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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It's amazing, she'll think later, how quickly she can shift from creature of the vines to jealous seal of the sea. It takes her fast, that flare of avarice. She's settling down to enjoy the wine after holding it up against the firelight to count each crystal flare of color when it hits. Perhaps he can see it in her eyes, the flash of sea-foam against the stark pearl white below her eyes. Or maybe it's nothing more than a sly look, a feral look, a look more wave that horse, that flashes across her face before she takes the first sip.
“My friend,” she says with a warning soft as a leaf turning belly in a storm, “gave me no name when he found me with a broken wing.” The avarice and sea-wave of her look fades. It is replaced by something like sadness. Horace could have known the bird's name by his song, or perhaps it was the way the feathers sang in the eastern sea wing. Red's forgotten now. Day by day it seems further away.
The melancholy doesn't leave her eyes when she tosses her nose at him like a seal might toss a bit of seaweed towards a sea monster's nest. Perhaps that's what she sees in him, a creature of the dark come to steal away her solitude. And for tonight, she's willing to let him have it, fill it, devour it. To her the cost of a story isn't so very hard to pay, not tonight, not when she wants to feel a bit of the old magic again.
She leans forward and fills his glass. The sadness leaves her face like a leaf leaves a branch in a strong wind. Something about it is reminiscent of a butterfly and of a bit of earth praying to me something other than dirt, moss and root. She smiles, fleetingly she smiles. “Settle in Daniel. It's a long story.”
Red begins with an inhale.
Deep into the night, when the wolves start howling, she tells her story. It starts with the sea and it ends with death as all good stories too. And Red, when she closes her eyes at the end, feels no regret for the giving of it.
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@Sarkan
