even after they have been stepped on
The grass betrayed Orestes’ presence. The message had surged on ahead of him, a shiver of wind racing through the meadow and bending the poppies on their long, thin stalks. A single red petal tore loose, crimson and unsettling bright in the sunlight. It spiraled on through the air, twirling perhaps unseen around the Sovereign’s legs before the breeze snatched it up, and up, and away. Only then did it flee, like a bleeding, desperate thing, leaping from current to current until it arrived, at last, in the citadel.
Ipomoea caught it in midair, the edges of it trembling as if it wanted nothing more than to escape him.
Solterra is coming, the petal quivered in his grasp, He is coming. There was no need to ask who.
He let the petal go with a frown, and in an instant it was whirling away over the mossy stone walls. For a moment he stood there, quiet and still. The grass twined like snakes around his fetlocks, his mane lifting in the breeze, the same breeze that had carried the petal selfishly into the distance now trying to carry his thoughts along with it. ”Red,” he muttered to himself, looking up into the sky as the petal whipped through the courtyard and out of sight, ”why is the messenger always red?”
It was a brisk day, one in which he still could feel a touch of winter in the wind’s caress. And the red of the petal only reminds him of the red hiding in the forest, and the way blood looked against snow and freshly sprouted leaves. Even when the birds in the court are singing of life and hope and love, and the strains of a lute is tying all their melodies together like the heralding of spring - still Ipomoea is thinking of death and dead things and a court that sleeps too often, and far too soundly, for his liking.
He takes his time, rolling up the map he had been studying into a tight reel, hiding the many red X’s that had been scrawled across the expanse of Viride. He folds Emersyn’s report next, and a part of him is thankful for the interruption; the Emissary had always been rather thorough, and her descriptions of the most recent kills had not spared him any of the gory details. With memories of his first and last meeting with the Solterran Sovereign drifting like desert ghosts through his mind, Ipomoea tucks his documents against one shoulder, then turns and retraces his steps through the gardens.
”What other lives have you lived, desert-born, since the desert has forgotten you?” Orestes’ voice whispers again through his ears, a different rendition of the same question that snuck its way back into his dreams whenever he thought he’d finally forgotten. His legs feel heavy, as if they’ve been filled with sand; as if the desert were still dragging him down. By the time he enters the courtyard, beyond which the other Sovereign waits like a miniature sun beside the open gates, his mouth has gone as dry as the Mors. And only one thought is left to wander like something lost and lonely in his mind, If the desert has forgotten me -
- why does it keep finding me?
”King Orestes,” he has to force the dryness from his voice, lifting his head until the words sound more like spring flowers than shadows in a canyon. ”Please, the gates are always open for a reason, my hearth is your’s.”
He’s remembering the bread Orestes had offered him in the market square, and the prickly pear jam, and the ghosts that had taken the empty seats at their table. But he’s become good at pretending, since taking his crown - so despite the hollowness in his chest, despite the ache, he smiles. And he doesn’t comment on all the ways Orestes is the same, and different, than the last time he saw him; or the way the smell of the sea has been replaced by the smell of sage and desert sands, or how he thinks the sea had suited him better.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit? I would have sent a runner out, had I known to expect you; would you allow me to take their place, and offer a tour of my home?” It feels wrong, to play the servant to a foreign king, a king of the home he had forsaken, a king he does not recognize; it makes something almost-feral come slowly awake inside of him, and all it thinks is, Only one of us is desert-born.
"Speaking."
