I want to let her go. I want to run with her after this true-child that we never got a chance to be.
I
solt wants a thousand things in this life — but most of them begin in blood.When she lays the tip of her horn against the girl’s brow in a promise, she wants to dig it deeper into her skin, to draw blood with it the way her sister had drawn blood on her lips. She wants to chase her down into the night, to carve away the bits of innocence like she might then stitch them into her skin, into her sister’s, and wear them like a mockery of the real thing. She wants to destroy her in the way she wants to destroy everything in this world that is more alive than her.
But she does not. She taps her horn once (only once — if she did more she might never stop) and pulls away. “When you will go into it without fear, you will be. And we will find you when you are.”
The feel of Danaë against her skin makes her tremble with want. But the dead of the forest are calling (always, they are calling), and in the echo of their voices Isolt has no heart to care for girls who are not ready to become dead.
“Until then — you can keep dancing.” The words sound like permission granted from a god to a mortal. And Isolt smiles that terrible, bloody smile, the one that cracks seeds and bones and hope alike between her too-bright teeth that shine like a scar on her dark lips.
She waits until she does, until Elliana goes dancing off into the darkness (and out of their winter forest that she does not belong to.) And once she disappears between the trees, she steps into the grave that she had not been willing to go into.
It is there that she curls around her sister, and drapes her throat around her spine with a sigh. Beneath them she can hear the sparrow singing and praying (to them, always to them). And she begins to hum along to the song of it like a lullaby. But she does not lull the dead around them to sleep.
She begs them to come awake, awake, awake, with their daisy eyes and root-joints, and dance along to the unicorn song.
isolt
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