Abel has never been ashamed before that he doesn’t know how to write. But shame in all its forms is nothing new to him; this is just one more stone on the grave he’s built himself, as he trades another piece of Isra’s gold to a man who copies down the words he dictates. How much more might he say if he were wielding the quill himself? How much more would be safe?
He knows the desire is as foolish as any dreams in his head; his words will always be clumsy things, unequal to the meaning behind them. Mutely he pays for each word, and mutely he watches as the scribe rolls up the letter, fastens it with leather, and tells him with a wink he will send it right away.
Hope feels as high and tight as a noose when he turns away.
Sabine,
I hope this finds you safe.
I am leaving - but I will until the new moon, if you would say goodbye. I want to keep my promise.
I’m staying near the docks in Denocte. Ask for Elijah.
I hope to see you, but if I don’t, please take care of yourself. Know that meeting you was the best thing that’s happened to me, maybe the only good thing.
She had been dreaming for five days straight by the time letter was laid at her feet.
What of, you wonder?
If you had asked her, she might have tilted her head and smiled. She might have said, in that violet-marlene-dietrich hum, that she could not remember. And you would have known she was lying.
As it was, she was not asked such a question; after all, who was left to care?
Her caramel-candyfloss hair was too knotted for hitchhikers to run their hands through. Though her bones yawned like earth-spun boughs, straining to peer up at the naked sun through the curtain of her skin, each bird that swept down would find her spine too slippery with salt and grief to perch upon.
She was swimming in a sea of corpses.
Sabine did not know how she found the energy to translate symbols into words and words into sentences and sentences into meaning. But that had been three days ago and somehow, by a tirade of small miracles, she now found herself standing in the throng of Denocte's morning song. There were still-warm gaps in her memory, as if something honest had been there and only recently decamped -- but, still, out of her reach they remained.
In truth, it did not matter how she had got here or why she had read that strange letter even after declaring herself cadaverous.
All that mattered was the gentle ache in her ribs that screamed and screamed and screamed of the death borne against her name, and most importantly, of all the loss that was still yet to come.
He had not thought about how close he would be to the little wood-and-daub structure he’d grown up in, when he fled with the queen’s stone-turned-gold down to the docks. He’d only thought of proximity to the ships, and anonymity among the sailors and merchants. Now, with the cries of the gulls and rough-throated shouts of stallions unloading barrels of goods, the summer sun playing over the water as gossamer morning clouds crept through the blue, Abel is sick with memory.
It’s a strange texture of emotions - guilt and fear and cautious, fragile hope. He tries not to wonder why the unicorn queen spared him. He tries not to wonder whether Raum knows of his imprisonment or his release, or whether someone (the golden man, the one who could disappear) might be hunting him even now. If death found him, he thinks he might welcome it.
But he knows these docks and boat-slips and cobbled alleys leading up to the city like a rabbit knows the warren it was born in. The other urchins he’d run with or fought with have grown up and moved on, and he recognizes no one, and no one recognizes him. Abel would feel like a ghost, if it weren’t for the fear, and the hope - how they eat at him the same way.
Tomorrow is the new moon. Tomorrow he will board a merchant ship bound for the old country, his place paid for with a sliver of gold the captain had considered a long time before taking (and in those moments Abel had been considering too, shameful things, things he must do if the answer was no).
He has tried to keep his hope of seeing her like a seed in an airless, lightless box, closed tight with no hope of growing. Better to die in the dark without having lived than wither and rot. It is better, he tells himself, if she does not come. How could it be a good thing, to put her in danger? And yet every morning he has woken from fitful sleep, and combed the bay, and waited.
This morning is no different, save for a new breeze off the water. Abel makes his way along a street above the docks, a roughspun cloak loose around his shoulders, the best disguise he can afford. The air smells of salt and the remnants of last night’s fires, and the hint of smoke makes him feel as loose and thin as water, remembering how it had clung to his skin for days after the warehouse.
It doesn’t matter how he finds her. She is not there and the business of the dock might as well be carried out by ants; and then she is there, and it is a summer morning and he is a free man with no past. Only a future as wide-open as the sky (he is getting better at lying).
Abel is careless in getting to her. He weaves through other horses, incautious, the glimmer of sunlight through heartbreak blue crystal his guiding star. For once he is lucky; the eyes that follow him have no recognition, and only see a boy trying to get to a girl, and that nothing more than one of the oldest stories there is. Some even smile.
He is not smiling, when he reaches her. He is a little breathless, and his eyes are wide and guileless, and the slats of his ribs are hidden beneath the cloak. His nerves are tangled like wires and his heart seems uncertain whether it wants to settle in his throat or his gut, but he does not look like a man already dead.
“You came,” he breathes, and sounds for once like nothing more than a boy in love.
The great ruckus of the docks feels like nothing more than a distant dream.
A sailor, pale and scarred, barks thunderous instructions to a crew that scramble like obedient dogs to his heel -- but Sabine can only hear the sigh of last summer's breath. The barrels, the gulls, the hammer-pulse of stern against bow? They dwindle and die in fragmented echoes, just like everyone she'd ever loved.
For there are acres and lives between she and the world that grinds on in her absence; a world that cares not for the heart of a single child. It is a machine that coughs and splutters but never ceases. It consists of more cogs than a girl like Sabine could comprehend. It is alien, it is foreign, and it has only ever shown her apathy.
Did it blink when Raum turned sand to stone?
Sabine turns suddenly, seeing beyond her ankles for a brief aching moment, and knows that she has forgotten why her legs shepherded her here -- though unequivocably it is not the only thing she has forgotten. Her ribs, bulbous and wrathful, scream at their host to feed them so; her throat, parched beyond repair, begs once more to make an offering to the lake; her eyes, sunken like rotting fruit, peer out of their hollow sockets in the bitter hope that there is light beyond the dark cloud across the sea.
And then she sees him.
It doesn't matter that his wicker-thin shoulders are sheltered beneath modest fabric or that his hair looks darker under a Denoctian sun. It doesn't matter that her heart is too weak to stand because he is moving, fighting, aching his way toward her and she knows he will catch her if she should fall.
She knows, she knows, she knows.
Because he is here! Standing suddenly before her like a wraith she might have fashioned from the knife Raum had promised to protect her with. Or the little-girl-love her mother had sworn to dress her in all those lifetimes ago. Or that magic trick Acton had vowed to teach her the last time he waved goodbye, as the dying light shifted across his smile.
Each broken oath was a dead-black tooth in her mouth and there they fermented, lodged in her flesh until one by one they fell loose onto the dirt. She buried them all faithfully beneath the unending sky and if you knew where to look you would still find their epitaphs engraved into the earth. So when she had asked Abel to make her that solemn promise, it had been only to fill that too-dark hole where the last lies had lived. She had not expected him to keep his vow; she knew better than to hope.
But here he stands and she is not dreaming -- the feel of his breath on her chest is too real -- and she does not know how to stop her tears from falling as his words fill the morning air. She nods in tender reply, wanting to say that of course she came, but can only whisper a soft proclamation that sounds almost like a prayer.
"You kept your promise..."
She couldn't quite bring herself to say that nobody had ever done that before.
A month ago he would have told her not to waste the water. A week ago he might have pretended not to notice at all, the better to assuage his own guilt for whatever part he had in it. But today with the ocean air washing clean his smoke-and-sand scoured lungs he lets himself imagine he is a new man. The kind of man who buys passage on a ship to start a new life. The kind of man who sheds his past of ash and failure, pity and pain. Not a good man (never a good man) - but maybe a better one.
And so he reaches out, touches the velvet of his nose to her cheek where a tear sparkles like a fallen sliver of her horn. As much as he wants to linger there (or maybe be more bold, maybe shift his muzzle to the crook of her throat, shoulder to shoulder, comforting each other like children) he curls his head away, butterfly-shy.
Like Sabine, he does not want to say of course I did. He doesn’t want to say anything at all; the thought of it, of promises kept (and what does he know of that, anyway, with all the good ones he’s made broken like bones and the fulfilled ones black as soot) brings a lump to his throat like charcoal.
“My life is worth very little,” he says instead, quietly, still not daring a look at her, “but I would have rather died than broken that promise.” He does not add that he almost had (you should kill me, his words, each one blackly meant); even thinking of the dragon, of the unicorn-queen, of the prison-turned-to-garden makes a shiver wend down his spine that has nothing to do with the breeze whipping off the open water.
If she knew he was here, if she knew he lingered on her shores, would Isra kill him? She would have the right. And there had been moments, in the past few days, when the sun sank below the line of the water and the world closed dark and cold around him and he didn’t know if Sabine would answer that he had wondered - he had wondered -
But Abel does not want to die today. For once, for as many moments as grace would grant him, he wants to live.
And he wants her to live, too.
The boy turns back to the girl. This time he takes in her sunken, red-rimmed eyes, the dull slats of her ribs, the wispy tangle of her hair. To him she is beautiful. He wonders how long she has been dying. Not in the way that they all had been in the desert, starved and cowed, the orphaned children of Solterra beneath the baleful sun their father, but in a way more intimate than that, and more insidious. The kind of death that comes with indifference.
“Have you seen the docks?” he says, like this noisy place of industry is his palace, and she a visiting princess. He makes his voice eager, keeps his steps light as he guides her gently to the edges of the street, out of the way of passers-by. “There’s an empty slip where otters have been coming to play, and some fool is always feeding birds. And if you don’t mind there’s a stand on the way with the best apple fritters in Denocte - I’m ravenous.” It is a lie, but not one he regrets (though to lie to her at all burns his tongue like a cinder). The truth is that he is worried for the way she looks like a kite slipping its tether, a strip of satin worn threadbare. Something perfect, in need of protection.
(Oh, what a fool he is - he can’t so much as protect his own shadow).
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