come away, o child
to the waters and the wild
Why can’t you use them? The question seems crass… and obvious. Aeneas furrows his brows—but this his upbringing gets the better of him. He thinks of all the patience his father has given him, and his mother to. “They aren’t grown enough yet.” Not I’m not grown enough yet. Perhaps the most boyish pleasure he allows himself is fantasies of flight, of Halycon, of—
Well, he thinks again of the knights in his picture books. “Why—why is your painting so sad?” Aeneas asks, as way of asking, why do YOU seem so sad?
He starts to think she’s pretty; pretty in the way princesses are pretty. Then Aeneas remembers his sister is a princess. Ew. Hilde is Hilde. His sister, a princess.
But what is this girl? A commoner? Aeneas knows it doesn’t matter.
At the same time, it kind of does.
I don’t like falling, she says.
“Oh.” Aeneas doesn’t know what to think of that. And there is a moment of indecision, before he decides to share a small piece of himself, a piece he keeps private. “Well—I think that’s what makes it worth it, you know?” He remembers watching the Halycon during a sparring match plummet from the skies before regaining balance. “You can see a lot up there.” As Aeneas says it, he glances up toward the sky, toward the sun.
The mere thought fills him with hope, and love, and admiration.
The grass he had drawn energy from not only regains its previous colour, undoing the damage, but turns the deep green of summer.
He glances back down, holding her eyes. They remind him of different shades of sky. They make him self-conscious, but he doesn’t know why. “Are you from here?” he asks.
with a fairy, hand in hand
for the world is more full of weeping
than you can understand
