[P] whom the gods love die young

[Marisol]

“Light came from the east,
bright guarantee of God,
and the waves went quiet;
I could see headlands
and buffeted cliffs.
Often, for undaunted courage,
fate spares the man
it has not already marked.”

If it’s true that everything must rise and fall—

Marisol began falling a long time ago.

There was the fall itself, a shock so cold and pure she could not quite remember how to use the wings that had been her constant companion since birth. A shock so huge that the bright, high whistle of the wind as it shot past her, as she tumbled like a rock toward the ground, was too loud to think over.

There was the morning she woke up with her children but not her husband, in a pile of blankets that still smelled like him, and her stomach sank straight out of her body because she knew, intimately, instantly, that he would not be coming back.

There was Asterion’s leaving, too (how many of her loved ones will leave before she dies?). He had left a still-warm throne seat and a kingdom that was too hurt to do anything but want him back; years later, just as Marisol is starting to feel like a queen worthy of her title, she has been thrown from it and into the dirt.

Some graves are dug on time. Others come far too early.

Everything must rise and fall. She has seen it in her own eyes, over her own years of living—Eustace, Asterion, even Florentine. And from a distance, the sovereigns of the other courts have always had their arcs. Marisol began falling a long time ago, and she has finally hit the ground: here in the cool darkness of the hospital, tears forming in her eyes just from breathing, her heart a wreck in every inch.

The hurt in her wing is a sharp, pulsing thing. It ebbs and flows—sometimes worse, sometimes better, but never close to gone. When Marisol shifts, sitting up in her wakefulness, the pain that stabs through her instantly is fiery enough that the Commander has to bite back a whimper. Her vision blurs. She closes her eyes, forces herself to breathe deep: in, hold, out; in, hold, out.

Elena is awake now. Marisol sees it through the thicket of her heavy lashes. The golden girl leans forward, the white heart on her forehead coming into focus as she does so, and Mari feels a rag dabbing at the corner of her mouth; she sees, though hazily, that the fabric comes back dotted with deep-red blood. 

With some effort, the queen swallows, then nearly gags. Her mouth tastes like dirt and lost time and old, rotted iron. Marisol thinks with some mixture of desperation and wonderment: against all odds, I have grown old.

Shh, shh, Elena says. But Marisol cannot keep quiet. She cannot not come clean. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she sees, really sees, that time is fleeting. She sees that her children are already growing up. That the clean shear of her dark mane is starting to be shot through by silver. That her time, in particular, might be coming to its end, and that all the years she spent thinking she was invincible have hit an abrupt stopping point.

Now she sees: the titles, the history, the invisible armor, mean nothing in the yawning, fang-toothed face of time.

Blessed be the fight—

Tears stream from Marisol’s gray eyes, coursing down her cheeks, settling in the corners of her mouth until the whole world feels like it might be made of salt underneath all the magics and glamours.

—because without you, how can we keep that fight going?

Marisol wants to say: I don’t deserve you.

Marisol wants to say: They don’t deserve me, fool that I am.

Marisol wants to say: You must already know what is the right choice.

Instead, she steels herself. She sits up straight, against the nagging pain all up her body, and pulls in a deep, shaky breath. She looks at Elena more seriously than she has ever looked at anyone, which, for her, is saying something; with her gaze clear, her face tight with knowledge and pain, blood and sweat matting her coat, Marisol says: 

“With you as its sovereign.”

A terrible, terrible pause. 

“I cannot lead like this. They need you, Elena. And I will be your pillar, your brace, I will always do my duty, but it is you they need now. You.”

“Speaking.”

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