the salt is on the briar rose,
the fog is in the fir trees.
the fog is in the fir trees.
Caspian was not raised on biscuits but on hardtack and watercress and whatever happened to be growing on the wind-swept meadows between the coast and the city. His mother would not buy butter, or jam, or anything that required making by hands other than her own. He’d always figured this was for monetary reasons, though now he wonders if she hadn’t just been proud. (Only lately is he coming to realize both things could be true.)
This never bothered him unduly. It did not seem such a bad thing, to survive on your wits and what grew around you. He knows, for instance, that the blueberries and red currants ripened in July, and the cranberries in September, and persimmons and apples through the fall -
(Of course all of this is small consolation each bitter January, but the capitol always feeds its people good alfalfa hay when they need it).
Today he is not thinking about hunger at all, or what is ripening on the vine - although he is thinking, a little, of the seasons. Benvolio is somewhere ahead of him, circling the belfries on the ancient church, finding new pockets of darkness to explore. Though today is warm, especially far from the toothy wind off the sea, Caspian knows that soon the days will be unbearably short, and cold, and the bat will go back into hibernation, leaving him alone.
It’s the worst day of every year.
Stop being dramatic. At that Caspian snorts and rolls his eyes, though Ben is too far away to hear him, and he tosses his head before turning down a narrow alley, a shortcut to his sister’s house. Winter must be on everybody’s mind: the cobblestones are bustling like a beaver dam before hibernation, and the paint dances out of the way of a mule pulling a cart of apples, and ducks just in time to miss getting clocked by rough-cut boards lashed to a giant Belgian unicorn’s back. The stallion tosses a swear his way, and Caspian, laughing, turns to insult him back -
And swings his hindquarters bodily into another horse. “Bloody-” he begins, but luckily whatever creative noun he was about to use next dies in his mouth. There is a girl there, a stranger, who looks nearly of an age and of a height with him, but before he notices much about her he sees the paper, and the pen, and the ink. He squints, trying to see how much damage his collision has done.
“Terribly sorry,” he says, grimacing, and from somewhere in his head hears Benvolio sigh, exasperated, What now?
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