NATURE'S FIRST GREEN IS GOLD, HER HARDEST HUE TO HOLD. HER EARLY LEAF'S A FLOWER; BUT ONLY SO AN HOUR. THEN LEAF SUBSIDES TO LEAF.
The only way Orestes can ground himself is observing, with an analytic eye, the natural beauty that surrounds them. Autumn has fallen heavily upon Amare Creek. In the later edge of day, the forest still brims with the sounds of light and the deciduous leaves are alight with nearly unimaginable colour. The entire forest is a fire of reds, oranges, yellows. The autumn leaves cushion their footfalls, and spiral lazily down the creek’s current. They are bright flashes through the mist that otherwise obscures the details of the creek and, with that elusive mist, Orestes discovers the entire area subdued with a kind of magic, a kind of quiet intent.
His thoughts stream as the creek does; endless; misted over, as if in a dream. First there is the self doubt, the eternal nagging of you should be with your Court now, at this time, not here, with yourself—
And yet Marisol is the one pleasure Orestes has allowed himself in Novus; she is the one thing in his life that strays from rigid duty, despite duty ironically being what brought them together. He steels glances at her through the trees, though they travel at a trot and not quite together. Orestes has not done this intentionally; no, instead the journey along the creek had become a sort of game, a dogged race between the two. At times Orestes dart’s closer to brush his lips against her neck, her flank, or to nip softly at an ear. Then he is away again, rushed with colour and noise, until—
There is a clamorous waterfall and the sun has shrouded itself in the hands of twilight. The colours, which had been so vibrant moments before, seem more subdued as Orestes comes to a walk; the waterfall obscures the sound of his breathing; it obscures, too, his thoughts. It is here Orestes closes the distance between them, tentatively, step by step. His eyes are upon her with a sudden intensity, one he has not felt before and likely will never feel again. His stomach is gnarled and he feels, suddenly, as if this is the only life he has ever lived.
He is silent for an extended moment; long enough that his breath begins to still, and his heart begins to slow, and whatever worries or fears he has are carried away with the sound of the water as it falls into itself. He stays a stride away from her and says, quietly, “‘I am too alone in this world, and yet not alone enough to make every moment holy.’” The poem returns to him and this time, this time Orestes knows his timing is right. It is there, in the way his heart beats so loud it rushes in his ears like the creek. "’I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive.” It is now the world’s golden hour; and around them the mist swirls, lit the sun’s dying rays. Orestes does not think too long or hard on how they are surrounded by the seasonal death of trees; or the way his heartbeat, so loud and firm, is a reminder of his own fragile mortality. No, he presses closer and when he does so it is to extend his lips to the hem of her wing and run them up the soft feathers. He has never touched her there before and while not exactly sensual, the gesture has more intimacy in it than perhaps any he has shared with her before.
“‘I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will as it goes toward action; and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things… or else alone.’” As he speaks, in a voice belonging to bedrooms, and sunlit corridors, and the rustle of the paper in his study it becomes increasingly clear the secret things of which he speaks. “‘I want to be a mirror for your whole body, and I never want to be blind, or to be too old to hold up your heavy and swaying picture. I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.’” Orestes moves from the feathers of her wing to the almost delicate spots beneath it; for those within his reach, Orestes’s brushes his lips against them and then turns inward, toward her ear. At the small of it, he continues: “‘And I want my grasp of things to be true before you. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother. Like a ship, that carried me through the wildest storm of all.”
Perhaps the poem is impersonal, written by another man. But for Orestes’ it says all he is too inelegant to express. It shares the simple fact that for him, a foreigner, Marisol’s kindness and intimacy had grounded him from the first time she sent him a letter. The sea tells me that she knows you, she had said. And: If there is a day you need to come home, Terrastella’s shores are open.
All along, that promise had stood: all along, Orestes had found comfort in the shared burden of leadership, of knowing what he had felt in it, he did not feel alone. And that after, after all that had transpired and would transpire, there was a place waiting for him, a home, a person who for some reason (and oh, there are many reasons) his Soul reconciled with. And somewhere, the promise had transformed from an assurance to a desire. Somewhere, Orestes had folded back the layers of an impenetrable wall; he had seen the warmth of her grey eyes and come to understand the pain, and sorrow, and fear that could govern her. There is a part of him, now, that wells with the desire to be a salve to these things: to show her not the self she sees, self-deprecating and always punished, but the Marisol he knows. The beauty and grace with which she exists; the tenacity and steel that has allowed her to sacrifice, and sacrifice again, for her people.
And that is where they are Bound, he thinks. That is the crux at which Orestes will become a martyr, to show her her sacrifices are worthy, and beautiful, and so is she.
“Marisol.” He says her name like a prayer. He is so close he can see the way his breath disturbs the fine hairs at her ear, upon her cheek. “I pledge myself to you. Beneath the moment where our gods touch, where the sun sets and twilight embraces him, I pledge myself to you. It is the first pledge in all my lives made not of duty, but of love. I am yours.”
What he does not say, because he does not believe it adequate: And you are mine.
The reason he has grown to love her as she is, despite her sense of duty, despite her fears and anxieties, Marisol belongs more solely to herself than anyone he has ever known. But Orestes does not want to belong to himself, no.
There is not enough time in his last lifetime for that.
“I am yours,” he repeats, and the sun blinks out on the horizon. The sky turns the colour of indigo silk and Arabian dreams, and Orestes’s voice becomes the trees, the waterfall, the wind.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
For the moment there is nothing but this:
Orestes’ breath on her hip.
His mouth, a prayer against the dark velvet of her neck.
His voice, a deep blue, equal parts soft and lurid, rumbling into her ear and then all the way down to the bones it breaks cleanly into pieces.
For a moment all the world falls away and even Marisol’s mind goes blank. Birds sing sharp and sweet from the branches of trees whose leaves have gone red, and yellow, and orange; this is all she can hear, except for the crunch of their steps in the dying grass and the soft huff of her own breaths. All together it sounds almost like another song.
For a moment she is focused on him, him, him, only him, more intently and more lovingly and more fearfully than she has ever focused on anyone else; focused so certainly and passionately that it makes her sick; so hopelessly that she nearly stumbles when he reaches out to touch her and then rushes away, as if in that split second she has forgotten how to stand on her own, and the world seems to slough away underfoot, like a bad dream being pulled off a sleep-tapestry.
Marisol wants to say it then, although it could not be without crying. I love you.
But the sentence is not quite finished—not meant to end there at all, even if it would be easier to pretend so.
Admit it, foolish girl, and find the real words: I love you more than I could ever possibly be okay with.
She won’t. Or can’t. It doesn’t matter; they’ve fallen apart already, and Orestes is nothing more than a flash of fool’s gold winding through this copse of dying trees, a body made of salt and seafoam. Her mouth feels suddenly and terribly dry. Her gaze cannot find a good place to land, because to look at him feels like submitting to death, and to look anywhere else can only be an affront to whatever made him so divine. Perhaps this is love—two terrible choices wrapped up in gold ribbon. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter, and never will, how terrible the choices are, as long as they are tied in that particular knot.
Marisol slows to a walk and blinks against the falling sun; the world has been cast now in a misty haze of warm, prismatic colors, split into soft crystals by the fog and illuminating every surface they touch with a glow that looks near-godly. Orestes closes the distance between them with steps as soft as a ghost’s, and ver the strong rise of his shoulder she catches sight of a waterfall which briefly makes her lose her breath. (Mari’s travels outside of Terrastella are rare, and so the whole world has still—for her—retained her novelty. Nevermind the fact that for most of her life she couldn’t have imagined being caught at Amare dead or alive.) In the shifting light his eyes are not just blue but green, gold, red, opalescent. The intensity in them makes her shudder like she’s been caught in a cold wind; and when their gazes meet fully, something in her stomach curls like a snake ready to strike.
He steps forward, and that thing lashes out, all teeth.
He steps forward and Marisol is paralyzed, starting from the chest, and spiderwebbing out until she cannot move, cannot even really breathe, for the way his gaze settles on her like an anchor and turns the air between them heavy with heat. And when he steps forward again, she does not move. Does not flinch as her warrior’s body begs to, or lean away as her child’s body wants to. Even when he reaches out to touch her—
Even when he reaches out to touch her, and the soft velvet of his mouth brushes a layer of dark, glossy feathers no one else has ever touched before except in violence, a place Marisol calls more sacred than a shrine, and instead of feeling violated she feels wanted.
Warm to the bone. Drowning in quicksand. Heat building against her hips.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body.
She swallows, roughly and with difficulty. It is not the first time she has heard this voice out of someone’s mouth—a voice made of alcohol and perfume, made for bedrooms and dark alleys—but this is the first time it has cut her so quick and so deep.
And I want my grasp of things to be true before you.
Now his breath skates the place where her pulse hammers hardest against her neck, and though Mari’s ear flickers wildly, the reflex beyond her control by now, she leans delicately forward as if the heat of it isn’t quite enough, and it isn’t. Maybe nothing ever will be, she thinks, now that she knows it can feel like this. Maybe it’s worth it anyway. Maybe this is the thing, and maybe he is the person, who will finally hold her together instead of breaking her apart, and maybe this is the relationship that will last her to the grave, maybe this will be the father of her children—maybe this is love (no, it is). Maybe this is life in its entirety, the way he looks at her, like a star swallowing the universe.
Marisol.
She shivers. And breaks.
I pledge myself to you.
And breaks.
It is the first pledge in all my lives made not of duty, but of love. I am yours.
And when she looks up at him, his breath stirring the fine dark hairs on her cheek, his gaze brighter than the sun, she cannot manage more than a sound between a gasp and a sigh that says without saying anything: me too, me too, me too.
Marisol presses her forehead to the crook of his neck and says, her eyes closed, her voice soft as a prayer—“I did not understand the stories until now.”
NATURE'S FIRST GREEN IS GOLD, HER HARDEST HUE TO HOLD. HER EARLY LEAF'S A FLOWER; BUT ONLY SO AN HOUR. THEN LEAF SUBSIDES TO LEAF.
He has never felt so mortal, so on the precipice of the void. When the sun sets, there is a chill kept at bay only by Marisol’s presence; and that presence captivates him with all the gravity of a planet, of something larger than himself. While she struggles to look, he cannot look away; he cannot keep his breath from catching; in true mortal folly he cannot keep the naked emotion from his face when he truly looks at her. He is more a man now than he has ever been; he is more present, more flesh and blood, than any moment before now. And when the sun sets, his tattoo catch ablaze with the sentiment of his heart. He cannot help the warm, radiant light that pours from him; that illuminates them in soft golden light.
They are both trembling. In all of his loves, he had never learned the true nature of a storm: and he thinks this is it, he thinks this is what it must feel like to rest within the tempest’s eye.
She does not need to speak, he thinks. He sees the emotions and the way they break through her as waves do upon land; and perhaps that, that is their fate. Perhaps they are the sea and the land, opposites but Bound, breaking over the weight of their own connection. I did not understand the stories until now, she says. She presses her forehead into him; she says the words like a prayer. But her touch—and her affirmation—ignites something within him, something smouldering, something even greater. Orestes wants; he groans, low in his throat, “Then make me yours,” he asks, he pleads. He will not assume what she wants; he will not demand. No, he is asking, as one asks a goddess. His breath against her.
Orestes thinks of her emboldened; he remembers her as Commander; as Sovereign; fierce and soft, beneath. She, too, is a creature of dualities. His eyes are closed when he runs his mouth from her cheek to her shoulder, when he breaths in nothing but her scent. “Then write the rest of the story with me.” But it is Orestes who draws back; it is Orestes who trembles with all a mortal man’s desires. It is Orestes who says, "Do not be afraid, Marisol. If you touch me, I will not become dust. I will not change you.” It is a promise, more raw than the last.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
The light catches like claws on the gold foil of Orestes’ tattoos, and Marisol watches intently, with dark gray eyes, every minute shift and gleam. The sun follows every one of his movements as closely as a stray dog begging for food; it kisses him with the fervent passion of a lover scorned and will not, cannot, let go. His perfect glow falls over them both, a yellow silk blanket.
What a god he would make, Marisol thinks, dazed. Keeping her thoughts in order is growing more difficult by the minute. To even stand near him is to be held down by a divine kind of gravity; to feel the warmth of his skin against her is to be sucked down into a whirlpool, drowning, and enjoying it. With her forehead pressed against his, nothing feels quite as intense or important as the rapid, unsteady thumping of her heart against the curve of her throat, where the skin is frailest, where the blood pulses the most violently. Her gaze falls, and a butterfly kiss of lashes brushes against the slope of the sun king’s shoulder. His breath pushes up and up against her chest.
Then make me yours.
Mari’s head falls; she steps back, ever so slightly, until a few inches of space are cleaved between them, and those steely eyes turn up to meet his from under a swath of curly, dark lashes. Her mouth twists into a curve that falls somewhere between euphoria and worry, and it perfectly matches the shine of her gaze that almost smiles, but is afraid to be so happy. The song of her heart in her chest is that of a plucked string: tight, quavering, tense almost to the point of shattering; and the gods only know what will happen to her when it does finally break.
“Aren’t you already?” she asks, throaty, teasing, voice dark and soft as a noble’s cloak made of velvet; and before he can answer she presses her mouth to the knot where his ear meets his jaw, letting out a short whoosh of air to play over Orestes’ skin.
A beat, then, of warmth and steam and the smell of the leaves turning brown all around them. Marisol draws away slightly, and when she does it is only to look at him with a smile slick and sharp as any predator’s, a ferocious glow in the gray eyes.
NATURE'S FIRST GREEN IS GOLD, HER HARDEST HUE TO HOLD. HER EARLY LEAF'S A FLOWER; BUT ONLY SO AN HOUR. THEN LEAF SUBSIDES TO LEAF.
Her mouth is salvation.
“Almost,” he says, in the voice of a wild thing. He cranes his mouth to her ear—his eyes are bright, more like the blue in fire then the sea. “There’s only one thing left.”
He supposes it is bold, to say; but he hopes the earnestness of his tone conveys not a demand, an ultimatum, but a desire. His voice comes out heady with it. And while she opens space, he steps forward to close it, delighted in the predatory glint to her eyes; the soft edge of their love is hardening, as steel does in fire, folded again and again over itself. He laughs. It is less nervous; it is more breathless.
“You can start,” he says, quietly. “By learning each of my tattoos, and I will kiss each feather of your wings and make constellations of the freckles beneath them—“
The rejection of that festival night seems to belong to another man. He is bold, now; nearly brazen. His tattoos, which typically glow metallic silver when the sun sets, continue to rage gold, gold, gold. The dark colour of her skin reflects it; absorbs it; and the light creates an alcove utterly private, beyond even the creek, and the birds, and the forest.
Perhaps they are both gods.
Orestes steps beside her, flanking; he runs his mouth along the arc of her neck, and then the slope of her shoulder. He admires her one white sock; the slight lightening of the black of her coat to rich, reddish brown. He noses her feathers, gestures her wing up.
“This, here,” he says, tracing the distinctive patterning of freckles against the white. “Looks like Cassiopeia. And this—like Orion. There, too, is Lyra, for the eagle carrying the lyre.” His voice drops. “But this one—“ and Orestes’s nose presses against a unique patterning, jagged, broken. “Looks like a Commander.”
Orestes has always been poetic, ornate; his words have been the closest way he can share his soul. Too often, however, Marisol has made him wordless. So that when he draws away it is to smile, shyly now, and say, in the words of Neruda, “Marisol—“ a pause. “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” As if it wasn't already implied.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
This is a man she has never seen before. A man she has dreamt of, maybe; years ago. When she didn’t know what he looked like, the sound of his voice, or anything but the way he would look at her, with eyes like fire and his mouth twisted around that word: love. The way he would look at her, like she was the only good thing—the only important thing—left in the world.
She could never have expected it would be him. The sun king. A foreigner. But here, now—under the rustling trees, just inside the roar of the waterfall and the rainbow freckles of sunlight coming off the foaming pond—here, now, looking at him, Marisol cannot remember at all what it was like to expect anyone else.
There’s only one thing left. The Commander rolls her tongue around her teeth and tastes the sting of salt. She stares up at Orestes with eyes that are less the grey of stone, now, and more the grey of ash, still smoking, and her whole body feels as though it is wracked by the force of her heart thrashing like a caught animal against her chest.
And he is gold in every sense of the word, a golden thing in a golden world, shining with golden light. When Marisol (gently, too gently) press her mouth to the tattoo on his shoulder shaped like a sun, it burns against her so hot that she almost jerks back; but the pain of it is not really pain at all, and so she stands her ground. His cloud-white hair drifts over her neck as he reaches out to touch her wing. And for a moment she debates saying something—pointing out just how much it means that she would let him so close to what literally keeps her off the ground. But that moment passes, and Marisol is too overwhelmed to do anything but listen to the sound of her own breath and his, rasping already with effort.
His mouth makes a track over her neck, her shoulder, down the curve of her spine. Every inch it passes makes her shiver one more time.
“What spring does with the cherry trees,” Marisol repeats, dazed; and her mouth curls into a half-smile made hazy with desire and contentedness. And when she laughs it is all the ringing of church bells in Terrastella, all the beautiful clashing of swords in Solterra, somewhere between shy and sweet and totally unafraid. “So—you want to make me blush. Well. You’re getting there.”
Teasingly she flicks the nimble tip of one wing against his cheek.
NATURE'S FIRST GREEN IS GOLD, HER HARDEST HUE TO HOLD. HER EARLY LEAF'S A FLOWER; BUT ONLY SO AN HOUR. THEN LEAF SUBSIDES TO LEAF.
Perhaps it is that he has never had a chance to love, that the only thing he can find to give voice to it is poetry, and pledges, and the monumental expressions of… more, more, more. He had been raised up humble; humility had always been his virtue of choice and, with that, the penance of eating last at a meal, of taking the least, of ensuring everyone’s needs came before his own. Now, he reigns over a people who value pride and sometimes avarice and Orestes thinks, for the first time in his life, that is why his people had died.
They had refused to take things for themselves.
When foreigners came under the guise of helplessness, his people had extended all their possessions and knowledge. When those foreigners took that knowledge and wielded it against them like a weapon, they were nearly helpless. Despite their magic blood and their amorphous shapes, they had been too weak to keep what was theirs.
But…
Orestes is tired of that memory.
He is tired of that sorry life.
(He nearly hates himself for it; he nearly hates himself for the way happiness is bursting, insurmountable, within his chest.)
And so Orestes moves on; he refuses to feel the survivor’s guilt any longer. He refuses not to learn the penance of extreme humility, of softness, is also tragedy. Now, he will not shy away from choosing his own happiness. Tonight, beneath the stars that begins to burn upon the dark expanse of sky, he will not turn from joy as if it is martyrdom to do so.
Her mouth grounds him to the moment even more surely. As she presses her lips against the tattoo on his shoulder, Orestes inhales sharply; it is nearly unbearable in the best way. They are both breathless then. They are both little more than stars in orbit. What spring does with the cherry trees, she repeats, trembling beneath his touch as the aspens do beneath the wind.
So—you want to make me blush. Well. You’re getting there.
He smiles and when she presses the tip of her wing against his cheek, he closes his eyes.
“More than that.”
When Orestes opens them again, there is no ambiguity in the suggestion; there is no ambiguity in the raw way he looks at her, vulnerable, full of want and history and the promise of tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
In all his lives,
he has never felt new. But here, he is. And he hopes he can return the sentiment fractionally; he hopes that in offering himself as he does, he opens a new door for her as well. Orestes offers not only himself, but the certainty of all that he is; the unwavering faith, the dogged determination to make the most of everything he is given, to better it.
But, even if she does not know it, she has been doing that to him all along. Somewhere from her first letter to the drunken festival to his admission beneath Terrastella’s cliffsides, Orestes has learned how to be something he has never been before:
Simply, a man. Not a Prince, or a Prisoner, or a Sovereign. Just a man, in love, with a woman. And perhaps, for just a moment (stolen, quietly, between the trees) he can help her become something other than Commander, Sovereign, Queen.
Perhaps they can simply be. That is his thought, when he closes the distance a final time. Orestes has no more words; no more poetry; he only has his heartbeat, and hers.
I will follow you down until the sound of my voice will haunt you
Marisol cannot know what, exactly, Orestes is thinking. They have missed too much of each other’s lives (and, despite feeling otherwise, known each other too short a time) to know what fragments of the past tend to surface the most. Besides, Marisol thinks, he might always been an enigma; it seems unavoidable when one considers the fact that his life is not his own anymore, but written and reported as if part of a history textbook.
But if she did—oh, if she did, she would know they are feeling so many of the same things.
Guilt, heavy as a boulder in her chest, at the thought of being happy; especially at the thought of being this happy, and for this long. A sense of long-held, nerve-tingling apprehension at the thought—knowledge?—it might all fall away as fast as it came, and she will be left closer to drowning than ever before. A gnawing feeling that she should be preparing for disaster rather than enjoying the sigh of the breeze; the warmth of Orestes’ mouth against her; the feeling that she is not Commander or Sovereign or even Marisol now; but a girl who is in love and nothing else.
And yet all that falls away under the burn of his eyes, and Mari’s breath catches in her throat like it’s threatening to choke her out of thinking and straight into raw feeling.
The trees close in, and all that is not really Marisol—the fear, the stress, the pain—falls away, away, away.
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