my lavender bones.
W
hen did it become so easy to swallow down his heart, to swallow down the sea that tries to rise again and again in his throat like he is the shore telling the waves not today? When did it become this hard to breathe without blowing fire, to wrap a noose around the neck of this thing he’s become that knows only how to rage like a dragon burning down a mountain pass?When did he lose that part of himself that did not have to hide?
He knows he should be trying to get it back. Ipomoea knows he should be wearing gentleness the same way the orchid does, that he should be looking for its beauty and not criticizing its impermanence. He knows he should be lifting his eyes to the morning and thinking of it as a promise instead of a curse.
He should do a million things — but he does none of them. Again and again he lets that magic tug his heart farther down a road he cannot turn back from, listening to that call of a feral thing that grows only in wild places. A garden was no place for a wildflower. Only the meadows would ever capture their beauty the way they deserved.
Ipomoea has spent so long trying to be a seed carried by the wind that he has forgotten he was supposed to be looking for a place to grow his roots. Now he does not know how to stop — does not know how to slow himself, or stop looking for the in-between things that most people dismiss. He does not know how to be anything but a contradiction, a king willing to leave his own country, a gardener who plants his rows in patterns no one else can see (and which he does not stop to explain.)
Perhaps that is why he looks at the other man (who ought to be a stranger — but Thana has already told him, and what she left out, the flowers that watched him in the woods had filled in the rest) and thinks not of who he is, but who he could be. Or when he looks at the people of his court and wonders who they all could be, with a little sun, and water, and time.
“I suppose we all have,” he adds at the end of Willfur’s statement, a knowing smile curving his lips. “It takes all types to form a community.” Just like a garden, he does not add; but still he cannot stop thinking as each person as a flower, and each flower a part of a greater whole. “I think that’s a better way of thinking of it than most. Too many people lean away from conflict rather than learning from it.”
He can see the way the mule has begun to relax, and it makes his own heart hum to a slower pace now. It feels easy to stand beside him, and think nothing of the turmoil that still wraps its claws around his heart, his court, his world.
“Spoken like a true Champion of Community should,” his words are quieter now, more serious. And he turns at last to look Willfur in the eye, as if appraising him. “If you accept it, that is.”
