[P] your voice is wild and simple

[Marisol]

you are untranslatable into any one tongue.

The door opens on her second knock.

His eyes are blue like the ocean. He looks like a king.

At once the gnawing pain in Marisol’s chest burns, compresses, flattens in on itself like so much concrete on a butterfly wing: it’s jealousy, and it makes her whole body sting like clear alcohol in an open wound—

He looks like a king, and that, just that, is something Marisol does not ever think she will achieve. 

Queen Marisol. She forces a little grin, diplomatic. Her jaw hurts. “King Orestes,” she responds, half-smiling, and her throat is dry, and everything in her wants to say I am not a lady, don’t look at me like that, but she doesn’t, she can’t, and only God knows if the idea of what he sees in her is repulsive or worth yearning for.

They stand there, for a moment. In the doorway. Halfway between this and that and not fully invested in either. Both options are not quite alive, and terribly silent; the castle behind him is as listless as the streets she’s just come from. No waving banners. No clattering silverware or bustling servants. Just ear-ringing silence. Silence. Silence. Her heart is in her throat, plump against the white ridges of teeth. There is no reason to feel guilty, but she does.

The wind blows sand in and out, across the steps and back over them. Her ankles are frosted with pale, gritty dust.

She follows him into the foyer. The dim glint of the fireplaces (it’s too hot in here already, why are those on?) plays tricks on the metallic shine of Orestes’ tattoos. Like there’s something inside him, twisting and turning against the light. Like the lines themselves are alive in a way she’s never seen before. Marisol thinks of her own warpaint—how it eats the light instead of reflecting it, thinks of what that might mean, if anything. His skin is dusty-dappled like sun on sand. His muscles move like water over stone. He smells like salt. Smoke. Smells like he belongs somewhere other than here, anywhere other than here. 

She follows him into the foyer, whose floors are lined with plush and ornate rugs, whose walls are draped with velvet curtains, whose chandeliers cast diamonds of colored light across the sandstone they walk over. Everything smells of sandalwood and amber and the hot, dry danger of the desert following Orestes like a veil. The air in here is stale, laced with nose-itching, chest-scraping dust. Marisol’s mouth has turned irreparably dry.

The office relaxes her a little. Up the stairs, through the door, and now they are standing in a place that she can only imagine looks like the inside of Orestes’ head (or heart, or both)—cluttered and beautiful, vibrant, utterly distracting. The so-precarious piles of books that make her skin itch in concern. The yucca flowers, the spiny, bright-green aloe vera. Despite herself she finds herself looking at the towering book-spines, pausing on the ones she recognizes. (Many are nonfiction, but she chooses to disregard those.) The Velveteen Rabbit. An embossed Anna Karenina. Alice in Wonderland. 

“You would like Don Quixote,” she says, without the usual musing. Her voice sounds a little timid. Shyer than someone in power should be. “I think.”

And then she swallows it all down, and takes a seat, and looks at him as he talks.

Such fine lines in his face, all the little intricacies of kelp cells and the simple, clean, curving ribs of seashells, such an aura of salt and cool wind, his expression like the sun on water. The silky curl of his pale eyelashes up, up, up against the golden brow and the ocean-dark blue eyes. The smooth and curling wisps of nacreously white hair waved like seafoam against his cheek, against the satin-dappled skin on his neck, against the china-silk smiling lips and flashing white teeth. The faint distraction of the tattoos gilded into his skin, how they move when he speaks. Leaves in the wind. Fish under waves.

She realizes she is staring. She realizes he has finished talking.

“Oh,” says Marisol.

She thinks of the ocean and the sharp teeth and what she had said to him, the murderer—

She thinks of what he had asked of her and what she could not give, and all the ways she has wrecked herself on the training grounds, the beat of her wings, gnawing on the iron-cold head of a spear—

A used pair of wings.

Marisol inhales, and says: 

“There is little of me that has not been eaten up my work, so there is very little to tell you of myself. I was born in Terrastella. I am nearly sure I will die there. In between it will be mostly hardships, if life up to now is any indication.” She smiles, then. Darkly humored, morbid, knowing. “I visit my mother every week, out in the slums, and my father, though he is long dead. She refuses my money but I leave it for her anyway, as is my duty. The Commander I ousted hated me deeply but needed me more, which apparently you knew, and all my life I have been making sure I prove him wrong. I know how to throw a spear but not how to be a water-horse. The sea is new to me. It was always supposed to be the sky. When I find the man who chose to turn me against my will, I think I will kill him, but I have not decided yet. I like to read.” Then a real grin—guilty, pleased, personal. Mari ducks her head. “Poetry, especially, things about nature and—love. And I assure you I am much less Spartan than I might sound, at least when it comes to friends. Which I hope we can be.”

“And you?” she offers, and for once the Commander’s voice is hopeful.

"Speaking."

queen marisol

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