the birdsong might be pretty,
but it's not for you they sing
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but it's not for you they sing
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Tonight the silence feels like oil washing over her in wave after wave of suffocating weight. Darkness is pressing tight against the windows and even the moon seems so very far away when she shifts through the thin layer of frost. Red inhales because she must, of course she must, but it feels like she's swimming far out beyond the cove and there's nothing ahead of her but ice, and blackness, and death.
There's a flash of something else but moonlight on the other side of the window. The rabbit with the broken leg lifts an ear and for a moment she's distracted by the lively tilt of his ear, the way the firelight makes him look halo heavy. She blinks and the darkness presses in again with the silence.
Kock.
Red trembles because this darkness is not the golden-shallow water of a cove. On the other side of that knock the vines are sleeping and the dirt is ice-hard. Everything feels like a grave, everything but the rabbit, her heart and whoever is lost enough to wander through the vineyard at night.
She moves towards the door and the rabbit lifts both his ears to watch (he knows the wolves are still out there, he knows the foxes are with them too). By the table her eyes pause on the bottle of wine and the two glasses waiting to be held, to be appreciated for the glimmer of their crystal. Only one has wine in it. Only one.
The door is opening too soon, the house more eager than she is to have something other than silence and oil filling the corners of it. And when she sees him, golden in the darkness with the moon and sea a barely there glow behind him, all that comes out is, “oh” like a sigh, like the tide. The silence presses in again, heavy and winter-cold. In the fireplace the embers blaze back to life as if the house has more to say than its mistress. It always does these days, always.
“Won't you come in?” Her voice waivers, weaker than the fire edging her in red-light. And when she trembles she doesn't know if it's from the memory of fear or the happiness that for once there is more than black silence and sleeping veins waiting for her on the other side of that thick, wooden door. She stares at him harder than she should as she steps back, hard enough that she seems more wild thing learning the ways of the woods than the mare who makes the best wines in Novus.
Beyond them the moonlight sea sings, hush, hush, hush.
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