little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
He has had the bells replaced.
That alone is enough to make her hope, thought the sound of them still makes her flinch - a reaction she hates as much as she can’t help, like a hound shivering when it hears the jingle of its hunting-collar. But after one black moment, or two, she hears the difference in the tone.
Of course she comes.
It is a hot day, and the people are wary. All the colors are flat and the shadows are hardly suggestions of shapes. In the sunlight the marble gleams almost too bright to look at, and beside it stands Orestes.
He is beautiful. She thinks it even before the markings across his body begin to glow like seams of sunlight from between the clouds, and there is an almost childish wonder that blooms in her at the shapes they make - things recognizable and things unknown. And the suns, of course. She wonders at all of them.
He speaks with eloquence, in a voice like beaten gold; soft but not weak. He makes a promise, and he makes an offer, and one by one the people answer (or do not, but that is an answer in itself).
Like a tail-twitching cat, Elif only watches and waits. Her gaze is sharp and hard on Jahin - had he been there, during the little-rebellion, when the Davke attacked the city and the library was burned? Had he buried a spear-head in Solterran bodies?
There are others. Some she knows (her heart beats harder in her chest when El Toro steps forward, a magnificent white lion beside him, and she wonders at all she does not know of him) and others she does not (she stares openly as Aghavni speaks). And then there is a lull, a small quiet, and she thinks of how simple it would be to just...not fill it. To remain silent, and in silence do the work of rebuilding.
But then she thinks of the long walk down the throne-room to where Raum waited, cloaked in the sunlight like it loved him, like he’d earned it, like he wasn’t the silver of knife-blades and moonlight and lies. She thinks of Caine, bleeding on another slab of white marble, and looking up-up-up into the eyes of a giant stallion as immovable as stone.
She does not step forward, but her voice when she speaks cracks over the crowd like a whip.
“My name is Elif,” she says, too loud, harsh even to her own ears. She takes a breath then adds, lower, “Of house Erdogan, although I am the last of them. I do not have pretty words for you, nor will I name myself anything other than a citizen of Solterra.” She is tempted to look at the unicorn who called herself Aghavni; a stranger, but for the rest of her name - a title neither Elif nor any other noble born could forget. She decides better of it; she is never at her best when bristling with suspicion, as she was often reminded as a girl. Instead she tries only to keep her eyes on his, though she is far enough she can only guess at the color of them (like the oasis, she thinks, or the sea).
“Solis may have chosen you, but I am slower than I was to trust his will.” And now she is a public blasphemer; oh, how distraught her mother would be! Her father would surely have slapped her, but Altan - Altan would smile. Elif swallows and feels the alaja where it always is, snug against her throat, as much a part of her as her wings or her lungs or her sharp green eyes. Unlike these things, it makes her braver.
“I wish to give you a warning, Prince of the Sun. We have been forced down by madmen and monsters, it is true. We have suffered at the hands of those within our own court more than once. For years we have seen more blood than water.” Now it is El Toro her gaze wants to stray to, to say have we not, and more besides? But still she doesn’t allow herself to waver, though her mouth is going dry, though her skin feels too tight with so many eyes upon it, and dusty and slat-ribbed besides. Instead she tilts her chin further up (you would drown if it ever rained here, girl), as though she is taller than she is, and has a name with many titles, and a destiny with it.
“But it is not the city who changes, in the end. Our tyrants have been so varied - but they have something in common.” She wears her smile like a sickle-shaped blade. “They are all dead.” And satisfaction is a dark, fierce gladness in her tone.
Now she bows - or dips her head, at least. The sunlight is sharp on the angles of her face; no one need know that the breeze that whispers through then had been called up to cool the sweat from her neck. When she looks up she wears a different smile, something softer, more subtle in its warning. Something the woman she was a month before, or a year, would not have been able to produce.
She has lost so much since the day Seraphina fell in battle - but she has learned so much, too.
“I hope that you are different, my king. And I will work beside you, with all the others here. But you should hope so more.”
