come, come, come, come.
what is done cannot be undone.
what is done cannot be undone.
Y
ou are hurt.
"I am always hurt," said Senna, mockingly.
And you are speaking like him again. The white gyrfalcon perched atop Senna's shoulder cracked open her cruel yellow beak in a cruel yellow caw. The nobleman's answering silence was met with a black-eyed apathy more feigned than felt.
Nestor could feel Senna's misery as if it were her own; yet what was it to her? She found him displeasing when he got like this. She did not know him when he was a feeling creature, because he was a thinking creature, utterly and fully — and falcons disliked hypocrisy.
Snapping her beak at his ear in a vicious display of hunger, Nestor leapt off of Senna's shoulder and winged up into the cotton-blue sky. Fix yourself before I come back. He was leaving a trail of bright blood after him in the harshest stretch of the Mors. No cacti stubbled these sands, nor rattlers or fat brown mice. Nothing but teryrs and wyrms and skulls filling in for tumbleweeds.
She would not be surprised if she returned to a pile of bones, licked clean by a desert-wandering cannibal.
Yet, what was it to her?
Shrieking wickedly, the falcon's white wings cut through a thick cumulus cloud, her parting words a singsong in Senna's head.
I should have ate him when I had the chance. A nightingale with a scarlet throat — how exotic!
What would Zofia say if she could see him now?
You have made a ruin of yourself. Her anger would be righteous; an echo of her brother's, his blood something she could never wash out. She saw Zolin in the sheen of her goldenrod eyes, in the swell of her Hajakhan brow; in the deepest river currents of her most secret desire for possessing and destroying beautiful things.
In repentance, she had lived in the most miserable way she knew how. She had been good, despite her unwavering belief in the evil of her birth — her greatest sin one committed whilst in the womb. She had been light, when all she had ever wanted to be was shadow. (By choosing him, she had sealed her fate. He was shadow enough to drown them both.) Sometimes, she would descend into a fit of silence so deep he feared she would never leave it, and wander trancelike through the castle for days. At night he would tell her stories from his rotten childhood; come morning he would wonder if she even knew him.
A Hajakhan's fatal flaw, Senna had discovered, was their obsession to break every beautiful thing they saw. For Zofia, it was herself. For her brother, it was everyone else.
You have made a ruin of yourself. Sometimes, he feared he could no longer recall the sound of her voice.
So you wish to die. Is that how it is? Little brother, you are more morose than I had ever thought you capable of.
A cool touch on his forehead, withdrawn quickly. The searing pain of carelessly poured iodine sizzling through pus-filled wounds.
As my parting gift I will bind your wounds for you, like I have done since you were a mewling kit.
A languid laugh. The smell of clean linen bandages, snapping in the wind. The sensation of losing more blood through creative bandaging. Water is forced down his throat; even in sleep, he laps it up like a dead man resurrecting.
Do not forget my kindness, Seneca. A silver scimitar slick with polish is slipped back into place at his hip. For you know I always come to collect. If you can spare the time, beware the Lion.
A meditative silence. It seems he is more determined than I had predicted. It makes one wonder, if Father had promised him the throne.
In the black and frigid hours of a desert dawn, Senna awakens to the keening wail of a teryr.
It is not a fully grown one; years of living amongst the desert-borne has taught him that matured teryrs spoke in a clicking language of tongues. And that matured teryrs rarely make the mistake of alerting their prey to their presence.
He draws himself to his hooves unsteadily, unsheathes the scimitar hanging at his bandaged hip. Solovey had come in the night; Senna's lip curls in a weak attempt at annoyance. He would recognize the nightingale's horrific bandaging in future lifetimes.
At least the blood has coagulated.
With the sun a copper rim at his back, Senna picks up what scant belongings he had procured at the Deluminian docks, sweeps on his traveling cloak, and takes into the sky. The Vitae Oasis is near, a half-day's flight south according to the star maps he had traced by moonlight the night before.
He flicks a crimson wing over his eyes, clearing away the sand. Nestor can find him at her leisure; he had little time to wait for her to fill her stomach with snakes and exotic nightingales. (And — his brow twitches — he is almost certain Solovey would let her swallow him, just to know how it felt.)
He arrives at the Oasis near nightfall, collapsing like a worshipper to kiss its silken surface.
THE encounter we've been waiting for...
