The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees
It’s afternoon in Denocte, and the merchants haven’t even arrived yet to the fabled Night Markets; it’s all empty stalls, crows and the occasional miniature dragon in the streets, bright blue banners sewn with a silver moon snapping in the brisk wind off the harbor.
There is a decidedly different energy here than to Terrastella’s sleepy pier. Caspian weaves between sailors and dockhands like a salmon between nets, relishing the shouting and swearing, the snap of the sails, the salt breeze. He pauses to watch a ship board, burly stallions rolling barrels up a plank; Caspian’s never been on so much as a rowboat, but when he closes his eyes and feels the sway of the dock beneath his feet it’s easy to imagine the pitch and roll of being on the deck.
At first another bout of shouting only adds to his vision, but at the third bray of Hey! You boy! Caspian opens his eyes to find one of those burly stallions staring at him from a much closer distance, wearing an expression of displeasure that the paint is not unused to having directed at him. The younger man glares at him, tensing, but when the dark bay snorts and says “Goddess’s biscuits, you young curs are useless. Get back to work!” Caspian only shakes his head emphatically and says “Aye, sir!” before turning and running down the dock, grinning at the consternated shout behind him.
He slows but doesn’t stop until he’s a few blocks away, and his hooves clop pleasantly on a street paved with uneven stones, buildings leaning like bad teeth above him. Some are multiple stories, an oddity he isn’t used to. Somewhere ahead, he knows, Benvolio is sleeping the day away in some unused chimney. On a whim Caspian steps into a dark shop, strolls to the counter and asks the young mare working it if she knows where he can find a girl named Aspara. “The princess?” She says, incredulous, and laughs with a voice as harsh as a jay. She doesn’t stop laughing even as he turns, brow furrowed, and heads for the door with a last glare shot her way. The sound follows him back out onto the street.
“Princess,” he says, trying out the word, then shakes his head, unable to square it with the girl he’d shared wine with beside the fire, the air perfumed with salt and smoke. It seemed impossible, not least because princesses did not have pet wolves. Still, he picks at it like a knot as he wanders the streets, gradually getting lost.
It was a warm evening, late spring, and the sunset stuck itself to every flat surface like a kid fighting its bedtime. I was that glorious age where one is always hungry, and never tired, and the daylight’s rebellion felt like my own.
It was easy living, I knew it then and know it now. I knew childhood was slipping away from me- I was a citizen, no longer a youth, and perhaps one day soon a Warden- and I took every opportunity I got to savor it. (I did not quite yet realize that youth was more than anything a frame of mind, that being old was a choice. But how could I? It doesn’t matter; I would learn.)
That evening I was tromping through the streets I knew and loved most, the labyrinthine passages near the market district. Furfur prowled by my side, and we were discussing strategies for my upcoming spar. He was very sour that I wouldn’t let him join the fight, and took every opportunity to remind me of it. I ate as I walked (I know, I know, it’s a terrible habit. And so rude), a fat fresh slice of honeycomb from the older mare with the gap tooth.
“If I was with you…” It was Furfur’s favorite way to start a sentence that evening, and I was sure it was going to end neatly with some elaborate description of August’s death. I would have cut him off there, but I stopped in my tracks and he quickly shut himself up. “What is it?” He hunched low, instantly on defense, attention zeroed in on the boy down the street slowly walking toward us.
“Caspian?” I laughed, half in disbelief it was him. “It’s Caspian, you can relax” I told my wolf. “Who is Caspian?” He scowled, revealing an abundance of teeth. As a general rule, he did not like boys who got close to his human.
“Oh stop that,” I nudged him roughly, and walked closer to the stallion with a grin. “Hi! W-What are you doing here?” I glanced past him, as though the answer might be written in the street; it was not, or at least not clearly.
I thought about him from time to time, but not in a way that meant anything... I just had the tendency of carrying people inside of me. It made no difference if we had only met once or if we were close friends or, in some instances, if we had never met at all-- I’d see or hear or smell something completely random and it would remind me of someone. Sometimes it was the oddest details, like a leaf falling in the cold autumn sunlight, or the scent of a room right after opening the window, that first wave of fresh air. Other times it would make more sense, and this is always how it was with Caspian- I would smell the ocean in the evening, just after the sun had gone down and the fires had been started, and wonder where that sea-swept boy was, and what he was doing.
“It’s nice to see you.” I know now it was nothing, but in that moment it took a lot of bravery to make such an admission. My smile came a moment later, delayed, everything in slow motion compared to the manic flutter of my heart.
The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees
Caspian believed in luck the way some did in the gods, and he believed in the gods the way others believed in luck, but it must have been both of them that led his path to cross with hers as evening deepened into something thick and golden.
If he still just thought of her as a girl, he might not have been so surprised. But that word, princess, made her into something else, something almost as mythical and hard to find as, well, a unicorn.
The light is against him, and so at first they are only silhouettes, a horned girl and a huge wolf (and that is almost enough to make him turn around). But as soon as she speaks his name his head lifts, tilting wonderingly, and even the strong lupine smell of the wolf and the sudden, unwelcome clump of nerves in his belly don’t keep him from continuing forward to meet her.
“Aspara,” he says, summoning a grin like he’d been wearing it the whole while. “Oh, just exploring. I have some cousins in the city, and there’s not much happening back home.” Of course, he does not say that he’s more or less lost (and anyway, he knows he can find the sea again, and that as soon as Benvolio wakes it’ll be easy to find his way, and both those things mean his current mislocation is temporary).
It’s incredibly tempting to blurt you’re a princess, as if it’s something she doesn’t know. Funny, how things like that you’d like to ignore just sit at the back of your teeth, putting weight on your tongue like a bitter persimmon pit. He wishes he had some wine again, and a smoky fire - ways to blur everything just a little.
“Likewise,” he answers, and to cover the way he immediately thinks what a stupid thing to say the paint shifts his gaze to the wolf, still standing a little behind her, looking more-than-vaguely threatening. “And this must be the wolf you mentioned. Properly intimidating, isn’t he?” Luckily, Caspian stops himself before saying my companion’s only a bat. That was hardly fair to Benvolio, when Caspian was only a low-tide urchin himself.
