I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
“I’m not sure,” he admits, and wishes he had a better reason for her than the truth. “It never felt like the proper time, unless I was alone…and for a long while I was not alone very often.” Not when there were meetings and duties, planning and reassuring, letters to write and to read - not when he was king, and his time was not his own, but belonged to the people of this court. Now he has only himself, but it is a freedom with a bitter taste.
The flowers growing in the city now probably are the same ones; they’d all been replanted, after the flooding.
There are gulls on the beach (as there always seems to be), and one swoops low over the water, its cry mournful. His dark eyes track it as the palomino speaks; if his heart tightens a little, thinking of another old friend now gone, his expression does not betray it. Asterion wonders if he will grow used to the feeling of loss. Sadness could be its own kind of companion.
“It’s very loyal, to those it likes,” he answers, and turns to meet her gaze again. Of course, the ocean was loyal to all; it’s not like it could go off from them, like other wild things could. He smiles at her question, or rather the statement that follows it. “Just wandering, today. But I’m glad I’m here, too.” Asterion sees no reason to mention his long history with the ground beneath their feet; even when he was king, he almost always found a way to skirt the fact.
Her question charms him, both the phrasing and the way she asks it the way a child would, shy and eager. “I’ll make it do more,” he says, and a slow smile spreads across his dark lips. “If you care to follow me-”
And he walks back to the beach and steps into the foam, and further out, until the water rises to his ankles, and laps over his knees, and cools his star-marked belly. With a thought he parts the sea, and it withdraws like curtains on a stage, revealing dark sand studded with shells and crabs and starfish, a little path cut off by a wall of water a few feet before them. Around them the water arcs up, almost meeting over their heads; the shadows of fish dart by and the sunlight streams through the water like it is colored glass.
It takes hardly any effort for him to suspend it there as he looks over his shoulder at her, searching her expression, and asks, “Is there anything you’d like to see?”
@
Asterion.
