hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She smiles faintly, distantly, when he confirms that the magic of the caves and the magic of the wall are connected. Her eyes return to trace the patterns of morning where they stain the iridescent glaze pink and red and orange like bottled sunshine. She wonders if the magic is old, if it is tied to something or someone, or if it as much a part of the Tundra as the snow and mountains are. Her eyes drift further along the wall, upwards as high as she can see and she wonders if this wall still melts as all ice should, or if the magic has turned it to cold, impervious steel. She supposed it didn’t matter though; nothing would be able to slip inside unnoticed. Even invisible, one would still leave a trail of footprints behind in the layers of snow-crust. She twists, reaching over to touch the soft pink of her tremulous nose to the strong curve of his dark jaw. “Is there other magic?” She asks with a seriousness that disappears almost immediately, shattered to pieces by the impish smile that stretched itself across her shivering lips. “Maybe a fire? A heated cave?”
His words do manage to appease her if only a little, but shadows remain like bruises in the bottoms of those dark eyes when she lifts her face to his. The curve of her nose cups and catches the watery sunlight until those dapples are gleaming and ringed in liquid gold. “I’ve never known physical pain.” She admits, tilting her head uncertainly to one side as her lips reach out the brush the impossible whiteness of the markings carved into the coal-dark of his cheek. And then her mouth drops away from him and the cold slips in to bite the places where his kisses had been just heartbeats before. She hunches a little and shivers, the wiry muscles beneath her sleek dappled bay coat rippling like coiling snakes. Her eyes drop further and further until they are low enough to be tangled in the pink scars that pucker across his chest, breaking up the deep black with their ugly permanence. “These hurt too.” She says touching them, tracing them, and it isn’t a question when it slips from her lips but she wonders anyway. She wonders, too, if he will ever trust her enough to tell her the stories that belong to each scar, for surely they were from more than just accidents, more than just battles won and lost.
But she cannot help the way she drifts from him, the great chasms of distance that fall between them when he wedges that sword of a word, king, against her trembling heart. She drifts and she drifts and her eyes are dark, guarded bruises until he uses his chin draped over her spine to pull her back again. A string of words wrap themselves around her heart and tug her closer still, and she can feel a familiar heat flaring beside the uncertainty brewing in her belly. “Months ago?” She asks, she breathes, she whispers in a voice that trembles like a leaf at the end of its mooring-branch. “You wanted me even then?” She asks again, and her dark eyes are impossibly wide and uncertain. In her chest her heart thumps wildly, feeling suddenly trapped against the cage of her ribs woven carefully around it. “When I was so scared and so broken, at my worst, you saw me and even then, you wanted me?” She shakes her head because she cannot understand, because she knows she does not deserve his affections and yet they’ve found her anyway and she finds she refuses to ever live without them again. He tells her what he sees in this cold, frozen kingdom, in brothers so loyal to one another she is sure they must be of the same blood and bone and broken flesh. He makes her a promise that buries itself within her treacherous, traitorous heart like a beloved blade.
But she speaks again, another brittle question that feels like broken glass spilled from unwilling lips. She lets him pull her close, close so he cannot see the exquisite pain that casts the delicate angles of her brown and white face in heavy shadow. “And what of me, Offspring. What is it that you see in me?”
Isle
