[P] the dark won't hide you [winter festival]

[Marisol]

but when the night has left us
will the spell remain?

The strange sadness of an empty castle sets into her like rain. It is cold and pale; it runs a ghostly finger down the length of each bone. Where are her people? Why do they not call for her? Marisol’s insides are flooded with a bright, buzzing warmth, a perfect thrill of excitement, but in the back of her mind there is a gnawing kind of darkness—a thing that says watch out, watch out, watch out.

But then they are dancing, and—

She cannot think of anything else.

She cannot think of anything but this: how to bend when Orestes asks it of her with the wordless pressure of a pushing muscle. How to let her head bend into the curve of his neck. How to dance, and how not to be distracted. The steps—a little sway side to side. A full stride forward, then back. The warmth of his skin is somewhere between biology and magic; when he presses his cheek to hers, when his lips skate her shoulder, it burns like nothing Marisol has ever felt before, and she has walked through plenty of fires. 

A shudder, a sigh. Mari rests her forehead in the flat slope of his shoulder, her cheek against the side of his neck. Their dance has begun to slow; she is pliable with sleepiness as she rests her weight against his, satisfied, nearly relaxed. The braided tail swishes absentmindedly.  Now the air is half-pine, half-sand, a mix of the things she thinks she might be capable of loving, and she has to swallow the urge to cry, mostly out of relief. It feels—it feels—

It does not feel like anything she knows, and that is the beauty of it.

She wants to say something. Something, anything, that will matter. Thank you. I missed you. I’m glad you showed up. But any of this—all of it—is a fool’s errand, for he must know—and if he doesn’t, it is still not something Marisol can put into words. For all the time she spends reading, it is a skill that will forever evade her.

But there is something in the back of her mind—a phrase, a quote, something very nearly like the thing that she knows will never submit to being written. She is trying very hard to remember. But this is all so very distracting: the pressure of his chest against hers, the clicking of hooves over the tile—the sound of breathing, of heartbeats, of something unfolding.

It comes rushing back to her. “Do you know the excerpt,” Mari murmurs—it starts as a rumble, a kind of earthquake in the place her lips meet his skin, then fades as she draws back to look at him—“‘Not one gesture of y—“

He kisses her.

It is an impossible feeling.

Marisol’s heart stops; it leaves her chest, bright and sharp as an electric shock; a shiver hits her, then a second; heat coils in every muscle, in every cell; for a moment Anselm bursts into her head to ask if she’s alright, his voice in her brain warped with worry, but she cannot respond, cannot think, only leans back and blinks, dazed, stunned, fearful, at Solterra’s king.

She swallows with inane difficulty. 

“You—you—“ 

It is impossible to hear over the roar of blood in her ears, impossible to feel anything but the sudden sickness in her stomach, the taste of iron sitting soft against her teeth. Marisol does not know what to say, what to do, what to think; all her words have left her, all her sensibilities, too.

“Orestes,” she says softly, in a voice that almost (actually) trembles with pain, “I think your people will begin missing you soon.”

Mari winds her own green ribbon around the prince’s neck, and gives him a swift kiss, and turns to go.

“Speaking.”

credits