elif
Elif is afraid.
She is afraid and it is the feeling she hates most in all the world - the way it clings to the insides of her veins like ice, the way it makes her shiver and forget the things that all wild things know. Her fear makes her helpless, skittish as hare, green eyes round and watchful and body still save for the trembling.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was over, they had won - Solis himself had stepped down from his mountain and helped them beat back the winter, and even if had been a little anticlimactic, even if a part of her wondered whether their god had been the one to bring the elk in the first place, it had been fixed.
And now a stranger stands before them, silver streaked with red like a statue desecrated, and says I am your king. He says Your queen is dead and Elif finds she is not frozen, not tharn with fear and shock - for she cries out in grief. At least she is not the only one; she does not want to be marked by those cold and dead eyes (nor the eyes of his beast, mercifully hidden).
A breeze rushes against her feathers, trying to soothe or perhaps goad her away, but Elif could not fly in this moment for a hundred reasons. Even the whip coiled at her hip like an obedient snake is forgotten, for what in this moment could a girl with a whip do? She is nothing, nothing, nothing at all - a single grain of sand in a dying desert of them.
Solis will save us all, she thinks, but there is already doubt gnawing at her heart. (Doubt? how? She had seen him with her own eyes -
and had he truly done anything? anything but talk?)
As children some of the younger ones had taken turns playing at Zolin and the slaves, Zolin and the child-soldiers, Zolin and the Davke. They had loved to play each part - the boy-king and the savage woman who drove a dagger into his heart. It had been a foolish game but a game nevertheless.
And as Elif stands there and the cry goes up in small pockets around the crowd - long live the king - she feels like she is in a new version of that silly game. But it does not feel like playing at all.
