we are slaves to the sirens of the salty sea
Evia has not always been great at picking up the nuances of conversation. It is not so much a limitation of intelligence that causes it, but rather the strangeness of her upbringing. The moments that were meant to sharpen such understanding blunted by the quickness of her forming, the rushed aging process. The fact that she been sheltered away from the rest of the world since then has only served to hamper it further.
So she does not immediately pick up on what he is asking.
Instead she angles her painfully beautiful face to the side, a frown plucking at the edges of soft lips as she thinks about the question. “To itself, certainly,” she finally answers, all silver bells. She can’t imagine that a child would belong to anything else, even in a life where she had become so close to property herself. She muses and looks back to the river, to the pull and push of the current against the banks.
“If it is anything like my other children, then the water.”
This softens her expression as she continues to stare into the rippling surface—to think about the things that she loves beyond it. Would Jamie recognize such things? Would he know what it is like to dance around the coral or swim amongst the otters? Would her aquatic world feel as foreign to him as he to her?
She draws back to him though, feeling that strange gravity, and her silver eyes brighten with just a touch of understanding as the question settles further into her subconscious. The darkness of him reaches out to her and she leans a check against it, feeling her scaled sides shiver in delight at the ghostly touch of him.
“Do you mean who its father is?”
There is a pause as she tries to find the words—as she thinks of how to explain it.
“Ivar,” she finally goes with the simplest answer. “He is the father of all my children.”
