The salt is on the briar rose,
the fog is in the fir trees
the fog is in the fir trees
Caspian believed in luck the way some did in the gods, and he believed in the gods the way others believed in luck, but it must have been both of them that led his path to cross with hers as evening deepened into something thick and golden.
If he still just thought of her as a girl, he might not have been so surprised. But that word, princess, made her into something else, something almost as mythical and hard to find as, well, a unicorn.
The light is against him, and so at first they are only silhouettes, a horned girl and a huge wolf (and that is almost enough to make him turn around). But as soon as she speaks his name his head lifts, tilting wonderingly, and even the strong lupine smell of the wolf and the sudden, unwelcome clump of nerves in his belly don’t keep him from continuing forward to meet her.
“Aspara,” he says, summoning a grin like he’d been wearing it the whole while. “Oh, just exploring. I have some cousins in the city, and there’s not much happening back home.” Of course, he does not say that he’s more or less lost (and anyway, he knows he can find the sea again, and that as soon as Benvolio wakes it’ll be easy to find his way, and both those things mean his current mislocation is temporary).
It’s incredibly tempting to blurt you’re a princess, as if it’s something she doesn’t know. Funny, how things like that you’d like to ignore just sit at the back of your teeth, putting weight on your tongue like a bitter persimmon pit. He wishes he had some wine again, and a smoky fire - ways to blur everything just a little.
“Likewise,” he answers, and to cover the way he immediately thinks what a stupid thing to say the paint shifts his gaze to the wolf, still standing a little behind her, looking more-than-vaguely threatening. “And this must be the wolf you mentioned. Properly intimidating, isn’t he?” Luckily, Caspian stops himself before saying my companion’s only a bat. That was hardly fair to Benvolio, when Caspian was only a low-tide urchin himself.
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