jane
The moon hangs like an egg in the sky of Solterra. It is the same moon that Jane has seen all her life, from beneath her mother’s grass-rounded belly to the sands that had threatened to end her. It is the same moon that every figure in Solterra has gazed upon since birth. It frightens her a little bit, Jane thinks, the permanence of it all. Whether there fall rain, whether the earth splits in two, that moon will always exist; heavy and foreboding like a paternal eye over his terrain. Or like a monarch over his kingdom.
No one addresses Jane at all, except to ask for drinks. She is used to this, mostly. The others know her, call out, but no one says her name. They want what she provides, always.
But what is she?
Jane thought she knew.
A month ago, if you asked Jane who she was, she would say that she was Jane, lady-in-waiting to Her Majesty Angora. Now, she is simply from far away. She now identifies by what she is not.
-
Beautiful. If her life could be defined by a word, it would be beautiful. As a filly, she had been beautiful with the trails of gold that coated her skin. She remembered the first time that one of the older knights had called her Midas Girl. Other names had followed. At the age of weaning she was passed into her home court to learn what one was supposed to do. She still didn’t know. She didn’t know what a scribe was, what a scholar was.
She existed to be honourable, to marry and to produce heirs. And to be beautiful, to die young and innocent, and to vanish into the history books like a mirage on the Mors Desert horizon.
-
The snake bites had lacked venom. She had watched them with latent interest in the days since she had come to Solterra, especially after having lived with her family. The bites had been deep into the muscle, and the ache of bruised flesh pulled at her body. But more than anything, she had worried at the way it scabbed and then scarred. Day by day it crusted and then fell away, exposing nothing but four places lacking fur. You had to search for them, you couldn’t see them without squinting your eyes, but it didn’t matter. Jane saw them. She didn’t know why, but the day that she had accepted their permanence had felt like a special kind of loss. A loss without a name. Standing in the tiny, empty, emotionless room that she currently called her bedchamber, she could never talk to anybody about it.
-
By the time night falls on the Solterran festivities, Jane is exhausted. She wants to sleep, but knows what that brings. At night she feels the tear of teeth followed by the guilt that it was those teeth- tiny, junior, infantile teeth-, and not the mother’s. At night she sees black coat turning red, snake brains on the base of Hardison’s hoof, and then the agonising moment that no one ever realises is a halcyon.
They say that there is a time of year where the ocean falls silent. It falls asleep as if in waiting cooperation with the kingfishers that lay their nests upon the waves. For only a few weeks, the ocean nurses and laps at the feathers of these birds like lapdogs. But then it is over and it is violent, and any eggs left are smashed against the shore. The unluckiest birds are caught by the ankle and hauled against stones in screeches of wet feathers and hollow bones. The ocean roars, angered by its former silence.
Jane thinks she must be in a halcyon now, too. Nothing happens. Each morning she wakes, eats, and wanders until dusk. She attempted for a bit with the Alvorsen sisters, but they had decided she was a hussy. It wouldn’t help at all if she tried to defend herself. There is a peace in it, but the peace sucks at her like the eye of a cyclone, like the break in between battles.
-
When she enters the oasis, everything feels silent. Everything falls silent, (and why do they call it falling silent, anyway? As if it is an accident, as if it is a stumble. The same could be said for love), and Jane stops in her tracks. She is alone, and in the distance she smells pure water. True water, like one could only imagine.
She smells something else.
Jane shivers a little bit. She turns and walks in the direction of the scent of figs, and finds the smell stronger. It smells like how she would imagine the sun smelled like.
In the shade of a fig tree lies a figure. A stallion, his coat as gold as that very sun she named. He is as bright as Solterra itself. A pegasus, two wings cupped against his side as he eats a fig. Jane smells the juice, the sugar-sweet liquid spilling over lips and down his throat. She wonders if he knows that figs are made of dead wasps. It always struck her as a fitting irony, that something so beautiful would come of something so uniquely vicious.
“You are the king,” Jane says before she can stop herself, but it’s better than saying nothing. Adonai.
@tag / speaks / notes
