the salt is on the briar rose,
the fog is in the fir trees.
the fog is in the fir trees.
There is something in the way she watches him that makes his skin want to shudder beneath the impression of her gaze, something that’s like curiosity only the way a river is like a flood. It is longing but more than that; and what would a young man read it as other than desire?
So Caspian stands neck-arched, hip-cocked beneath her eye, and when she says I am not a patient soul his other eyebrow lifts too. Oh? his expression seems to say, meeting its twin in her smile. When she continues, though, he only shrugs a shoulder, the lines of his face mellowing back into boyish ease. “Then I’ll have failed,“ he answers, offhandedly, but within he’s burning with determination, a new spark with a cage of wood around it. “But I’m not very patient, either.”
You’re terrible at flirting, Ben mutters into their bond. Caspian takes a moment to stretch, turning back toward the glittering, dreamlike arch. Yeah, well, you’re a mouse with wings, he retorts. Both of them prick their ears toward the stranger when she says trouble. One is wary, one intrigued.
“Me, trouble?” Caspian tries and mostly fails not to sound pleased. Now he looks at her and notices more of the flowers wound in her hair, and stones, and shells - some of them not so different than the one he wears on a simple cord around his neck. He wonders where she’s from; if Dusk, it would explain the ocean-familiar scent. “Not in a foreign city.”
Her second answer draws that smile back to his lips, a little less wild this time. Like all boys of his age, his stomach is almost always rumbling, and immediately visions of food stalls groaning under the weight of delicacies drive most other thoughts from his mind. Without a thought he followers her, out of the shimmering lights and back into darkness, where the path begins to drift downhill. “Hmmm. I’ve always heard of the night court’s dragon cakes…I should start with one fo those, I think.”
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