“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
The feeling had never quite left him--a rock in his chest that he tries to force down, but it sits, and it sits, and it rots, and it rots. Michael had watched the waves, sometimes dark (far darker than he remembered) and sometimes the same blue as his eyes, or teal capped in webs of foam. Sometimes he had walked the deck and listened to the wooden tap of his hooves and watched Isra and her family and asked himself why. Sometimes he had slept. But mostly Michael had looked at the sea.
Sometimes Isra looks at him and he hurts. Sometimes he looks at Isra and he wonders why. But mostly he looks at the sea.
---
It is just after dawn and Denocte purrs in her streets like a sleeping cat. Overhead the sky is a dark purple smeared into midnight blue flecked with white like the seafoam, white like the mess of his mane, white like the pockets in him that are opened and blank and bleeding light from every crack. It is the cold light of winter, he thinks. It doesn't match the calm warmth of the first breaths of summer that meet him. It is no place for the chirping of crickets or the croaking of frogs.
Michael comes in the arms of a ship raised up from the belly of their court. Michael comes with his scarf wet and heavy around his neck. Michael comes in this post-dawn lull so that nobody sees him, so they do not look at the mast and the sails and the masthead and think that their young god has come home.
It is too early for that. Too dreadfully early. And when he thinks this he knows that he means both for her, and for him.
The ship is docked, the lines are tied, and Michael drops a coin or two in each pocket without a word. No one looks after him as he passes and he does not tell them the rock is still there, still heavy, but now sticky with a thick film of shame that he cannot touch, or look at, or even consider.
The only thing he says, as he climbs the hill to the city and shoulders his way through the heavy wood gates (the guards do not ask, either, because they see Michael, see his thousand yard stare, and push the doors open as soundlessly as he pours himself through), is when he reaches the door to the castle, hung in its lanterns and creeping ivy, and he whispers to the guard "Let me speak to Moira."
The guard takes Michael through the main hall and their steps ring like an old church. Michael tries not to think of the things that are gone or the things that are there because he cannot think of anything but the rock in his stomach and guard's back, bobbing in his periphery.
He is left at the kitchen door. The light is low, a single torch on the wall to offset the orange glow from beneath the door. Michael nods, smiles thankfully, and opens the door before him.
The room opens up and eats him whole. Baskets of fruit, pots full of spice and dormant stoves leer in from all corners. And in the middle of it, red like the torchlight, red like the blood sprinting into his cheeks-- there she is.
Now that Michael is here, he doesn't quite know what to say.
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