Somehow, in talking to her, Abel had forgotten his thirst.
It returns now, sandpaper raw within the column of his throat, a tightness along his jaw. Yet he finds, as they track toward the city with the sun on their backs, that there is a piece of him that would rather stay in the dry wilds with this girl than go to the bright heart of Solterra and drink. Abel knows what else waits there.
He makes no connection between Raum’s burning-blue eyes and Sabine’s of clear winter blue. How could he? It is unlikely, it smacks too much of fate. If he guessed, then he must also know that something terrible will follow, resulting in another bar across his shoulders, another weight to bear in silence.
It is as if she reads his mind, reaches careful fingers into his thoughts, when she speaks again. Of course he should know better; he looks like the kind of boy who is not okay. His ribs are the slats of an old barrel, his throat is an hourglass with the sand running through, his eyes are the kind that watch from wet shadows and pass no judgement at all. Nothing in Solterra is okay right now, except perhaps the vultures. They will always survive.
I am a vulture, too, he reminds himself. This is how he knows he will be fine, even as everything crumbles away. He is weak but he is not fragile. The difference is important.
She is affecting him already, because he stops, turning back toward her, and the way his eyes search hers makes it seem like the question was his, and the concern too.
Abel ponders the question, turning it over carefully, like something small and sharp or like a stone that might be anything, if you broke it open. “I don’t know what it would look like,” he says at last, “to be okay.” He doesn’t want her pity, isn’t looking for it, wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had it (use it - of course - make it a tool, or a weapon). He says it matter-of-factly, and wonders when he was last okay. What a luxury, those simple syllables become; what a life he imagines for himself. Okay must mean his parents, alive. Food in his belly and a roof over his head and knowing that although there were monsters, and darkness, and dread, they were on the other side of the door.
“Are you?” he asks, because it seems polite, because her asking has made him feel like a boy again, with someone to worry for him. “Sabine?” He adds her name before he can help it, and at once his dark gaze darts away, guilt and something else mingling in him. It feels dangerous to say her name, to call those bright blue eyes onto himself. Already he wants to say it again.
The way the darkness in his gaze seeks out the light in hers gives birth to a sensation along her spine that she did not recognise. She wants to name it, to illuminate it -- and then send it spiralling back into the gorge that harboured all the things she did not know. For it was a feeling of contradictions; in one instance it seemed to prick red like a needle breaking her fine skin and, yet, in the next it set the furled dahlias in her chest blooming out, out, out toward the sun.
Perhaps, it was nothing quite as nuanced as all the complexities she imagined it might be. Perhaps, instead, it was simply the realisation that for the first time in a long time, she did not feel quite so alone. Standing here, ankle-deep in ancient sand that made her skin itch and her throat burn, staring at a boy she had just met -- a boy who, inadvertently and unknowingly, had managed to penetrate the great tangled web that had isolated her so unconditionally.
When Abel speaks, she hangs on every short candid click of his tongue against the roof his mouth. There is only truth in him. There is only falsehood in her. Sabine is a book of her own lies -- they fester unspoken, borne regardless by her flightless wings. When she imagines the face of her father, it is a lie. When she tells herself that Rhoswen did love her, it is a lie. When she barricades the thought of Acton from her mind, it is perhaps the worst lie of all.
And she is drowning in their multitude; she can control their angry reaching claws no longer.
So when Abel marks the withered blistering air with his truth, Sabine does not know how to contain the bruised ocean in her heart. "It looks like a feather," she breathes, "or a dandelion caught in the breeze." She wants to burn, she wants to disappear. "It is feeling so light you think it almost possible to fly," she stops herself, "but sometimes being okay just looks better than this."
When he asks her if she is okay, she wants to crumble. She might have once, but that was a lifetime ago and that girl, in one way or another, is dead. "No," his honesty forces her to meet him, and with one stabbing breath Sabine's truth fills the air, "my father is the new king of Solterra."
He loses himself in watching her eyes the way he used to watch the sky, as a boy, lying in the sand as his father searched the beach for the little treasures he would later try and sell. (But oh, he knows now the man didn’t care at all about letting them go, or making money for them - only for finding them, that thrill of discovery, of holding something beautiful). The clouds would tear ragged across the too-blue expanse, racing patterns of shadow and light, and Abel would feel held close by time, like the only still thing in a universe that turned and turned. He watches the same shadows move across her gaze now, and he holds very still.
Until she begins to speak; and then his breath sighs out, and he is ashamed for how clearly it sounds like longing. Almost he says I know that feeling - it is finding a shell in a tide-pool with ten shades of purple, it is counting all the clouds in an hour but he stops himself just in time. But he has to offer her something, for the way his heart has picked up in his chest, the way when he blinks he forgets, for a moment, the scouring heat and the dread, oh, thick and heavy. So he nods, and says “I remember that feeling. I didn’t know it at the time.” And maybe, for a moment, they might be just a boy and a girl, and look up at the right time to see a swallow make an arc across the sky with the sun on its wings and it would be enough -
But they are not just a boy and a girl. Abel has known it, and it is proven again when she speaks. Okay is not a feeling for them, and a feeling like a laugh begins to build inside him, pressing on his throat, something desperate and mad like a jackal might laugh, knowing how darkly all the world fit together. But Abel swallows it down, and does not take his gaze from hers, and thinks (without knowing her at all, really) that she is brave and he is a coward and when they leave one another, he will still be thirsty, no matter how much water he drinks.
And then he thinks of all the things they call Raum - traitor, murderer, madman - and how all of them are true, and how Sabine must have heard them, too.
Her eyes shimmer and spark in fear of what he might say, how he might feel, where he might go in light of her lineage. Sabine knows her father is a hated man. A miscreant. A villain made from marble. She has heard their scared and vengeful voices on the wind and she cannot blame them for wanting his head. Who could? If the crowd's clamour was true, Raum was, at this point, more monster than he was man.
In every too-long moment, it is becoming easier for Sabine to accept what she knows is now true. He had killed Acton and he had kidnapped Isra amongst many other terrible things. They are two entities: her father and the Crow Beast and there are galaxies between them. Her father is not the murderer of innocents and that wicked sinner is not her father. It is the only way she knows how to reconcile this vast impossible reality.
So in the moments after her confession, when the sky leans in a little closer, Sabine braces herself for a frown, a flinch, a snarl -- anything that would marry the image of Solterra's king to the savage brute ripping throats from people she loved. At this point it is not something she wants more than something she desperately needs.
But he does nothing. It is a paradox. Days, even hours, before Sabi would have felt a wave of relief at his muted reaction, but now... it feels like a penultimate nail driven into her coffin.
Abel does not look away and she wants to wilt like a drought-driven rose left out to die. He swallows and she watches the swell of his throat too closely, too intensely, as if waiting for a colony of bats to come thrashing up out of his gullet. Sabine's gaze travels back to the boy's and she cannot bear the anticipation that hums like a hive of bees behind her ears. Tell me he is a murderer, tell me the truth of it all. Tell me the crimes notched against his name. Please--
“Your father saved my life,”
Wasn't life absurd? The beautiful inconsistency of it all. Sabine might once have paused to consider the tragic irony of Abel's words, she might even have laughed. Such sagacity is robbed from her now. The infinitesimal grains of sand shifting beneath her feet sound suddenly deafening and she takes one long step back from the coyote her father had saved. Photographs bleed like wounds into the scrapbook of her mind. Venerable images of her father's face that make her heart shrink and swell; he had saved this strange little boy, he had saved him.
Monsters don't save people; not from others, not from themselves. Hell is not a place for those who dare to shed light onto the darkness of those less fortunate.
By the time Sabine looks up, she knows she cannot continue. Not now, not today, not with a child carrying a piece of her father's good-heart. Her lips part gently, achingly, fearful of leaving Abel in case the world swallows him like the world was swallowing her. She wants to say something, anything, but the words, at first, do not come.
As the desert begins to rise up around her small frame, Sabine leans toward Abel so that she might press an endless farewell onto the hollow of his brow. The day feels almost feverish as she turns back toward the coast and curves her cheek back toward him one last time.
Now that he has caught those eyes, has made himself brave enough to meet them, Abel cannot look away.
He holds that fathomless heartbreak blue (the sky in the morning at the edge of spring, as his father finds one more worthless, beautiful shell) and watches each shadow move there. They are staring at one another and it doesn’t matter, because they are the only things in the desert, because before her is is as bare as a ribcage split open to the endless sun.
She steps back and he wants to cry out. But the boy stands as mute as ever, though his legs tremble with the urge to move toward her, to keep that same space between them where he feels seen, each stripe of shadow and bar of light. In a handful of moments he has fallen in love with her; he is not the kind of man who will ever realize it is only another betrayal of his traitorous heart, grasping to be understood. There is a part of him that loves Raum, too.
Her gaze moves from his and he feels like he falling, he feels speared on a shaft of sunlight. He feels like a hymn half unsung, suspended, waiting for a voice to finish him.
When she leaves forward his eyes close, and the warmth between them is nothing like the heat of the desert. She is only there for the space of a breath but Abel is busy at work, memorizing the scent of her, the shine of light through her glass-blue horn, the flutter of her pulse below her jaw, the color of her skin a dozen shades he has no name for.
And then she is going, opening up daylight between them like pulling seams apart, and he remembers how greedy he is, how selfish. Stay, urges his tongue, Keep her, cries his heart, but he closes a fist on his heart and swallows down the words. They stick in his throat like salt and sand and at first all he can do is nod. But his silver eyes still speak, crying out like a dying star.
“I promise, Sabine.” It is terribly easy to say - it is terribly selfish, the way he can’t resist shaping her name one more time, that bright bird singing off his tongue - it is terrible to watch her go and remember the desert rising savage around him, hot and hard and hungry.
He is too weak to watch her go and not follow, and he cannot follow. Maybe he belongs in the desert after all, for the way his heart is like a carved arroyo: withered and bursting and empty again in the space of one hard rain.
Abel turns away, toward the city that already smells to him like burning.
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