Isabella Foster
I like a look of agony
because I know it's true
I
would pretend to be a cadet when i was younger, would even take runs on our family’s beach in the morning like I heard the cadets did. The fact that i even say my family’s beach immediately separates me from any Halcyon cadets. They had their barracks, living modestly as they do. I, on the other hand, have everything I could ask for and then some. Our family could donate enough money to clothe and feed cadets for a lifetime, but we don’t. We offer them some money in the form of a donation. It is enough to provide clothing for a few cadets, a weapon or two. We could afford to do it for all and still have plenty of money leftover, and still we don’t. It is about power, my family likes seeing them stare with grateful eyes up at us. It is because of the Halcyon that I had taken up archery. I hear their archers can shoot a bullseye from up in the air, above the clouds. I had, even at a young age, known I needed the best bow possible. And that is how I came to know Hugo. Now, I would trust no one else to build my bow, nor my arrows. I hand him drawings, an assortment, usually with feathers or flowers that I had seen in Dusk’s gardens, vines that sit outside my bedroom window. He always turns these simple, pencil, charcoal drawings into something magnificent. I have seen wood turn into weapons in ways I did not think possible.
I have more than books with me today, wandering through the streets of the Court. I have a break from my lessons and bundles of parchment with a new bow design. Feathers, like the one in my hair, that is what I am thinking of. I move through the crowd, a crowd I have known since I was young, these streets I have walked since my father first took me to get my first bow, my first arrow, my first quiver to hold it. There is bargaining for silk on my left, a merchant from Night Court. Another selling plants, a botanist from Day. But I pass it all, there is only one face in mind.
I enter and our eyes meet quickly just as I pass a solider with his spear. “Hugo,” I say pleasantly. He knows why I am here, he is a seller and I a buyer, but I would not say our relationship is so black and white. It cannot be, when my weapon has always been such an intimate part of me. “Been busy today?” I ask approaching him. “Are you staying warm?” I watch him with steel eyes as I stand with snow on my feet. “I think I ought to start shooting flaming arrows in an attempt to stay warm,” I comment with an offhanded way of speaking, pretending that having arrows that were set aflame from the moment they were shot from my string would not be a life’s dream. “I have not come empty handed—want to see some new sketches?”
picture colored by Elidhu
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