Think of your favorite place.Somehow I skip over the rest of it, or at least my subconscious brain does. This is the line I settle on obsessing over, picking apart, wondering if there is some deeper meaning. The ink is thin and pitch-black. I wonder if the feather he wrote it with is his or someone else’s (and I find myself utterly heated by even the thought of the latter). Think of your favorite place, he says, and I do not think of my room with its window and its goldenrod light, or the courtyard and its stoop-backed fig tree. I do not think, even, of my mother’s closet and the robes that still smell like her.
What I think of immediately—what I want to say, though I would never dare—is that my favorite place is under his wing. Against the sharp line of his shoulder. Or, if I am greedy, the soft curve of his throat where he always smells like pine; where sometimes, if I am not very careful, I catch myself on the verge of biting down.
(After all: if he is dead, he cannot leave me.)
I stand at the edge of the creek and wonder, with a knot in my stomach, what it is that we need to “talk about”.
Maybe—maybe it’s about his new position. Of course I noticed that he signed it Delumine Emissary, and I have goaded him with the name Warden enough times to see that his position, as tiresome as I might find it, is important to him. But I know his king is gone now, like all the rest of them but Dusk; I wonder who he is serving. Perhaps that is the cause of our discussion. He’s taking over. Or he’s leaving—running away from the empty throne.
I don’t think he would, though. And the knot in my stomach forms again.
It is mid-morning, and the world by Amare is pleasantly warm, much more temperate than I’m used to. At my feet, a long silk blanket holds a wicker picnic basket, filled with figs and dates and all the other goods that I had the kitchen staff pack up before I left this morning, when the sun was just a little smile above the horizon.
I’m not brave enough to turn when I hear his hoofsteps.
