B
lue eyes trace the curves and the points of the antlers as the girl bows her head. She had seen them before, on the top of a woodsman’s head. She told him it reminded her of the deer in her storybooks. She finds, looking at hers—they still do. Maybe, if she were her mother, and was so much more attune to the living, she would have drawn two flowers from her mane and given it to each the girls as a memento of coronation night. Their own crowns upon their heads. “It is Caligo’s blessing,” she says, because it is one of the things she truly does know about herself. It is hard to learn about yourself from the dead, when they were gone before you were living. ‘Surely you knew me before,’ she would say to them, wherever children’s souls are kept before they are born. This, this question always made them leave. She has thought, what is so hidden in the answer that they cannot tell her.
When the other girl laughs, Elli’s gaze tightens to her starry skin. “Not a bringer of doom, no,” she says with breathy words. “Clarity,” she says, as if she knows how words are weighted and she were not just a child.
“A dance?” Elliana says turning to the girl with the pointed ensemble sitting atop her head. “I came here to see the young queen,” she says, and wants to say because I knew her when she wasn’t. But, that feels too uneasy in her mouth. Maybe Danaë had been a queen all along. “But my mother told me that dancing is perhaps the best thing for hopes and wishes,” she says and trots ahead. With a single flitter of blue eyes in her companions’ direction—she begins.
..but nightmares are dreams too.
