“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile."
“Sometimes I don't know either.” It feels like less of an confession to say the words when her chain sings like an anchor at her knee. “But then I remember every step has a direction.” And right now she's walking away from the lake and the mountains. She's walking home and each sharp press of metal against her skin carries her back to all the things she loves.
Isra wants to brush her nose across his cheek. She wants to nudge back the shroud of his mane and think of all the ways his eyes match the noon sky. She wants to paint him in a hundred different patterns of the word home. Maybe it's why her smile is a bright thing to his cider, all midsummer night and moonlight against skin the color of dirt.
“I wish--” She says and the word wish tumbles over itself (again and again like a dandelion seed in the breeze). Just like she wants to paint words on him, she wants to tell him that she wishes he were sure. She wishes, she wishes--
She wishes she could fit a whole world, or a million worlds, in her city on the hill that the moonlight loves.
But she never gets to say what it is that she wishes when a shadow covers them. It's darkness in the shape of wings that becomes a dragon the lower Fable flies. Isra smiles then, and it's brighter than before, brighter than she ever thought she could smile. Drops of seawater land in her eyes when she looks up. She blinks away the pain and thinks that nothing has felt sweeter than that sting of brine on her skin.
There is a tear born of salt instead of sorrow in the corner of her gaze when she looks back at Michael. It turns into a diamond when she blinks and it makes no sound at all when it falls into the grass rising up to meet their hooves. “Some of us do.”She almost tells him that there is wonder and horror living in the blood of the horses here.
Isra almost makes him a sea of pearls and golden stones from the dirt and grass leading them onward (or is it backwards?). She almost asks him if there is magic in his skin too. But something in his gaze and the autumn on his tongue keeps her silent. It's that same thing that kept her from brushing her lips against his brow and telling him that the city on the hill isn't a maybe. It's a home.
In the end she only makes, in the silence between them, a single blade of grass into a string a pearls. It looks at if it's waiting to be plucked, like a wild-rose waits for someone to fall in love.
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