adonai.
I drift through the party on statuesque limbs. For a while I am amiable, pleasant, uttering a blessing in common tongue for the pious, slipping a glib in Sahvahn for the enamoured—until my breathing grows strained and my smile stretches tight like lambskin left out to tan.
I bow lightly to a brunette with the Hajakhan crest ironed into her sleeve, her ruby eyes faintly serpentine in shape; she is watching me too carefully to be anything but conniving, and her smile fails to convince me otherwise. Vaguely I place her as the new Emissary's maternal cousin, but her name escapes me, and anyway—she is not important enough for me to expend any further effort.
This entire party is an avalanche of barely placeable faces and smiles that leer like a laughing jackal's. And it has only just begun.
A new tide of arrivees pours as fluid as wine through our carven doors, and as I lean precariously against the skeletal, holly-wreathed banister of our staircase—prized for its looks more so than its effectiveness, a taste distinctly Ieshan—I bring a wing to my mouth and absently check if it comes away red.
It doesn't. This comforts me, but only barely.
I am faintly annoyed that besides Miriam, my sisters and Corradh seem to have conveniently forgotten about my existence. Pilate is the only one I know the whereabouts of, and this only serves to annoy me further.
I grit my teeth; I am too proud to search for the rest of them through the swell of aristocratic faces, so I turn away to pick unhappily at a fig tart I had plucked when I'd passed the kitchens. It tastes bland and paste-like. I resolve to hovering the china plate in the air, and seeing how high I can lift it.
I am the eldest, and as such have never looked for my siblings, because they have always been the ones to look for me. To boast, to whine, to wheedle. I had listened to it all without complaint. Was sibling devotion inherently limited to childhood and spritely adolescence, then? Was a never-healing sickness and months of bedrest enough to undo all I have done in their welfare?
I am fairly unsurprised and too impassive to take particular offense. It is simply the way of the nobility. Our mother had barely raised us, our father her sulking shadow; that her children have grown up feral yet clothed in the finest of silks, fed on a diet of ambrosia, should surprise no one, least of all me. It is quite possibly the worst combination you could have—we are quite possibly the worst you could have—yet something still holds us all together, and for now—
For now, it is not my duty to ask what exactly that thing is.
There is a teasing flutter of lavender in the crowd. Immediately I am aware who she is—I have been waiting for her—yet I hesitate, the plate shivering in the air, for a surer sign. Until the scent of night-blooming jasmine perfumes the air, and my lips drag up into a grin.
I am pleased that she has come. I am honored that she has traveled such a distance at my request. I hunger for such physical reminders of my existence.
When I step into her path, the sapphires draped like tears over my cheeks and breastbone ripple and whisper like a voiceless chorus. "Lady Mesnyi?" I say, my voice raising in inquiry, though it is more a display of manners than a real question. I have never seen the performer in the flesh yet she is infamous: skin kissed by lavender, ears dabbed with jasmine, a swan's grace and a nightingale's croon in clear, warbling soprano.
I sweep into a bow, the tasteless tart providing me with the energy to make it low and grand. "I am honored. Your presence has been eagerly awaited."
In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim
he's not wingless yet as depicted but I just couldn't wait anymore to use this table c""":
BRIGHT SPLASH OF BLOOD ON THE FLOOR. ASTONISHING RED.
(All that brightness inside me?)
(All that brightness inside me?)
♦︎♔♦︎
