pilate
/
walking round always mad reputation, leave a pretty girl sad reputation / this that what-we-do don't tell your mom shit, this that red cup all on the lawn shit / got a fresh cut straight out the salon bitch
I wonder if my mother knew what she was doing when she made him.
Let’s say the rumors are true—that we are children not just of noble blood, but the stuff of myths. Let’s say (and for legal reasons I will add: hypothetically) that all my siblings and I are indeed made of Solterra’s fine, glittering sands, less mortal than we are godly and less living than we are statuesque. Eyes of polished gemstone. Heart of marble, veined with gold. If it were true that she sculpted us, then she would have been a real artist worthy of recognition, would have belonged with the de Clares.
But anyway. Let’s say she made us. I have to wonder, then, why she chose to make us all so different: me in her image; Corradh and Miriam too, in lesser measures. What possessed her to wrap Adonai in white and gold instead? Did she mean to cast us as enemies by making him so, well, individual—gracing him with things none of the rest of us have, the beautiful horn, the wide metal wings? How could she not have seen that by making us so different she would inevitably push us further apart?
When I was a child I admired all of this. I envied his ability to fly (even though he did not often make use of it). I envied the horn that spiraled from his forehead like Caliburn from its stone. He was beautiful in a way I did not recognize; more Solterran than any one of the rest of us, more snake-like, more refined, and simultaneously more deadly. At banquets I stuck to his side like a burr. The other nobles would see us, and laugh: back then it was sweet, that the princes of Ieshan were so closely bound. And back then I always thought it was a good thing he stood out so sharply from the rest of us. That it marked his worthiness, somehow.
It used to be enviable. Now it makes me cringe. Now everything about him feels rotten and ugly. Now I look at him and I don’t see a sibling, not in the way I see the other Ieshan children. I only see the wretched thing my mother made when she still loved Solis more than herself.
He is foreign to me, in every way imaginable.
I have neglected them.
I sigh out a breath—
As I have neglected you.
And despite myself inhale it back in, more surprised than I mean to be.
I drop my gaze to look at him more evenly. I can’t help leaning slightly forward when I do it, as if I am drawn to and not repulsed by him. His handsome face is clean of real expression. I don’t know what else I could have expected—it would be foolish of him to betray anything genuine. But he has always been more hot-headed than people would assume, and sometimes I hope against hope that he will crack, slide back to his old ways, and in doing so become weak, the Adonai I used to know.
He looks back at me with a gaze like molten silver, like nightshade, as pretty as it is deadly, and I run my tongue around the curve of my teeth and try not to become attached to the look of his eyes, because I know they will, at some point in the future, like everything and everyone else, leave me.
Dying can be a long process, but it comes to a close eventually; and when it does, I might even miss him.
Quick, little brother, he says—I can’t help the way my mouth twists in disgust when it happens, though in the millisecond after I am already chastising myself for not keeping cool, with the violent intensity that comes from years of being told that I should know better—embrace me. And again I make a movement I wish I hadn’t; I flinch, not out of fear but pure disbelief, and my scaled brow rises instinctively.
But before I can respond (before I even really know what I would say), Adonai’s glass comes crashing down on the well-worn surface of the table with a sound like a sonic boom that sends my snakes into a fit. Even with our intricately embroidered tablecloth to break its fall, the cup shatters into a million flashing pieces, whose sharp edges turn the moonlight into spears and tumble like rain to the floor. Wine dribbles down my chest, settles into the corners of my mouth; it flecks my white robe like a bloodstain, and that irritates me the most.
But I do not chastise him. I do not laugh, either, despite that feeling like the next most sensible option, for I know that the servants are still watching, and he has given me an opportunity far greater than he could have ever meant to.
“Oh, Adonai.” I soothe him in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, a voice tinged with carefully constructed sympathy. “You shouldn’t exert yourself so. Holding a glass is too difficult; there is no need to conceal that from me, your own brother. You must let me do it for you.”
A servant rushes over with a new glass. I hold Adonai’s gaze as I pour the wine into it: slow, methodical, not stopping when it reaches the line I was taught to stop at, not stopping until it is filled almost to the brim, quavering like a frightening prey animal caught in crossfire.
Let me do it for you, my eyes say, or you will drown.
