GENTLE LADY, DO NOT SING
sad songs about the end of love; / lay aside sadness and sing / how love that passes is enough.
She almost doesn’t feel like herself, standing here among the multicolored flames of the festival, which seem to dye the metallic silver of her coat every which way as they dance and sway. She almost doesn’t feel like herself, because she is so sure that she died that night on the Steppe, her grave in flowers instead of flames (ill-fitting for a Solterran, least of all a Solterran queen); but now some part of her feels like she has been pulled back from the ground, that she is not quite a ghost any longer. There are people here, and she has a daughter, and she is speaking to a stranger not in the way of a hellbent Fury on a quest for justice, or revenge, or salvation. She is not speaking as a queen, or an emissary, or even as a soldier.
Tonight, she is simply a woman, her white hair dribbling to her ankles, painting the face of a stranger. She wonders if it isn’t the first time in her life that she has been herself, not something defined by the will and whims of her people and her homeland.
She cannot remember the last time she stood so close to a stranger without flinching.
“They certainly do,” she says, a half-laugh lingering on the edges of her upturned lips, “and she is especially prone to it, I think.” Unlike her twin, she thinks, though she does not say it. (They both worry her, but in very different ways.) Diana is always searching for something, always running, always pulled by forces that, even as her mother, she cannot understand at all – and she isn’t sure if that breaks her heart or not. But she does not think of that too much, not now. Instead, she keeps that half-gentle and mostly unused smile. “Thank you. I just hope that she hasn’t managed to find too much trouble in the meantime.” She thinks that her hope is probably futile, however.
She can’t say that she is surprised by the somber tones of his answer to her inquiry; what she expects less, probably, is to empathize with it.
I suppose I was looking for someone. But I did not expect to find them.
His words bring her back to the island full of mirrors, her search for the specter of her mother. (All she found was the sharp and golden reflection of her own eye, which was nearly enough.)
If she is wondering who he is looking for, or why he cannot find them, she does not prod at the bruise. “I’m sorry,” she says, and, for once in her life, she thinks that her voice might be proper consolation, because she knows that she understands it. There are nights – most nights – where she swears that she knows more ghosts than she does living beings, and, even among the living, she always finds herself looking for versions of people that no longer exist, ones that she loved and can never return to. She can remember walking through sandstone hallways with smiling faces, waiting eagerly for the arrival of letters (even, once, in the face of tragedy), a gentle touch here and there, a kindness.
And then there is always the picking yourself back up again, even on your own.
(At least she has her children, now.)
He asks her, unsmiling, if she would like him to return the favor – to paint her. She pauses, and there is a certain rigidity that floods into her stance, quick as a bolt of lightning. She forces herself to settle just as quickly.
There are some disgraces (tragedies) that can never be walked back from, no matter how much you would like to escape them. The request dies and rots like a dead thing on the tip of her tongue, and she exhales sharply, the gold glint of her scar catching in the fire-light like the drip of an open wound, like blood.
“There is,” she says. (She doesn’t say that she once wore the rarest of them all, dredged-up relics of warrior-queens of old.) “There is, but I…can no longer wear it. I fell in battle, and my people suffered for it. I can never wear our paint again.” She looks at him, spring-green eyes with a warrior’s glint, and she wonders if he knows all the ways that living on can be a greater disgrace than death. Seraphina presses her tongue to the back of her teeth, swallowing, and she finds herself asking, to her faint surprise, “but…if there is something else you might paint, I would appreciate it.”
Seraphina has never allowed anyone else to paint her before. There is something foreign – a bitter taste in her mouth – about asking it of a perfect stranger.
Regardless.
When she looks at him, she is not entirely sure what her stare is asking for.
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"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
