I
am too young to want to escape my body. But I do. Oh, I do. It comes from the dreaming. It comes from the deja vu that strikes me unexpectedly in my waking days. When I visit the docks and hear the wet slush of a fishing net dropped to the deck, or the sound of sails catching wind.
It comes from not knowing where my father went, and from knowing too well what it sounds like for my mother to muffle her tears. I don’t speak of him, anymore. I’ve found it easier to pretend he never existed; that I was simply a child of Vespera and, well—
It is easier that way. That cool detachment.
(I can’t feign it at night, when I am alone; I can’t feign it when I am staring out my window toward the star-freckled sky).
But I can feign it now. I can feign it now as I slip out the back of the citadel to a narrow game trail. It is overgrown with ivy and other foliage. At this season, it bursts with greenery. I read about spring, in winter, as a boy. But I had never understood it until now, on the edge of summer. The birds are singing and the sea is warm enough to swim in; but I am not leaving the citadel to swim.
I skip down the narrow trail and then, when the rocks crumble from beneath my feet, I take flight.
I am too young to want to escape my body. But I do. Oh, I do.
One day, it might drive me to drink or to gamble or to fight. One day I might drive me to women or to dares or to unclimbable ventures. But today, today—it only makes me kiss the sky.
I bank off the cliff, fighting the coastal breeze; I skim over the top of waves and then ascend, up, up, until the ocean bleeds back into land. The earth beneath me seems as brutal as the feelings in my chest; the breaks are just as jagged, just as severe. I go from the sea to the cliffs to the fields where the tulips open beneath me in a blush of color.
I land there, I think, because it is beautiful. In my mind I plan to pick tulips for Elli—and then think better of it, worrying that, perhaps, she might be saddened by their lives cut short. I feel lost as soon as my hooves hit the earth. Around me there are couples and pairs and I am alone. I wander off to the edge, where the tulips bleed back into grass, and that is where I see her.
“Danaë,” I greet and already I am not myself. Already, I am Terrastella’s prince, and my voice is warm. “Are you alone?”
She is older than before; she looks older than me. But I am not like some. I understand the magic of these lands, and the magic of growing. I know, without asking, that we are both winter born and will be until we die. "It seems odd you're here. Can't you grow all the flowers you want?" I ask it a little wryly, with a curling to the edge of my mouth.
the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive
