He is grateful for friends like this, he thinks (even the ones he doesn’t know well) - those for whom quiet speaks as well as a voice. The spaces of silence are easy between them. Maybe it is only a mark of Asterion’s growing up - once, surely, he’d be clambering to fill the air in his nervousness, especially before a king - but he thinks it has rather more to do with Po himself. Maybe neither of them were always this way - maybe what really grows between them is the shadow of a crown.
Well, he is glad enough not to have his head bowed by it now. The bay is glad, too, to follow the paint the way he had on the island, the soft sound of their hooves like a drum beating him back in time; the light here is darker, softer, and the magic quieter. Almost you could forget it was there at all.
Asterion’s eyes, too, touch each of the carved things, each of them given life with careful cuts, given motion with flickering firelight. When Po speaks, the bay has to twist a black-tipped ear toward him to catch it. The question touches his heart like a tender bruise, but a smile curves his lips. “Every day.” He considers adding, I think that’s part of it, or should be. Now he studies the back of the other stallion, the dark wave of hair, the way the firelight finds him. “But I don’t know who would have been right.”
@Ipomoea
hold me amongst all your cards;
