"My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed against my ribs."
The first spring without my sister had come and left quicker than I thought it would. Although in hindsight I suppose most seasons are like that; gone as soon as you’ve gotten used to them. To make things worse, each season passed with accelerating speed. It gave one the sensation of hurling through time, slinging faster and faster from one season to another. I wanted time to slow down, to stop, even to move in reverse. Tempus of course remained apathetic (and silent) to my desires.
I’ve never really enjoyed summer. It was too bright and bold, boring in its excess of sun and warmth. I liked the storms that came later in the season, when the heat rising off the southern sea came inland and collided with the cool mountain air-- the afternoons punctuated by lightning over the Arma, clouds dark and heavy with unexpressed rain. But it was earlier in the season and they hadn’t come yet. Instead there was an unpleasant blanket of warm air that sat low and still in the valley of Denocte. I’d take snow any day over that repressive heat.
(I had yet to be introduced to Solterra, where my appreciation for the heat would bloom in steely defiance of every expectation that it would wither.)
I was walking along the coast-- the breeze there the only respite from the heat of the court-- when I saw her, cresting a dune far enough away that her figure was broken by wavy lines of heat. Neither of us broke our onward march and I gradually was able to make out her striking face. Black, white, gold. It was that period of my life where I constantly compared myself to others, and constantly found myself lacking. My stomach clenched with envy and defiance. Furfur trotted at my side, closer to the ocean. When the waves came in he was up to his heels in water, to his great joy.
(I thought of my family, touching that same sea but a world away. Or where they so far they sailed a different ocean? At night were they even looking at the same stars?? I hoped so-- I did not know how they would find their way back otherwise…)
We both slowed to a halt at the same time. A breeze picked at our manes, blowing them rather dramatically away from the sea. “Hi,” I said, brimming with self-awareness (I refuse to call it self-consciousness, for it was not quite that). Kids my age always made me think and rethink too much. I desired their approval, and at the same time I resented them for it. She was pretty, which made everything a hundred times worse.
Furfur stood at my side, expressionless, sharp gaze fixed to the stranger. “Who are you?” I didn't mean for the question to come off as rude as it did. I sounded half feral, like it was wolves that raised me and not the earth. I llicked my lips, which felt suddenly very dry, and I did not smile even though I knew I was supposed to.
There was wind coming off of the ocean, wind that tugged at the young girl’s hair and laughed as it twisted it into ropes. She wants to ask of it, why are you laughing? and why won’t you make me a French braid instead of these dreadlocks? She had never been very good at braiding her own hair. She always left the plaits half-finished, or rushed them so that they were too-loose, or left odd bumps and snags and other irregularities that had her ripping out the cords nearly the moment she finished them.
So now she lets the wind do as it pleases with her mane and her tail, and wonders what it might feeling like dancing across her crest if she were to clip every last lock off. She never would, of course - she could already imagine the looks of horror her fathers would give her, if she came home with her mane short and jagged and uneven - but the thought was nice nevertheless.
Oftentimes, it was in her thoughts that she rebelled the most. It was much easier to think those terrible, unpleasant things than to say them out loud. Oh, her heart was far too weak, far too cowardly to commit to such defiance. Even now it was stuttering, leaping, gasping like the waves that broke unevenly against the shoreline, like it thought she was racing the wind instead of jogging along behind it. She wants to roll her eyes at it, to laugh with the wind and tell it to stop acting like such a girl - maybe she would have, if she wasn’t struggling to stay on her course.
Her legs tremble with every step as her hooves sink deep into the sand, and there’s a burning feeling creeping up her thighs, but she does her best to ignore it. Does her best to tell herself that all the other girls and boys could jog twice as far as she could, and so just a little bit farther, just to the top of this dune -
It’s a relief, really, when she sees the other girl on the beach. She turns to her immediately, if only for an excuse to stop, to catch her breath before she had to push herself “just a little bit farther” again. She slows to a walk, and then finally, a stop, and if her legs could sing with joy she swore they might have.
She tries to hold her breath steady, tries to pretend her jog through the sand had been as effortless as the other girls her age (she fails, of course; her lungs heave and tremble like a ship caught in a storm at sea, aching, burning, ready to burst -) Her lungs feel ready to burst, beneath all the weight of the ocean-heavy air.
“Maret,” she answers, and her lungs scream in protest. She sucks in a quick, deep breath, and prays the unicorn doesn’t wonder why. It’s almost easy to miss the sharp way the other girl stares at her, the flat tone of her voice, when she’s trying so hard (too hard) to pretend she is not weak. And yet every hard edge, the line along her lips that stubbornly refuses to lift into a smile, the feral sounding of her voice against the seagulls squawks, makes Maret’s heart leap higher, higher, higher into her throat.
For a moment, a heart-wrenching, beach-shattering moment, only the sound of the waves settle in the space separating them. Maret shifts uneasily, wondering why there was always so much silence when she met someone new, why she was never as adept as the other girls at filling that silence. And then, feeling like she had to say something, but with no idea what -
“I like your wolf."
She smiles down at him, hoping his teeth were not quite as sharp as the girl’s not-smile.
At first I didn’t notice there was something wrong.
(Maybe wrong is incorrect-- or just too harsh-- if one is talking about someone else’s body. How could any natural thing be wrong?)
There was too much else to notice. The golden egg-yolk of her hooves (walking on sunshine), the wild, tangled, black and white of her hair, the piercing blue of her eyes. It wasn’t until she said her name, “Maret,” that I noticed the heave of her lungs, the rasp of her breath.
In that moment I became sharply aware of my own breath, and I marveled at how easily it came and went without me needing to think about it. It was something I had always taken for granted, like the beat of my heart, or the curl of my eyelashes.
I found myself suddenly shy, so overcome with the desire to ask “what’s wrong with you” yet suspecting it might be one of those questions she lived in dread of answering. I had my own questions of this nature, questions heavy, clunky, burning; unasked but undeniably present, lingering like perfume in the still air. “Why did you stay?” or (worse, for its inaccuracy) “Why were you left behind?” Even, some days, I dreaded to hear “How are you?”
Sometimes the simplest questions were the hardest. The truth, which I felt I owed the world, was not always pleasant. Certainly not always comfortable.
Beneath the weight of my unasked question, I managed to say “I’m Aspara.” A nice, awkward silence came over us then. I was used to others breaking that silence, but Maret seemed just as incompetent as me when it came to such things. I suppose there was a kind of camaraderie in that. It was mostly just uncomfortable, and I wondered if I should keep walking...
But then she said “I like your wolf,” and my smile, which I had been withholding for god’s know what reason, gushed suddenly like water breaking the walls of a dam. I couldn’t help it. I liked my wolf too.
Meanwhile, Furfur bristled at the comment. “I’m as much his as he’s mine.” It felt important to clarify that, and I felt him relax instantly. I had seen all manner of pet for sale in the night markets-- snakes, dogs, birds. On occasion, and to my great dismay, a seller would have miniature dragons, in cages so tight they could hardly turn around. But Furfur was not just a pet, a hound, to be fed and housed and used, like a tool. Our relationship was not transactional.
“His name is Furfur.” I was not yet old enough to think that, perhaps, it was a poor choice of name. Anyway I don’t think Furfur could care less what I called him, as long as I was consistent; and anyway we were both strangely drawn to that name, so to hell with what anyone else thought of it. “My sister and I rescued him and his brother.” I nudged him in an attempt to get him to step forward and say hi, but he remained stoic and resolute at my side. I had the very strong sense he was not about to offer the stranger his sleek coat to be pet, like a dog, and there was nothing I could do to convince him otherwise. Oh well.
I was feeling more comfortable-- any mention of my sister instantly lifted my spirits-- and I found I had more and more questions about the girl which were far more appropriate to ask than “what’s wrong with you?” But first, a complement. It was my understanding that when you received a compliment, you should return one in kind. I was skeptical about social currencies like these, but I had not yet formed a solid opinion on the matter, so for the mean time I went along with it (if a little grudgingly). “You’re very pretty.”
It was the first thing that came to mind.
Pleasantries aside, I dove into the first question I wanted to ask. “So, where are you from?”
Maret hated when people looked at her like they knew something was wrong. Like they were counting the uneven beats of her heart, or the way things shook in her grasp, or the way the pains sometimes came and took her breath away.
She knew it was wrong, of course; that others didn’t tremble without fear like she did. But she knew, too, that she was more than her illness. She was a poet, and she had gods’ blood in her veins, and royalty too (if her father’s stories were to be believed and of course, little girls always believed their fathers.) But most people could not see beyond her two-toned eyes, let alone the waver of her voice.
So when the other girl does, when a smile rises forth at last and brightens her features like sunlight flooding a shuttered room for the first time, Maret’s fickle heart begins to feel something like relief.
“Of course,” she agrees, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “It’s very nice to meet you, Furfur.” Truth be told, she had not met many people with Bondeds in Delumine. The king, she knew, was rumored to have one - a new one, the rumors said, new implying it was not his first - and her father had told her once of a golden hare that loved him as much as he loved it.
And yet, hearing these things was not the same as seeing it for herself, and a bit of envy crept into her spine. She smiled again, to let the sunlight back in; and the jealousy crept away again like frost in the late morning.
She wants to ask her how she rescued him, and when, and from what, and where she had found a wolf like him, and what her sister’s name was and if her wolf was also a Bonded. She wants to ask a thousand things, and she doesn’t want the small, polite questions that people always gave when they thought they were talking too much about themselves. Maret wants to hear everything, to know everything, so she could write about everything.
And when she was so often stuck indoors, staring at people living the lives she would never get to live herself from behind a plane of glass - most days Maret felt most alive when a stranger brought her a new story, because to hear the story was to live vicariously through it.
She hoped people might one day live vicariously through her stories, too.
It’s while she’s deciding on which question to ask first (which is more likely to lead into a second, and a third, and on and on without annoying her new friend into deciding perhaps she didn’t want to be her friend, after all), that Aspara catches her off guard with her own compliment. This time the smile she offers is shy, slow to spread; nevertheless, it warms her belly from the inside out. She wishes she could tell her what it meant for someone with few friends to be called pretty, but suddenly all the words that had been racing to be first to her tongue fall silent.
Thankfully, the other girl doesn’t seem to notice her awkwardness at accepting compliments; and Maret is grateful that she dives immediately into a new question. This she understands better: this exchange of questions flows more naturally than their exchange of compliments, reigniting that hunger for knowing from before.
”The Dawn Court,” she answers with equal eagerness. ”My father is - was - a Champion there. Where is your home?”
Oh, I liked her smile. It was like… it was like the color yellow. Melted butter, daisy hearts, warm spring days.
In comparison, I felt blue. Not in a sad way. Like midnight, very calm and still, poised on the eggshell edge of time-- sunset to my left, sunrise to my right.
You understand?
I also liked how polite she was to Furfur. It never sat right with me when strangers treated him as anything less than equal. He gave a few wags of his tail-- the most positive reaction the other girl would get-- before running off to the water’s edge. The silver bellies of little fish were flashing in the tumbling waves, and he splashed around determined to catch one. “He has a short attention span,” I explained to Maret with a grin that only broadened when he retorted with some rude comment about how absurdly boring I was sometimes.
It was a small blessing she didn’t linger too long on my compliment-- I felt a flush of embarrassment to have said something so petty. I really didn’t believe beauty gave anyone more value in this life, although most people seemed convinced otherwise. When she revealed she was from Dawn court, my eyes lit up. I hadn’t met many Deluminians. In fact I think the only one I met had been a tree, so I didn’t exactly have a balanced perspective of what they were like.
“Oh, I’ve never been to the court proper! What’s it like?” We had a love of questions in common, and an interest in stories. But it had never occurred to me to share my tales, not unless someone asked and certainly not in writing. I guess I was too private to willingly part with my stories, or stories given to me. “I’m from Denocte.” It felt too much like bragging to say my mom’s the sovereign... and anyway, I had to remind myself, she wasn’t anymore. In my mind Isra would always be a queen, drawing others to her like a warm flame on a cold night. I admired her so much that I sometimes forgot what it meant to be a mother, a child-- that I would always have (would always be) a part of her. Sometimes she felt as far from me as the moon.
And then there was Eik, so down to earth we used to play a game of looking beneath his hooves for roots. “My dad is from Solterra, but I’ve never been. Have you?” The sandy kingdom beguiled me. I found myself often thinking of it, building cities of sand in my mind. I think I only stayed away for as long as I did out of fear that reality would not be nearly as wonderful as my imagination.
Maybe later she would look back on this day and wonder if it was when she began to understand what the sunshine felt like — what it really felt like. It wasn’t just the heat of it against your coat, the brightness of it stinging your eyes. No, it was something that ran deeper than skin.
It was the way a smile could warm you from the inside out, and make all those fragile ice crystals limning her eyelashes melt into tears of joy.
And it was the way it could make her smile feel like the waves on a summer day, breaking gently against the beach. She could still hear them in the distance, turning briefly to watch the wolf leap into the sea foam. She wondered if she would ever be that fearless one day, that bold — to dive herself head first into the ocean, into the deep where she could not see her feet. Oh, she hoped so.
When Asapara asked her about her home, she has to stop herself from saying the first thing that comes to mind. Queit, she wants to say, like it’s the worst possible thing to say about a place — and in some ways, it felt like it was. Ever since her first visit to Denocte, trailing along behind her father with stars in her eyes and a song leaping its way out of her heart, she couldn’t stop comparing her home to others, her life to others. It always felt to her like everyone else was living the sort of stories that she was eager to read.
But when she turns back to the other girl, and bites her lip to stop those first words from spilling out, she tries to think of her Court in the unbiased-way all the scholars praised themselves for doing.
What was Delumine like?
It was quiet, yes — quiet enough to hear the wind whispering through the treetops, and birds chirping outside the open windows, and the page of a book being turned. And it was quiet in the way a wildflower meadow was so full of color and beauty that all the world seemed to stop, if only for a moment, to look upon it. In Delumine a person’s life wasn’t counted in years, but in stories, and experiences, and discoveries. And she has to remind herself then that the sunrise was quiet, too, and she loved it none the less for it.
So when she instead smiles and says, “peaceful,” she means it. “Do you like spring, Aspara? Delumine is like spring, even when it snows.” And she wonders then how she had never thought of that before, all those times she laid down in the meadow and watched the grass sway around her and wondered what girls her age did in Denocte, or Solterra, or Terrastella.
So of course when the conversation turns to the other courts (to Denocte! to Solterra!) her eyes light up at once. “The Night Court is so impressive,” she says wistfully, leaning in closer. “My father would take me there, when I was younger. For your festivals.” Ah Denocte, with its spices and smoke and stars. Something about the Court had always inspired her, every visit had made words leap into her mind like her stories had a life of their own, begging to be told.
She wants to ask more about the girl’s Court (she would never tire of listening to it). But somehow it seems fitting that she was not wholly of Denocte, even if she had grown up there — Maret could see the desert in her, too, in the white-sand of her coat to the blue of her horn, so much like the endless sky over the dunes. “Once, earlier this summer. The warmest place I’ve ever been,” she admits. “Why have you never gone, if your dad is from there?”
Maybe if she had slowed down, she might have thought how insensible the question sounded. As it is, she only cringes the moment the words leave her lips.
“do you like spring, aspara?” I had the answer on the tip of my tongue before she even finished saying my name: “it’s not my favorite.”
I think every child goes through a phase where favorite is a word of the utmost distinction. In that phase (I think for me it was somewhere around my first birthday?) I found it important to identify my favorite food, my favorite color, my favorite room in the court. It was like… if identity could not yet be defined by action (for I had as of that point done so very little with my life) my young mind thought it must be defined by the things one liked, and maybe by extension the things one wanted to be.
Anyway, in that phase I had decided that of all the seasons, winter was my favorite. I think in part because no one else seemed to like it very much, and also because that was the season I was born in. At the time I didn’t see what other reasons I needed. This was a decision I stood by for most of my youth. Eventually I would yield to the admission that all seasons were good in some way or another, and I looked forward to each of them in equal measure. It took time to realize that most of all it was the change I liked, and (although this will seem contradictory) the predictability of that change. I don’t know if I would have liked to live in a place that always felt like spring, although I certainly looked forward to visiting again.
In the end, I didn’t tell her that winter was my favorite. “That sounds kind of strange,” I admitted, “but nice! Spring is a great season. Very, uh, fresh.” As soon as it was out of my mouth it sounded placating, like a consolation prize, and though this is not my intent it was too late to take back. I just smiled, sheepish and apologetic, and eagerly followed the flow of conversation to Night Court.
I had heard from a lot of non-Denoctians how they enjoyed the Night Court festivals, but personally they were my least favorite part of my homeland. Maybe I just wasn’t old enough yet to appreciate them. Or maybe I would always prefer the wide-open spaces of the lake, the mountains, the prairie. Still, I smiled to think of pretty Maret enjoying the festivities with her father.
I wasn’t bothered by her question at all-- I would have asked it too, if I were her. “Well, he was supposed to take me and my sister, but they went with my mom on a trip across the sea.” My cheeks already felt warm with the question that always followed such a statement: why didn’t you go with them? I figured I might as well answer it before it was asked. “I stayed behind to defend Denocte. You know, just in case something bad happened.” I dragged a hoof in the sand and shrugged. “Also… I get seasick.” It was hard not to feel a little deflated after these admissions, even when Furfur caught a fish and yelped with delight as though he was just a hugely oversized puppy and not a literal demon. Well, maybe that brought a little smile to my face.
I was realizing how I probably looked like a liar or an idiot or both, to be talking about defending Denocte when I was there on the beach, having a nice stroll. Maret would be too sweet to point this out, but she didn’t need to-- I was my harshest critic. “Well, I should get back to defending.” My smile was perhaps a little self-mocking. “You should come visit me sometime. I’ll show you the best spots in the city.”
I whistled at my wolf, who stared at the sea one long, thoughtful moment before loping cheerfully to my side, ready for the next adventure. “It was lovely to meet you, Maret.” I danced forward and placed a gentle kiss on her cheek, then I turned and began to follow my own hoofprints home.
-
@Maret fin! Maret is the sweetest prettiest girl ever, we adore her and aspara wants a sleepover sometime <3
In the end, she was learning, all goodbyes seemed the same. Felt the same. Ended the same.
And she was beginning to think that the silence from the beginning of their short conversation was almost preferable to that which followed.
She doesn’t say anything as the girl turns and trots abruptly away, doesn’t react to the placating kiss she presses light as a feather to her cheek. Maret smiles — like the trained doll that she sometimes feels she is, dipping her head respectfully and making no effort to stop her (no matter that she may have wanted to.) She only watches, feeling her heart fall like a bird shot from the air in her chest, bang bang, dead and gone. She watches and wonders to herself if it would have felt this way had she stayed home, had she simply smiled and kept walking and saved herself the disappointment.
Later she might worry that it was the last question she asked, or — even worse — that it was the differences between them. That she was too bland, too spring, too untested to be a friend to. Maret wouldn’t blame her — after hearing her story, she might have felt the same had their roles been reversed.
With the summer sun drawing lines of sweat down her sides (all the better to pretend the salt on her face was from the heat alone), she turns and walks into the waves. Her magic pulls the fragile bits of water from the salt-spray air and crystallizes them, draws them to her like a shield and halo.
And as the water rises past her shoulders she realizes how much she hates the end of summer, and its goodbyes.
There was wind coming off of the ocean, wind that tugged at the young girl’s hair and laughed as it twisted it into ropes. She wants to ask of it, why are you laughing? and why won’t you make me a French braid instead of these dreadlocks? She had never been very good at braiding her own hair. She always left the plaits half-finished, or rushed them so that they were too-loose, or left odd bumps and snags and other irregularities that had her ripping out the cords nearly the moment she finished them. 