well, then I'd rather be wild
O had been surprised to find the owl waiting for her. Novus, of late, was surprisingly calm, and anyway she did not usually have a barrage of callers nor held a position that invited such correspondence. When it swooped down to find her, she had flinched, thinking: this must be meant for someone else.
But it had not even given her a chance to protest, only dropped the scroll at her feet and soared away into the hot blue sky. When she picked it up, the letter unfurled to reveal ink scrawled across a paper imprinted with flower petals and bits of herbs, the writing an eager, sophisticated slant; it smelled the way she remembered Dusk court smelling, like saltwater and rose perfume. For a moment, even knowing that she was standing in the desert and blinking the grit out of her eyes, O had been transported to that night in the hallway of flickering lights stuck between two green-eyed girls, and knew whose signature would be on the bottom of the scroll even before she read it. Anandi.
And she had said, too—yours. O’s stomach had turned, a loose knot of rock shifting just between her hips in a way that made her feel dizzy even without moving, and the heat of her skin became overwhelming even as the sun went down, down, down.
At dusk. Near the sea.
It’s so her that O can’t help grinning. What else could she expect of Andi but to do what she does best—to orchestrate this meeting like it’s an inside joke, just like that first one on the island, saltwater pulling at their feet, hair ruffled by the breeze and made golden-red by the setting sun?
She passes through the row of bonfires without comment, watching with a squint as sheafs of paper turn to charcoal, then rise up to meet the clouds in puffs of dark smoke. The crowds are pressed in like children vying for a look at some obscure bug. Today the wind off the ocean is cold; O, dressed down as always in nothing of an outfit except her dark hair twisted back in braids, has to suppress a shiver as she descends. The sky is still mostly blue, just beginning to find its sunset color in pale swatches of orange and purple, and when her hooves meet the gray sand it is cold, cold, cold.
She steps onto the beach and lets the fires burn away behind her like so many bad omens.
