Lean on the ground with you
On, on my knees
Kneel in the water down low
But you can't go where they all go
✧
W
e are approaching the city. No longer are the frilly tops of black gum trees pressed shoulder to shoulder like the heads of whispering conspirators. The sky, let in by slivers as canopy gives way to cloud, is the pale wintry blue of forget-me-nots; and the moment I make the metaphor, I am instantly proud of it.
It's been so long since I've seen the sky that the comparison is really quite literal.
Before I know it, the swamplands are less swamp than they are civilisation, or so Rook tells me, because to him the swamp I used to live in was as far from civilisation as one could be, and so of course he knows more about this than I do.
I stare hard at a rolling white manor as we pass by its leafy lawn, and comment blithely how similar it looks to Elder's house. The house, I tell him, that I was born in.
Perhaps I wouldn't be so convinced of your tribe's lack of civilisation if you'd ever brought me back to see it.
I turn my head so that I am no longer staring hard at the white manor but at him. Now isn't that the debacle! I think, so loudly that he turns away and scoffs.
But quickly enough I grow quiet, because when one white manor house stitches neatly to another white manor house and both of them are mere dwarves to the next one in line, a marble monster of turrets and balconies and windows that rises out from a lawn populated entirely by statues—I see, with dismay, that civilisation isn't at all like it was at the swamp.
I halfheartedly wonder if there's a library here, at least. Not Rook's Library, the one made out of living trees, but perhaps he'll like even a regular one.
I flip my hair behind my shoulder (loose, today) and nod towards the statues in the marble monster's yard. Is this what you mean by civilisation?
Instead of answering, Rook flattens his ears to his skull and bristles against my shoulder.
At first, I dismiss the girl as just another statue. She's pale enough for it, imbued with the same alabaster refinement as the countless contorting shapes littering the snow-covered grass. But then she moves, her head bobbing back and forth as she takes something from another besides her who I don't mistake for anything but a servant.
We don't have the tradition of keeping them in Elder's tribe, but she'd sometimes joke that I was like Ma's little servant, though far better treated, and far better looking, with emphasis added at the end.
The girl walks towards us and Rook presses me into the blocky green shrubs behind us. Only the tips of his antlers are visible through the brambly leaves but they look so much like skeletal tree branches that she passes us by without a glance. I push up my mask to see better. She's carrying something with her.
A rock? All I can make of the thing is that it's brown, and roughly round, and somehow important enough to be carried by a girl who looks like she doesn't much need to carry anything.
Rook shakes his head. It smells like food.
I pry myself out from the shrub and flip my mask back over my head. Surprisingly Rook doesn't protest—he merely tails me silently as I tail the girl, a procession of marble and crow head and black-coated stag. I think he is as curious as I am.
The girl stops at the edge of a pond, and begins tearing the thing she carries into chunks. Not a rock, then. Food, soft enough to be torn, pillowy white on the inside.
Bread.
And then she throws a piece of the bread into the water, and the sight is so strange I frown.
"Why are you doing that?" Rook glowers at me and makes no move to follow as I step out carefully towards her, my hair a bright river under the sun.
The other girls never liked me. I wonder if this one will.
