I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
Once, Asterion had been like her - guilty for what he had left behind, and how it had been left. How strange it was, that distant past - how feral it seems now, that wild world with its gods who tended their pastures and flocks, and no walls, and nothing but water to drink. Everything had seemed holier then, though sometimes he thinks that Novus would have found them all heathens.
But then living had felt more like living, and less like worrying. Funny how a world with castles and knights could feel less like an adventure and more like a burden.
He smiles at her statement, and nods, the way he would at a precocious child. “I’ve grown since then, I like to think,” he says. As she continues his dark ears flick forward, interested: here is something more like that distant world of Ravos, the gods and horses he knew there. “What a beautiful lineage,” he says. And your father? he wants to ask, but does not; for fathers are on his mind, of late, but she would have told him, if she felt it worth telling.
Asterion huffs a laugh as she continues, thinking that she, in a way, is a little like water herself - a laughing stream, on to the next riffle, the next little tumble and fall, the next bit of conversation. “Sometimes a whisperer, but sometimes a shouter or a beggar. And I try to stay clear of secrets, myself.” Now it is his turn to be mischievous, even when she asks about tomorrow. “I’ll let you guess,” he says, and it is not sorrow, not dread, but a boyish excitement (just a kernel of it, like a memory) at the idea of a day unfurling unknown.
At his invitation she comes nearer, and he sees that she is not quite so young as she sounds - even as her long lashes and the heart-shaped mark on her brow bely the knowledge. She’s a little like Florentine, in that regard, with a laughing youth even into womanhood; it endears her to him the same way she thinks of her godfather. And it is good, it is good, to be close to someone who expects nothing from him.
Nothing but dolphins, that is.
Asterion grins even as he shakes his head, sending his forelock tumbling over his eyes. “I’ll try,” he says, and if he says a little prayer for dolphins then, well, who could blame him? That please would undo anybody. He turns back to the sea, pressing his tongue to the back of his teeth in concentration; first he makes little waves, the kind of surf that begs for playing on, and then he shapes water-dolphins that shine like stars in the sunlight. These leap and tumble, eager and acrobatic as the real things, but they are only a decoy. And he hopes, and waits, and hopes again for a dorsal fin -
@
Asterion.
