She doesn’t think he realizes it, but she is nearly always watching him, nearly always aware of where her bay king has hidden himself away. Occasionally their children will pull her attention away, occasionally their grandchildren will, too. But even now, even changed and not remembering her, not remembering their life together, she still loves him. It is hard though to remember the man that was, to remember his fire and his passion, the way his eyes burned when he saw her, the easy smiles he kept tucked away just for her. It is hard to remember that man and not miss him. This man is still him, still hers, but every time she catches him watching her with that quiet look, that puzzled furrowing of his dark brow, she cannot help but feel like something had been stolen from her.
How, how had he forgotten her.
Somehow though, between the rain and the thunder and the storms raging through the morning, Malis had lost track of him. She is wild in her fury, a slash of burning indigo swimming from hill to hill, meadow to volcano, until finally, finally she finds him alone beneath a tree. When she reaches him she is heaving, the ridge of each rib like a welt and the hollows between are deeper than valleys. If not for the rain to hide it, to darken her skin and rinse away the salt, she would be damp with sweat, dark across her neck and her shoulders and her haunches.
He forces his head against the thick of the trunk, frustrated, and she is quick to force herself between him, pushing him back with the sinuous blue of a body that is soft only for him. “Killdare.” She says, pushing him back further so that she can shift to face him, so that she can turn his face with the blue of her nose and check for abrasions against that dark, mahogany face. There are a few marks, scuffs where his skin is pink and angry beneath a coat that seems dull and thin, and when she touches her lips to his face, to the lines of bone and the hollows beneath, she is furrowed and wary. “Why were you doing that?” She asks, she scolds, she abandons her lips against his face so that she can duck beneath his neck and settle against a chest that has always seemed to be carved perfectly for her.
Yet –
She frowns and touches her mouth to the point of his shoulder, moves and finds that she can trace the entire bone all the way up to a back that is more hollow than she remembers. Inhaling sharply she moves further around him, finding ribs likes welts and scowling at the valleys between them. It is much the same as curls around his haunches, pressing dark, furious lips to bones that stick out where they shouldn’t – faintly, but enough that her heart is wild and erratic and worried in her chest. “Killdare,” she says, she accuses, her voice as sharp as those emerald eyes, as the points of obsidian horns in a row along her face, “what’s wrong?” She returns to his shoulder, would prefer to be against his chest, but her eyes are like arrows against his dark face. “Why aren’t you eating?”
MALIS
makai x oksana