The sun rises, and sets on another day. Snow is falling in fat, wet flakes that stick to his mane and pile in the thick winter coat on his back. And like he must, Michael returns to the sea.
It's been whispering his name for days: waves breaking, the saltwater roar. When he hears it outside the city his heart feels like a fist, or like a bird, or like a rock, hard and sharp. It's been a year since he's seen the ocean, even crashing against these steep cliffs - not since he went to the ocean to open his hands and bring Isra home, hands that were too small and a grip that was too shaky to hold her and all of her wild magic.
Michael stares in rapt silence, eyes fixed on the distant, cresting waves as they roll in toward the dark rock of the continent, wondering many things that do not ever quite take shape - nameless things, half-formed things, things that swim close enough to the surface to be seen in the slanted shafts of light but do not break into the open. He thinks someday he will write a poem about the sea and her wild magic like Isra's--a long love poem to the deep and the dark.
Michael starts walking, along the cliff, as if daring that green and angry sea to rise up and meet him. Take him. And he doesn't stop until the vineyard rises up against the still-falling snow and the heavy gray clouds that block out the night sky. Before he knows it he is closed in on all sides by grape vine sleeping in the snow, and again, before he knows it, he is at the door of the quiet little house.
Knocking.
It isn't that late, he supposes. An hour or two past sundown in that time of year that sundown visits earlier and earlier. And he thought, he saw a light in the window, but who knows.
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
the birdsong might be pretty, but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
Tonight the silence feels like oil washing over her in wave after wave of suffocating weight. Darkness is pressing tight against the windows and even the moon seems so very far away when she shifts through the thin layer of frost. Red inhales because she must, of course she must, but it feels like she's swimming far out beyond the cove and there's nothing ahead of her but ice, and blackness, and death.
There's a flash of something else but moonlight on the other side of the window. The rabbit with the broken leg lifts an ear and for a moment she's distracted by the lively tilt of his ear, the way the firelight makes him look halo heavy. She blinks and the darkness presses in again with the silence.
Kock.
Red trembles because this darkness is not the golden-shallow water of a cove. On the other side of that knock the vines are sleeping and the dirt is ice-hard. Everything feels like a grave, everything but the rabbit, her heart and whoever is lost enough to wander through the vineyard at night.
She moves towards the door and the rabbit lifts both his ears to watch (he knows the wolves are still out there, he knows the foxes are with them too). By the table her eyes pause on the bottle of wine and the two glasses waiting to be held, to be appreciated for the glimmer of their crystal. Only one has wine in it. Only one.
The door is opening too soon, the house more eager than she is to have something other than silence and oil filling the corners of it. And when she sees him, golden in the darkness with the moon and sea a barely there glow behind him, all that comes out is, “oh” like a sigh, like the tide. The silence presses in again, heavy and winter-cold. In the fireplace the embers blaze back to life as if the house has more to say than its mistress. It always does these days, always.
“Won't you come in?” Her voice waivers, weaker than the fire edging her in red-light. And when she trembles she doesn't know if it's from the memory of fear or the happiness that for once there is more than black silence and sleeping veins waiting for her on the other side of that thick, wooden door. She stares at him harder than she should as she steps back, hard enough that she seems more wild thing learning the ways of the woods than the mare who makes the best wines in Novus.
Beyond them the moonlight sea sings, hush, hush, hush.
Michael does not have time to regret this moment on the stoop in the light of the moon, even brighter when it is reflected from the sheet of snow over most of Novus. The door to the dark little house swings open, the fire swells to life, and a cold wind sighs in from the vineyard.
Oh, she says - and she is a breathtaking girl painted in a dizzying pattern of spots, with eyes that he will later recall as the very color of her grape leaves drinking the light of a late-morning sun. He sees that she looks very sad, or very tired, and the fingers of it brush against his own exhaustion, against his trembling legs and the pit in his heart that sobs this is enough, every morning and night as if he could use it to keep the time.
Outside the waves break against the dark rock, a sound that is muffled by the layer of snow. Fat drops fall into his hair and his eyelashes.
"Oh," he says almost in unison. Michael is drawing in a breath to apologize, to say I should not have intruded, I am so sorry, I should have been anywhere else but your vineyard and your quiet little home and-- and-- and-- when she steps back and invites him inside in a voice that he barely hears at all over his blood roaring in his ears. He does, as beckoned, filling first the doorway and then the space against the wall with gold and white and pulling the door shut behind him until it clicks gently into place.
Michael breathes as if he has forgotten how to do it automatically (in, a long pause, out).
Across the room on the table there are two wine glasses, one empty as the fingered light of the fireplace laughs in its reflection. Across the room there is the fireplace itself, cold though it is laughing in red and yellow and orange, as if it rose up to greet the stranger at the door--later he will wonder, later Michael may lay in bed and think long about the vineyard and its fireplace, and how so many things feel like a hearth with laughing flame and heat that does not touch his knees, or his ankles, or any part of him. Across the room there is a rabbit that stares at him with eyes like the moon even as that same moon bounces off its edges.
Michael turns back to Red. Michael stares into her vine-green eyes with a lump in his throat. Michael smiles at her like breaking waves and the sad songs his mother used to sing to the ocean. "Sorry, I'm Michael. I'm here for the, uh, festival. I was just walking, and--" As he speaks his ocean eyes roll away from Red, as if he will find the words in her room with her wine glasses and her rabbit. "I really don't mean to intrude. Were you waiting on someone? I just mean with the glasses."
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
the birdsong might be pretty, but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
For a moment both her and the rabbit watch with with the same look, the same out of place tilt to heir heads. And maybe for a moment, for the span on his too-long breath, the moon is caught in both their eyes like fireflies in a glass. Or maybe it's only that the light is caught there for a moment, one beautiful glorious moment, before it starts to die.
Red blinks at the same time the rabbit does. The moon dies.
Outside the snow is starting to roll in like a herd of bison and the sea is thundering against the cliff-side. Beyond the windows Terrastella is full of ice, and snow, and death. But in here, when she looks at him, there is only the low hum of a hundred sad sea songs echoing over and over again until her ears are ringing with them. There is only the sadness, the sorrow, the space between words that seems as bottomless as the black sky above them. Snow is melting off his eyelashes and it looks to her like tears, like an echo of the sadness rolling black around and around her soul.
There are a hundred words that should come out instead of, “don't.” She doesn't know if she telling him not to be sorry, or not to look away, or not to be standing in her house that hasn't know anyone but her for so, so long. Red starts to pour a glass of wine because it's the only way she knows how to calm all this sadness in her that is threatening to come out as a scream that will never end, or s enough tears to flood the sea. That do not hangs in the air, caught between the silence in the sigh of wine hitting crystal. Moonlight sifts through the window again and turns the wine to blood, to life, to something more than water and root.
Her own inhale is too fast, prey fast. The rabbit closes his eyes and settles down to dream. The sight settles something primal in her, that part of her that will always be seal in the sea watching a shark cut through the sunlit waters.
When she looks back him her eyes are too green, too sad, too promising of both tears and endless joy, too full of pleading for him to look at her again. She is too full. “I'm not waiting for anyone.” She grasps her glass with her natural magic just to make her body feel like it's doing something other than aching. “I always pour two...it makes....” Her eyes look down to the table, to the wine that was the last harvest she had with Horace. She does not look back up, not until---
“It makes me feel less alone.” Outside the snow is still coming in like bison, like a herd, like endless flakes of snow that are never alone. Snow could be melting on her lashes too by the time she looks back at him. She doesn't ask him, but holds out the glass for him anyway, hoping that he'll see that sad sea song in her eyes and understand. It's the best wine Novus has ever known.
“I'm Red. How was the festival?” She asks it like a hallelujah, like a prayer that tonight there is something other than silence. It all comes out too rushed anyway.
What she really wants to ask him is why he is here instead of there. She doesn't.
