where the trojans?
It is early morning, not yet hot, the sky not yet blue; above the white curve of our villa’s roof the sunrise is still a foamy yellow-pink. But I am already awake. Fully awake. Too awake.
I have not been able to sleep enough lately, if at all. I don’t know what it is. The knowledge that that shithead warden is in my country, maybe, with his cutting smile and the bolts of electricity that could set the city on fire—maybe the knowledge that Adonai has not been able to sleep much, either, and that makes me nervous.
Sometimes when I peek into his room, when we all should be asleep, he is instead staring blankly at the wall like someone scrying tea leaves. I don’t know what he could possibly be investigating; after the incident, we had to take down all his paintings. There is nothing to look at. When I sit in to listen to him practicing his instruments, he looks at me suspiciously, as if he is afraid of me, as if he does not recognize that I am his own brother. We sit across the room from each other and still manage to turn the air frosty.
Maybe he is right to be scared. But it doesn’t make me feel any better.
(Something I think but won’t say is I can’t sleep, in part, because I am too afraid of what he might do to me.)
The streets are rousing now, coming to life at last, and looking down at the movement from the balcony I feel relieved, and less alone. At least I would die in public; at least they would see me fall, and my blood might paint the streets like a martyr’s, a piece of artwork. Merchants are setting up their stalls. Pounds of spice are being poured into tall cones, jewelry laid out in piles. There is the music of movement, the clatter of coins, the sleepy stirring of a whole city shuffling to its feet as the sun also rises.
I don my cloak and pull the gold clasp closed tight against my chest. The servants are beginning to make breakfast, boiling water for tea, peeling mangoes, unwrapping steaming leaves of sticky rice. I pass through the kitchen, the courtyard, the clattering din of pots and pans and glass and into the slightly softer noise of the street, where I do not know I am walking toward a girl with a silver collar.
@teiran <3
