Eventually Isra will learn how serious men of the sand can be, how their gazes and say stories when their lips give only dust. But today, in the golden light that seems sharp when it reflects off the snow, Isra only watches the stallion with something impish dancing in her blue-green eyes. He has nothing of whimsy in his own stare, nothing innocent in the way his horn pierces the air as straight and true as an arrow.
Isra much prefers the dainty spiral of her own horn and the way the wind sings through the hollows of it when a storm is approaching.
It's singing now, a low keening of winter that spreads frost across something deep in her soul. The song makes her think of the bottom of the sea, of both darkness and the secrets of ships and pearls and monsters who have never tasted the sun on their skin.
When she cocks her head at him she wonders if he knows anything at all about the ocean (one of salt or sand, anything that might be deep enough to drown in). She's about to ask him, about to seem more strange than she surely already must.
But they are practical, these desert men and she finds the words turning to dust on her own lips when he speaks. There are war-drums in his voice and the kneeing of hot, summer air. It feels like listening to fire and all the things that hurt to touch. She's at caught as she is terrified and she starts to laugh lightly just to make herself feel braver.
“Perhaps,” She says, because she simply has no other idea of what to say. All the other things she could have said die on her lips when his own lips tense in a frown.
“What else have you heard?” This she almost whispers because she wants to see how long his lips can frown and how long his gaze can burn.
ISRA OF THE SINGING HORN ;
“I just want to be the size of a galaxy, so I can eat all the stars"
