“I
was a soldier. But you already knew that." I nod wordlessly, my hair spirals of gold against his neck. I pull at his mane and bite back a grin when he smiles. Under this lonely torchlight, heightened by the sheen of blades polished bright for war, his eyes are almost feverishly blue. Life, to the spilled ink of mine.
“We fought a generational, racial war. I was the last generation, before we won."
I lift my head and turn to regard him silently, my surprise held close and tight. As a Solterran, the hideousness of his warfare does not shock me so much as the confession. My wariness is worn like a ruby at my throat. This is nothing; I had asked him what he did, and he is merely answering.
I watch as the torchlight plays over the angles of his face. The dark gleam of his cheeks; the sea-blue of his eyes. As he speaks I search his expression like a priest searching auguries for answers, until he utters “...what do men, raised for war, become when the war is over?" and something shifts within me, like river-ice under a swollen caravan.
I am Solterran. I am a prince forged in a court of war. I ought to know how to answer him. Yet his confession (it is more than the confession—it is that he has confessed, the ultimate vulnerability, when I had thought him a man invulnerable) has scraped my skin as raw as his voice.
The silence left behind by my lyre is a live thing. “You repent, if you must," I say finally, my voice suddenly thin, my smile suddenly glancing. There is nowhere to look now but at him and I am terrified of what I will see when I do.
Because it is only now that I realise I have promised him something I can never give him, and it is too late, too late, to repent. “And after—" I swallow, before falling silent. In speech I am used to being eloquent, to being lucid and princely-clever. I am unused entirely to how my words now blur, one after the other after the other: “If he has something still to live for—I think it enough."
It is a testament to the suddenness of my fear.
It is the lump in the throat that turns to metallic poison as my wing skates over his eye and he tells me softly, "My father."
The poets like to say that dying makes a man different—that the pious becomes wicked, that the wicked becomes pious. I do not think that I am wicked. (I do not think that I am pious enough to become wicked.)
Yet I must be. For why else do I not tell him, from the moment I see how he looks at me—that I am a man waiting to die? There is blood at the back of my throat. I smell of bitter herbs and linen and parchment and blood. I wonder if I will last past the spring. I want to live. I look at him and I want to live.
But I still wish to die.
When I try to say this—a sickly sweetness, as filmy as oil, pours down my throat and I cannot bear it. The words choke back down my lungs.
The poets are wise, and I am a fool.
“Your father." I think of my own. Of his conciliatory smiles, his booming laughs, his phantom-like ability to disappear whenever I had wanted to see him. He'd never laid a hand on me. He'd never known me enough for it. My voice is painfully soft when I murmur, “I am sorry."
I am sorry. Each time those words had been spoken to me I had wanted to strangle the speaker.
(I am sorry, Prince Adonai, that you have taken ill.)
(I am sorry, Prince Adonai, for the loss of your parents.)
(I am sorry, Prince Adonai, for the loss of your sister.)
Softly, I brush my mouth over his scar. I do not care if I am hurt. I do not care if I am strangled. (If anything—it will be quick.) There is an urgency, now, to my touches over his skin and I am not only glowing but burning. I am burning, and I have always been burning, and I do not care, Vercingtorix, if you break me.
If I could, I would laugh: bright, bitter, cruel. I have never hated myself more than in this moment, in my inability to resist him, in my inability to tell him that I will not be the one broken, because I will be dead. I will be dead, and you will be alive, and if I was cruel enough I would ask you, in between these feverish kisses (at your nose, your eyes, your cheeks): What is worse? That you lived, while your comrades died?
That you walked out of the war alive?
“Torix," I say, when he tells me I can show you. My eyes are fever-bright. Slashes of blue, where they should be silver. I have never hated a color as I hate this shade of blue. My breath is cloud-soft as I brush my nose against his, longingly, before my smile falls quietly in on itself. “I..." The sea is far; visiting it had only been a boy's fantasy, eagerly shared to him because it had been impossible. There is solace to be found in dreaming impossible things.
Yet my reluctant solemnity is broken, for a moment, when he tells me of his dragon. And what can I do but laugh? It is a sound of delight, to stifle my growing fear. If only for a moment. “A dragon?" I trace my wing indulgently over his cheek. The determination in his gaze nearly drowns me, yet my smile holds. “Then it just may work."
I do not say how the impossible thing is making it out of this marble-carved fortress. I do not say that as much as I wish to see the sea, what I truly wish is for him to promise to visit me again and again and again. There are many rooms in this great, gaping house. I have toured them all. Every visit, I will show him another one.
I yearn for the sea. But what I yearn above all, is his company promised to me.
“There is something you must know," I murmur against his chest, when he presses me close to him, his nose buried between the soft down of my wings. My mouth is still held in the shape of a laugh. In my head, I trace out the contours of a great dragon, sailing like a knight's steed to the beckoning sea. I must hold tightly to this image, so that my voice, when I tell him, will not break too quickly for me to put back together.
My lungs are clean of blood. My eyes are free of poppies. “I—"
I swallow. I am cruel, but I am not cruel enough. I cannot keep this from him any longer. “I do not have very long left to live. This illness of mine, it does not—" When I am interrupted by a slashing cough, it is low and wet and aching. Mucus trapped in the lungs. Blood pressed against the throat. “—it is not curable, because it is not an illness."
A hoarse laugh catches at the end of my breath and I press my head desperately into him so that I will not break.
“It is poison." And I cannot beat it.
Help, I lost myself again
But I remember you
Don't come back, it won't end well
But I wish you'd tell me to
@
BRIGHT SPLASH OF BLOOD ON THE FLOOR. ASTONISHING RED.
(All that brightness inside me?)
(All that brightness inside me?)
♦︎♔♦︎
