Maybe later she would look back on this day and wonder if it was when she began to understand what the sunshine felt like — what it really felt like. It wasn’t just the heat of it against your coat, the brightness of it stinging your eyes. No, it was something that ran deeper than skin. It was the way a smile could warm you from the inside out, and make all those fragile ice crystals limning her eyelashes melt into tears of joy.
And it was the way it could make her smile feel like the waves on a summer day, breaking gently against the beach. She could still hear them in the distance, turning briefly to watch the wolf leap into the sea foam. She wondered if she would ever be that fearless one day, that bold — to dive herself head first into the ocean, into the deep where she could not see her feet. Oh, she hoped so.
When Asapara asked her about her home, she has to stop herself from saying the first thing that comes to mind. Queit, she wants to say, like it’s the worst possible thing to say about a place — and in some ways, it felt like it was. Ever since her first visit to Denocte, trailing along behind her father with stars in her eyes and a song leaping its way out of her heart, she couldn’t stop comparing her home to others, her life to others. It always felt to her like everyone else was living the sort of stories that she was eager to read.
But when she turns back to the other girl, and bites her lip to stop those first words from spilling out, she tries to think of her Court in the unbiased-way all the scholars praised themselves for doing.
What was Delumine like?
It was quiet, yes — quiet enough to hear the wind whispering through the treetops, and birds chirping outside the open windows, and the page of a book being turned. And it was quiet in the way a wildflower meadow was so full of color and beauty that all the world seemed to stop, if only for a moment, to look upon it. In Delumine a person’s life wasn’t counted in years, but in stories, and experiences, and discoveries. And she has to remind herself then that the sunrise was quiet, too, and she loved it none the less for it.
So when she instead smiles and says, “peaceful,” she means it. “Do you like spring, Aspara? Delumine is like spring, even when it snows.” And she wonders then how she had never thought of that before, all those times she laid down in the meadow and watched the grass sway around her and wondered what girls her age did in Denocte, or Solterra, or Terrastella.
So of course when the conversation turns to the other courts (to Denocte! to Solterra!) her eyes light up at once. “The Night Court is so impressive,” she says wistfully, leaning in closer. “My father would take me there, when I was younger. For your festivals.” Ah Denocte, with its spices and smoke and stars. Something about the Court had always inspired her, every visit had made words leap into her mind like her stories had a life of their own, begging to be told.
She wants to ask more about the girl’s Court (she would never tire of listening to it). But somehow it seems fitting that she was not wholly of Denocte, even if she had grown up there — Maret could see the desert in her, too, in the white-sand of her coat to the blue of her horn, so much like the endless sky over the dunes. “Once, earlier this summer. The warmest place I’ve ever been,” she admits. “Why have you never gone, if your dad is from there?”
Maybe if she had slowed down, she might have thought how insensible the question sounded. As it is, she only cringes the moment the words leave her lips.
@
