in sunshine and in shadow
In this, too, they are similar: before this place (and, in all honesty, here as well) the idea of positions was foreign to him. There were the gods, and there were the places their followers gathered, and there were the wanderers like himself. Maybe there was no order to it; maybe they were feral savages.
But there had been no bloodshed over something so arbitrary as a word.
A smile lifts the corner of his own mouth at Eik’s reply, and he dips his chin, though the look he wears is just short of wry. “Thank you,” he says, “and I trust her.” The bay’s expression turns more considering at EIk’s next words, and an ear twists at the mention of whispers - he has grown more cynical since a few hours ago. Learning of Reichenbach’s actions had shifted the ground beneath him, and now he wishes he could test each step before taking it.
Still he lets his smile grow, even as his gaze moves to the castle, where he images she waits at Lysander’s side. Hopefully the man would wake. Hopefully there would not be war, another word foreign to him, one that should perhaps weigh heavier on his mind, on his heart.
“I’ve never met anyone like her,” he begins, turning back to his companion. “She is…bright and bold and soft and kind. She always has something to say, but is never cruel. She seems sometimes young and sometimes old and I worry for her—” he stops himself, remembering all the talking he’d done to Reichenbach, there in the dark hallways of the sleeping court only weeks before. Oh, Asterion has always trusted so easily before, has never thought it wrong. “But I don’t think I need to,” he finishes, and says nothing else. Nothing of the knife, or of her tales of time-travel and returning from death, or of the fact that they share a father.
He will if asked – this he promises himself. Eik is his friend, not a stranger from a foreign court. They are two figures on a beach, lonely and not alone, searching and finding.
They walk, and the sunshine patterns them with dapples and melts the snow off the gables with the soft sounds of spring. The court is stirring; other horses wind around them, sparing them no glance save, perhaps, to see the paint that still colors Asterion in whorls and lines and dots. When Eik speaks, the bay’s gaze is soft on him , though it sharpens with interest at the words. He loves stories as much as his sister does; he sighs happily at the thought of them.
“I would like to hear more about those adventures,” he says, and then cocks his head before adding “or experience them myself.” Too long has he kept to the borders of Terrastella, struggling to understand black ink in dim rooms.
Asterion hears the note of discomfort in the gray’s next words – or perhaps he did not hear it at all, only identified with it, associated it with his own feelings that milled like midnight shadows. When Eik closes his eyes, the bay looks away, still wearing a slight smile.
It fades at the next words. He cannot remember if they ever touched that day alongside the sea, but now he bumps his shoulder against the gray’s, a brief press that said nothing except that he was seen. “It isn’t,” Asterion says, even as thoughts of the black unicorn, of his twin, of the gods he had met and known and still not followed, chase one another across his mind. “Or if it is, then I am a traitor too.” There is something just shy of a laugh in his words.
He does laugh at Eik’s next words, casting another glance at the world around them. So many sounds, so much color, a riot of senses. “Yes,” he answers, “but I don’t think this is my favorite part.” Even as he says it the thought of last night comes rising to his mind – of Aislinn, waiting for him, magnificent beneath the starlight. Perhaps he is wrong; he would not be sorry for it.
“I would like to return the visit, some day. I wish it could be today.” Of course it could not; not with his newly appointed title, not with bloodstains still on white snow just outside the city, not with Isorath fled south.
This is what it was, then, to belong: to be less free.
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