Are in the dark together,—near,
If the tide is going either in or out she cannot tell the difference in the cry of a gull as it swoops upon a crab caught in the weeds. She can read no secret in the waves where they curl upon each other and die where they race into the current. All Danaë can hear is the howl of the gulls, the laughter of true-children, and the steady lub-dub of Elliana’s heart that yet beats in the cage of her chest.
She is surprised Isolt has not yet made a freed hummingbird of it. But she finds her gladness at the hum of it a fragile, wavering thing that neither goes in or out like a tide.
Anara, indifferent to strangers, curls around her tail-blade as if the weapon is just as soft and pillow-like as the sand dimpling beneath their hooves. Part of her is jealous of the ability to be a silent thing, a predator-thing, who has no care in the world for children, or gulls, or rotten crabs with legs of ivy. If only (if only!) she could feel that same calmness bloom in her when she looks between sea and horse as if she is not counting the beats of her heart.
And if there is a secret, like the ones hidden in the bones beneath her cheek, she does not know that it turns ruby-hard in her gaze before she blinks. “It seems so because it is.” It is the same feeling, the same almost-seeming, that she can feel like an ache when the moonlight and the sun-light gorge themselves upon the spirals of her horn.
“It would take you into the black bottom of it. You would be lost with the ships, the ancient whales, and barnacles instead of lichen.” Her cheek misses the warm hardness of the rib bone when she lays her lips against Elliana’s skin. There she whispers, as she moves from neck to ear, “in the belly of the sea I would not be able to grow a rose in your heart, Elliana.” And she wonders, as she inhales and exhales against the shell of the girl’s ear, if she sounds more like a unicorn or more like the sea.
She does not say that she had thought of missing her too. Because all she has missed was the sound of a hummingbird begging for flowers instead of a gilded cage.
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