“You can never be sure of your way.”
The snow’s so thick
And the ice so slick.
With your life you will surely pay.
-------
He watches the little witch go. Ahead of him she drifts like a storm rolling in from the sea. If he would see her face, to see the angular lines shadowed with pain and displeasure, then he would surely call her a storm-monger.
She talks as she goes, her voice a thing of babbling, unsettled seas. She is fitful, he thinks; a creature as unstable as the winds that swirl wildly beneath a gathering tempest. There is no one but Polunin to hear the words she speaks and so, he surmises, she must be mad, or lonely to speak so freely.
Haunted a ghost voice whispers within his mind and his elegant nape arches high with distaste.
Firelight eyes blink once, then twice. It is with distaste that he finds himself here, so far from water. The only sea his body knows this instant is one of swaying grasses: coarse and ticking and irritating. He is headed back, the call of Denocte’s lake too strong. It is with adoration and curses that he considers that jagged body of water. For it had lured him here, a siren’s call in the dark, as he fled his old court of ice and snow.
It is ironic then, that the girl should be moving the same way as he… Was she the lake, come to call him back with her wild, wintry eyes and blue, blue skin? She is water in all its forms and as she goes, as she moves on through this dry, green sea, she staggers like choppy waters. His fighting eye, predatory with his marksman’s gaze, settles in upon her point of pain.
On and on the black swan stalks the wandering storm. On and on toward their Night Court home and it is only when she nears the edge of this damnable plain that he finally draws along beside her: the black front of her raging storm. His eyes bathe her in consuming fire and his teeth do clack whilst his wings spread once, then twice, beating the air to ease their strain. An eye falls to Dvalinn’s own feathered limbs held tight to her side, held stiflingly tight.
Knife sharp feathers fold away, like night daggers sheathed to await the cover of night in order to play, to destroy. The shift of his wings disturb the air, rousing the scents of sweet herbs and yarrow spices clinging to her skin. Fire-eyes trail to Denocte’s sage, looking for wounds. Polunin was a warrior, he knew the smell of newly cut herbs, ready for healing, ready for, “Poison?” He asks of her at last, his voice the rough grate of a coarse bird’s cry. “Or healing? Which do you collect those herbs for?”
As the black swan gazes down his nose at the mumbling witch, he feels her capable of either.
@Dvalinn
