"we rose up from the rocks in half darkness with stars beginning to appear in the sky like pale, ethereal jewellery."
"Neither," she said, silver eyes like black stones, and Caine could not help the laugh that clawed out from his lungs, a light startled thing, because he had not realised there had been a third option.
"But if you'd prefer the real thing to a mockery, you only have to take it."
He could still hear the sea behind him, still feel the spray of heartbreak-blue waves slashing the white slick sands one pulse after the next, the rhythm droll and eternal, the rhythm droll because it was eternal. They were not far from the water. The necklace that was really a collar, that horrendous imitation she had called a mockery, shuddered as a sea breeze tore lovingly through it, as if it still remembered that divine laws like gravity and wind must be obeyed. His illusions had always been precise. Though Caine forgot it often between bursts of arterial blood, in his chest beat the heart of an artist.
There was a terrible malice in Caine's red-pulsing eyes when Warset raised her wings above him like they were pieces of the night sky made flesh. It was accompanied, and then swallowed utterly, by a terrible wonder. His shoulders ached with the weight of wings half-remembered and never properly grieved. It was the closest to mourning he would ever come.
Who was this girl, he thought, with eyes of light where his were blood, who plucked the sea from his mane and touched her nose to his neck and closed her wings above his head like she was the Night itself, like she was an archangel sent from the Goddess Caligo all the way down to sully her divinity as she brought a sinner to his unrepentant knees?
He could not stop looking at her. "If you do I promise you'll never fall in quite the same way again." The crow had fallen silent. Caine no longer registered its phantom weight on his shoulder. It had gone completely, he realised, abandoning him to her, or really, him abandoning it. He had taken it back into himself out of an illogical desire to be the only creature, living or magical, under her death-dark wings. It was the closest to jealousy he had ever come.
He did not speak when she stepped closer, and closer, and closer. Instead he held his words close, cupping them in his chest and picking them through like he had picked Fia's flowers, as he gave, and gave, and gave. Until his ankles sank deep into surf; until his eyes cooled back to silver; until malice and something else bled like a slashed throat out of the corners of his bleak smile.
“You would let me?” He had stopped moving. He had become a thing immovable. He could not stop looking at her. “But you shouldn’t.” And then his mouth was at her ear, soft and chiding: “Not for anyone. You will end up giving away pieces of yourself until there is nothing left.”
You must always keep your possessions close, Agenor had once cautioned him. Because they are the only things that cannot leave you, that instead can only be left.
The crow had taken the necklace with it when it was banished. Caine's neck rippled black as fate, naked from adornment, cold from the touch of the sea. His wings trailed limply in the pummelling surf, gathering weight and losing flight. His mouth continued to hover near her sleek ear as he thought, his breath warm on her neck (as hers had been on his).
Caine did not move away. Not this time. He did not want the weight of her fathomless eyes clapped upon him when he asked, with the fatal curiosity of the sinner,
“... Where did you come from?” Not a court, he thought. Farther than that.
Farther.
