[P] golden child; lion boy

[Adonai]

A D O N A I



—

T

here is a grove of eucalyptus trees that stains the backwaters of our lands red every summer. The bloom is not visible from the house; most Ieshan children do not know that our lands encroach quite so far into the Mors.

The land where the eucalyptus reign had always been too dry to farm. Mother had tried, I think, until Zolin grew from the flesh of Solterra like a particularly nasty ulcer, and the peasants no longer kissed the sand when our carriages carved golden paths through their markets.

Suddenly no gardener could be spared from the tending of the rose trellises, that fragrant white labyrinth cushioning the main estate from the grime and beady-eyed spies of the inner city.

We were not fools, like the dead Hajakhan royals.

So the eucalyptus were left to the barren sands, and, bereft of my mother's smothering attention, they flourished.

It is not the season for the bloom, but I am so sick of the house and the company it keeps that after I am washed and dressed (a thin linen robe, one that I will drop at a gardener's hooves) I sweep out the doors with instructions for no one to follow.

The sun is already at an apex in the sky when the sands begin to harden beneath my hooves. I am only a little out of breath, my linen robe long discarded; and before I had left my room I had checked: only the faintest shadow of blue-black dulled the gold beneath my eyes.

I am afraid to call it progress.

There had been an old well dug between the roots of two bowing eucalyptus saplings that Mernatius had found. We had drank from it indulgently, thrilled as all desert-borne are by the presence of water in unexpected places. But the grove has aged since then, and I find no saplings as I wander between shade and searing sun. A trace of gold glints from between the trunks.

I blink when I realise that the gold is in the form of a stallion, and that the stallion is drinking from the well.

An unfortunate consequence of an eternity spent in the company of none but maids and traitorous brothers is that it has left me starved—half-mad—for someone else.

"You must not be from around here," I say, smiling brilliantly into the sun as I approach the well. "To not know that the well water is cursed."

How I have missed the sound of my voice like this: mocking, sweet, and just a little bit cruel.





In the summer haze:
Behind magnolias,
Faint sheets of lightning.

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