“Bones know what you need. Hearts only know want.”
While he talks Isra traces the shape of his words across his chest. She writes never across the hollow curl where his shoulder starts. His words are deep as the roots of their trees. He says violent and blades and her lips pause to press hard and hot against the skin hiding his heart from the world (not not from her, never from her).
Isra knows the shape of his heart, the way it's ocean deep and large enough to sail on. His heart has always been the reason she loved him, all sunshine to chase away the winter brine of hers.
She wonders what it would have been like to learn violence before sorrow. Maybe it would have made her less of a war waiting to march--out over the mountains and across the sea where the horizon touches black space. Isra feels like she could march forever with her war-drum heart, and her hungry magic, and all this rage that the world is so dark and cruel. But then she turns to look at the deep earth of Eik's eyes and her children with lighting halos around their bodies--
She suddenly doesn't want to head towards the horizon with her drumming heart. She doesn't want to go very far at all.
Eik kisses her shyly and--
Lighting strikes a tree in the distance and she can hear the moan of it, the way the roots beneath their hooves tremble (as if she's touched it with her magic). Fable lifts his head towards the rising smoke and Isra, through their bond, can feel the way something primordial wakes up in both of them. “I would have loved you then.” And she does not say that she would have loved him as a child, or that she would have only seen him and ran towards the sea and the horizon.
It seems so long ago now, another skin, another life. Was she ever a child in any way that matters?
Isra presses her lips to his heart, and his ear, before she pulls away to call to her children. The storm is too close now to risk staying in the church tree. Now she only wants to curl up with her family like roots beneath a ancient forest.
And when the storm passes and the tree stops smoking---
She will--
The twins press their noses against her legs and she forgets all about what comes next.
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