?” She asks because she has to know. It's the same hungry way she needs to know if he's a crow pretending to be something else.
Lately it seems like she's always hungry and everything around her is rotten.
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