A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
Abel isn’t sure what to make of her tears.
A month ago he would have told her not to waste the water. A week ago he might have pretended not to notice at all, the better to assuage his own guilt for whatever part he had in it. But today with the ocean air washing clean his smoke-and-sand scoured lungs he lets himself imagine he is a new man. The kind of man who buys passage on a ship to start a new life. The kind of man who sheds his past of ash and failure, pity and pain. Not a good man (never a good man) - but maybe a better one.
And so he reaches out, touches the velvet of his nose to her cheek where a tear sparkles like a fallen sliver of her horn. As much as he wants to linger there (or maybe be more bold, maybe shift his muzzle to the crook of her throat, shoulder to shoulder, comforting each other like children) he curls his head away, butterfly-shy.
Like Sabine, he does not want to say of course I did. He doesn’t want to say anything at all; the thought of it, of promises kept (and what does he know of that, anyway, with all the good ones he’s made broken like bones and the fulfilled ones black as soot) brings a lump to his throat like charcoal.
“My life is worth very little,” he says instead, quietly, still not daring a look at her, “but I would have rather died than broken that promise.” He does not add that he almost had (you should kill me, his words, each one blackly meant); even thinking of the dragon, of the unicorn-queen, of the prison-turned-to-garden makes a shiver wend down his spine that has nothing to do with the breeze whipping off the open water.
If she knew he was here, if she knew he lingered on her shores, would Isra kill him? She would have the right. And there had been moments, in the past few days, when the sun sank below the line of the water and the world closed dark and cold around him and he didn’t know if Sabine would answer that he had wondered - he had wondered -
But Abel does not want to die today. For once, for as many moments as grace would grant him, he wants to live.
And he wants her to live, too.
The boy turns back to the girl. This time he takes in her sunken, red-rimmed eyes, the dull slats of her ribs, the wispy tangle of her hair. To him she is beautiful. He wonders how long she has been dying. Not in the way that they all had been in the desert, starved and cowed, the orphaned children of Solterra beneath the baleful sun their father, but in a way more intimate than that, and more insidious. The kind of death that comes with indifference.
“Have you seen the docks?” he says, like this noisy place of industry is his palace, and she a visiting princess. He makes his voice eager, keeps his steps light as he guides her gently to the edges of the street, out of the way of passers-by. “There’s an empty slip where otters have been coming to play, and some fool is always feeding birds. And if you don’t mind there’s a stand on the way with the best apple fritters in Denocte - I’m ravenous.” It is a lie, but not one he regrets (though to lie to her at all burns his tongue like a cinder). The truth is that he is worried for the way she looks like a kite slipping its tether, a strip of satin worn threadbare. Something perfect, in need of protection.
(Oh, what a fool he is - he can’t so much as protect his own shadow).
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