S
omewhere, he knows, his daughters are staring into the flames, and Thana is dreaming of worlds carved from the ashes of them. Somewhere a shed-star is reading a young girl’s fortune, and a man is trying to prove himself in the races, and a group of kids are daring one another to run close to the flames. And somewhere Rhoeas is running wild through the forest, running and running and running until he cannot hear the music or smell the smoke or see the light of the fires reaching out into the night. There is a moment in which Ipomoea wants to set himself free to run with him.
He supposes now that it must be the desert in him (a realization he is only now beginning to embrace) that has him craving the wild. Or maybe it is still the call he can hear resounding somewhere in the forest, that wolfs-song that begs him to find overgrown trails leading him deeper and deeper north. His heart speeds up whenever he hears it, that unmistakable otherness of it cutting like an arrow through his chest, like it knew him better than he knew himself.
Perhaps it did. Perhaps he had only ever been a fractured part of the earth, broken apart and carried off by the wind. Sometimes he felt as though the earth were calling him home, home, home to it, like at any moment it might collapse beneath his hooves and take him back to the heart of it.
The thought is not so terrifying as it once was. When Ipomoea pauses and turns back to look at his city dancing between the bonfires, he thinks it will go on without him. For a long time since taking the crown (and even before, when Somnus had gone silent and he was left to do what he could not), he had not been so sure.
Now it is harder than ever to resist the call of the earth. Of the forest. Of the desert. Of Thana, every time she looks at him with the violence rising in her eyes, the wildness he loved nearly brimming over (and oh! how he would love her still if it did, but he was afraid sometimes of watching that happen in their city). So when Morrighan turns to him, he recognizes the look in her eyes as the same one he had looked upon Isra with, all those years ago.
She reminds him of himself, he thinks. A regent who looks upon her court and is worried by the deathly quiet of it, a regent who’s pleas fall on a deaf sovereign’s ears. It had not been lost on him that she had been the one to bring the Night Court here, instead of Antiope. He can see what is happening to Denocte, for it is the same thing that had happened to Delumine.
And he hopes now that she will act before it is too late. Before he did.
He looks at her slowly, quietly, for a long while. And then: “I know how you feel.”
For a while only the waves whisper between them while he listens to them, to their breathing, to the distant music stretching lazily across the sand. “You aren’t being selfish for feeling that way, if that is what worries you. Our hearts have a way of letting us know what needs to be done before our brain has a chance to process it.” His smile feels foreign, like it doesn’t belong on the face of a man who has worn as much blood on his lips as he has. But it is a gentle smile, despite the way he feels; like he is breaking all over again, breaking with her, because he knows (he does not know how he knows, but he does) what the next part of the story will be.
an endless garden
