AND I KNOW THAT ROME WASN'T BURNT IN A DAY
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
T
he words fall out of him; Andras has no choice but to watch them go. In some capacity, he feels his mouth form them, feels his throat push them out, but they do not seem like his words. To anyone else, perhaps they would have been easy to see: this is the self, opened like a palm full of petals, and each petal is another true thing crushed into the mill of the crowd.–But Andras has never known himself, not really, and if he has he does not know what it looks like, except the sharp pulse in him when Adonai says Pilate’s name. (That, he would recognize if he were deaf and he felt the words through the floor. It is involuntary, and violent, and his mouth trembles with the effort of holding it in.)
‘I’m so happy you thought of me,’ Andras hears and feels himself say, and still feels more than he sees the brief flash of disbelief, the uncanny stillness with which Adonai meets his statement. Andras feels it, also, only twofold.
Ah, of course, Adonai says, leaning close in a motion that has Andras reeling with the quickness of it, the closeness that’s left in its wake. This close he can see the blue strings of Adonai’s eyes, the light cast off the spear of his horn. The warmth, tucked underneath the thick fur of his cloak and trying its best to escape, is an almost palpable sensation.
’My brother is rather cold with his affections.’ “I’ve noticed,” Andras smiles weakly. “I don’t think he means to be.”
“Well, he obviously means it, but– anyway.”
Andras frowns, as fondly as he can. Across what must be an ocean, against the grating sound of a violin from the side of the room, through waves of voices that seem to pulse in and out of being, Adonai is wondering about him – what his brother sees in the cut of Andras’ cheekbone, in the white of his lip against the white of his teeth that makes each smile look too wide to be entirely real. Andras often wonders, himself, when he can bear to.
So far he has not come up with any good answers.
You’ve seen him already, I gather? Adonai asks, then looks at him like he’s waiting, and the Warden looks back at him, dulled and thoughtful, with a smile that does not hold an ounce of mirth. He nods, and the moment passes, almost as if it had not happened at all.
–except that Andras is watching Adonai when he coughs, not very hard but enough that it shakes the fur of his cloak and unsettles the pair of white-gold wings laid over his back. Andras watches with purposely dulled concern, turning his head to look out at the crowd, louder now that he’s focused on them. The sway of them is dizzying.
Adonai asks if he’s hungry. Andras grimaces without looking back. He should eat something, to soak up the drink and end this nightmare even one second sooner than it will end itself, but he looks at the thick oaken doors he had walked away from, and the prince wrapped in his fur, and he feels something like fear, but not quite, worm its way down his throat and into his stomach.
“No,” Andras says, which, because Pilate stands at the bar, handing drinks to–whatever he is–that peel back the ramshackle walls he’s constructed, leaves him as, “Starving.”
ANDRAS, WARDEN OF DELUMINE
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
