[P] how do i love you? oh, this way and that way;

[Marisol]

I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps. 

But, bless us, we didn’t.

I think your people will begin missing you soon.

She hears her own voice in her head, and it is cold; it is detached; it is not the voice of someone who is in love, or it shouldn’t be. She sees Orestes’ face, wearing the expression of a heartbroken boy, and wants to cry, though the raw hurting is days old by now. 

But the hating is still fresh: the unadulterated venom, the strength with which Marisol has turned it onto herself, the disgust, the hostility, the part of her that says you broke his heart and you should be ashamed.

Which she did. And she is. 

I think your people will begin missing you soon.

Her heart is pounding, a metallic pain in the back of her mouth, and Marisol is walking briskly, fearfully past the walls of the court proper, head tucked to her chest not like a queen but like a girl who does not want to be seen. Her ribs ache; it is beginning to get dark, an early-winter sunset with strange purple and yellow foam laying just on the horizon. Solterra’s buildings are traced in a thin film of gold.

It is all very beautiful, in a way that does not feel good at all, beautiful in a way that only makes her ache more. If she could navigate with her eyes closed, she would; everywhere she goes a new pair of eyes turns toward her, scathing, judging, making her ears ring, making her jaw ache. 

They say things:

Isn’t that the Halcyon Commander?

She must be coming to see the king.

I heard he went to her festival.

I heard—

I heard—

I heard—

She is standing now at the doorway of the castle. Lanterns flicker from their sconces, strange, bright eyes set hanging from the gray cobblestone. There are sounds all around her—people moving, the wind singing, the sound of desert birds calling to one another, or maybe it’s merely their wings, sifting and ducking through the air. From the door a face looks back at her, made from strange whorls and carvings of stone. 

A face framed by soft white hair. A face with bright sea-eyes and gold tattoos. A face that says her name in a voice like despair. Marisol closes her eyes; something inside her hurts,

and hurts,

and hurts, until it doesn’t even feel like pain anymore. Just a strange, dark, pulsating ache.

Mari shoulders her way into the foyer. Inside it is strange and quiet, just like last time—no courtiers, no servants—just huge, old-dusty portraits hanging from the walls, and gold plates and cups, and ornate instruments, relics of of a bygone era in which the desert was a place for treasure and not skeletons. An era where a king might have been given something, not had it taken. The Commander’s ears flicker, but all the sounds in here are strangely muffled; someone’s voice is floating through the air, floating down, down, down to her. 

She climbs, slowly, achingly, up the stairs, a step at a time.

Cobwebs coast the railing, dust lines the cracks in the cobblestone. The voice has faded, but she follows the same path it did, the same path she followed last time, when she had walked behind him into his office with the steaming tea, the precarious towers of books, the strange old art, the smell of sand and salt and old, cracked parchment. The halls are hallowed, they rise too high overhead; Marisol feels like a child as she picks her way through them, meeker than she can ever remember being,

and then she is standing in the door of his office, and he is there, his back turned.

The same sea-foam hair. The same dark, pretty dapples. The same lines and swirls of gold lancing across his cheek, up his leg, coating his shoulder like a spiderweb in the places the last light of the day is catching it; Marisol’s heart stops. Her blood runs cold.

She opens her mouth:

“Forgive me.” It is a raw sound, a pleading sound, in a voice hoarse from disuse or tears or maybe both, and Mari is trying not to tremble where she stands, and cannot be sure how well it is working, if at all. (Forgive me, forgive me, it is all so useless: all these words may mean nothing at all. All these words may not be a balm to the wound she has opened, or a reasonable reaction to the thing she has done to him, which has no name but a point like a knife.) “I should not have turned you away. I… did not want to.”

Mari’s eyes meet his only barely. And when they do—oh, there is no steel, no stone, no hardness at all.

Only a kind of sorry which no one has ever heard from her.

She steps forward, then stops, catches herself in the middle of the act. Is this still allowed? Is this still what he wants? She has been good at overstepping her bounds, lately; perhaps this is another one of those. 

“Forgive me,” she says again—soft, quiet, passionate—“and I will tell you all the love poetry I know, forever."

“Speaking.”

credits