o, the red rose is a falcon
and the white rose is a dove.
and the white rose is a dove.
Katerina blinks awake fast. Prey instinct.
Winter is coming, quick and harsh. The dirt floor is cold against her cheek, then her shoulders, then her ribs, as she starts abruptly upright. With some effort she shifts to lay mostly straight-up.
Her heart is pounding in her chest, almost too loud to hear over. Wind comes whistling through the bookshelves; it rustles the leaves on the trees; it rattles the branches overhead in the places they are intertwined, the boughs woven like fabric where the maples lean in to meet one another. Most of Dawn’s patrons have gone. The only creatures left are the librarians, which scurry near-silently around the piles of books.
And of course there is the man coming toward her, a vision of the kind she has come to dread.
Katerina licks her lips. She shakes her head, dislodging a collection of leaves and broken twigs. Something in her mouth tastes, somehow, wrong—dirty and metallic, coating her tongue and the back of her teeth. But there is nothing wrong.
There is nothing wrong, she reminds herself. It even sounds true. Mostly.
The scholar clears her throat, finally begins climbing to her feet: she digs her hooves deep into the hard-packed dirt and surges upward, half-sighing with effort, though the sound of it is mostly contained: it rattles in her chest like some organ that has come loose.
“Mm,” she answers. “Yes.” Now they are on even standing, and close to one another, unbearably close. From here she can see the jagged lines that mark his coat, separating black from white; she can see the strange, soft curl of his ears, the sharp blue shine of his eyes, like sea-glass.
Something in her stops, and starts again.
She clicks her teeth absent-mindedly. “Just a—spell.” A faint smile. A clean, bracing kind of expression.
Then a beat. A moment of silence, which is a moment too long.
And finally, brows furrowed, Katerina asks, voice wavering: “Do we know each other?”
