THE STARS ARE NOT WANTED NOW,
PUT OUT EVERY ONE,
PACK UP THE MOON AND DISMANTLE THE SUN,
POUR AWAY THE OCEAN, SWEEP UP THE WOOD:
NOTHING NOW CAN EVER COME TO ANY GOOD.
PUT OUT EVERY ONE,
PACK UP THE MOON AND DISMANTLE THE SUN,
POUR AWAY THE OCEAN, SWEEP UP THE WOOD:
NOTHING NOW CAN EVER COME TO ANY GOOD.
❀
Bexley does not know anything of witches, or mushrooms, or how to love what is not summer. She only knows that up here it’s cold to the point of hurting and beautiful to the point of brazenness. Like her.The leaves are all in their red-and-gilded coats. She hasn’t seen colors like this since she was the littlest child, since far, far before she came to Novus: now she berates herself for not remembering how they look like magic when there is none to be found. It’s nice. (What a simple girl you are, she thinks. It’s nice.) The susurrus of the dry grass, the thin, blank sunlight through the trees. It looks one of the pretty oil paintings she’s seen in the halls of the castle. Nice. And strange.
For hardly the first time today, she feels skin-crawlingly out of place. You do not belong here, the birds remind her, singing their nursery songs from up above. (Their eyes are like badly made jewels; unbidden, she thinks of the island.) Bexley does not belong here, she knows, in a place without sand, without blood, without iron. What would she be without those sharp edges? Good girls belong here, the birds remind her. Good. Not gory. She does not belong here in this place that knows good and right from righteous and petty.
It’s all too pretty. It’s all too nice. Too good to be true. Up here the wild air smells like sap and smoke; Bexley’s heart hurts, but a little less sharply.
A black and ochre butterfly is perched on a branch just above her, beating its wings senseless through the thin air. Pretty little bird-thing against the peeling white bark of the birch. He well matches the rich, warm tones of the leaves that come cascading down around them. Now the world is silent. Her muscles beg warmth. The wind refuses.
Bexley tilts her head up toward the butterfly and blows out a soft breath; he doesn’t flinch. “Pretty boy,” she murmurs.
The vibration of her voice makes his gossamer wings tremble just a little. But he does not run. And behind him, where she cannot quite see clearly, there is a flash of white-gold through the trees like a ghost.
No, not a ghost, she chastises herself. No more ghosts. Something inside her roils and turns: danger to the nth degree, a fever so potent it’s something like a drug.
A shy white smile crosses her lips.
To August she says, with a sheepish tone that implies she doesn’t really mean it at all, “We have got to stop meeting like this.”
