lepis, comtesse of taiga
RUN AND TELL ALL OF THE ANGELS; THIS COULD TAKE ALL NIGHT
i think i need a devil to help me get things right
The creature in front of her wears her husband’s face, speaks with his voice. He has his mannerisms: a clockwise cycling of his left ear when he is in thought, a way of tightening his cheeks in agitation that bring out the boldest features of his face. Lepis has always thought that might be how he will look when they are older and more drawn: when time has pulled away the tightness of youth and left them worn like statutes. Her mind would fill in details, she had imagined, with details and memories of each storm that weathered his face. Storms they had weathered together. Wasted imagining, she berates herself, one more thing to be lost in the ravenous void that her chest has become.
Everything about him is Wolfbane. She knows the satisfied glow that suffuse their children after time spent with him, even though it is a new look on Elio, and one that had grown blurry with Celina. His mind is there, his memories, his habits. He is her husband, she has no doubt, and the blow he lands next elicits a wince no different than a physical blow.
Blame Lilliana? Who does he think she is?
There had been a few times, wayward thoughts, when she had let herself think of suitable demises for the copper mare. A scorpion sting? The bite of a hungry sea creature? A pack of wolves? There were plenty of possibilities. And yet the guilt had always driven them away in the end. Each time, she forced herself to reorient, to refocus, to remember who she is. It is not Lilliana to blame. The chestnut mare has disappointed her, but no more. The removal of trust had stung, but there had not been time to bury their budding friendship deep enough that Lepis suffers more than that. Once, on a lonely night, she’d even let herself admire the younger woman – Lepis is not sure she would have been able to deflect so easily in Lilliana’s position. It’s a skill to be valued in the career that the other woman had chosen, and Lepis ca even admit that to herself.
But blame her?
When she can look back at him, at the man who defends his mistress even after words like that from his wife, he is speaking again. The way her face sets, firm and frowning, is not for what he says now, though the words do not seem to affect her beyond deeper etching in the scowl. Wolfbane surely knows that Lepis would not blame Lilliana, and never when he was standing in front of her, a target so large he practically glows.
He is trying to hurt her, she realizes.
She’d been right after all, those spears she’d flung about not loving her anymore striking true.
The creature in front of her is not her husband after all.
She has always known that growth is a lifelong process, and yet since the moment she loved him, Lepis has never imagined that the way they would grow was apart.
“You left me!” She means to say. Instead the words are a whisper, far more question than accusation, as though she cannot be certain it had really happened. She adjusts the phrase. “Wolfbane left me.” That feels more accurate. “left us.”
Whoever this is, with Wolfbane’s eyes and mouth and memories, this is not the man she married. Ignorant of the curse that shadows his veins and most of the ways of magic, Lepis knows only what is in front her: a man who has changed so much in this year apart that he no longer loves her.
“The only father Elio really knows is the man in the stories I told him.” She says, and though Lepis knows the words could have just as easily been a barb, she does not treat them as such, not with the shadow of sadness in her voice when she says it. “I think it would be better for him if it stays that way. I think you know that, somewhere inside. The man I married knows that.” (If she had seen him with the children, she could not have said that, not and think it true.) Those words would wound her husband to the core, but this is not her husband.
Her hard blue eyes are no match for the darkness and her soft voice is muffled by the creak of trees overhead. Lepis takes a step forward, for that reason and no other. It is just then that her mortal eyes find the glittering tracks along his face, just then that the faint scent of salt she had thought the sea becomes obvious as not the sea at all. In an eyeblink she is close enough to force his head up with the bridge of her nose, and to turn his face this way and that with the hard silk edges of her partially unfurled wings. Her touch is not rough, but nor is it tender. Clinical, almost, like the way she looks from one olive-rimmed hazel eye to the other. It is not Lepis’ intent to scrutinize his tears and one some level she knows that on Wolfbane’s face they would have shattered her.
Rather, she is looking for something, or perhaps even the lack of something.
“Tell my husband something,” she says to the man in front of her, whose face she holds in her hands, “Tell him that I’m sorry. That I am sorry for what I said, sorry for what I did, and even sorrier for what I thought.” There are tears on her own face, but she doesn’t feel them anymore, except as the wind catches the already raw edges. Lepis breaks a promise she has made to herself, and projects without asking. “And give him this. Tell him this is how I feel.” There is no outward sign of what she does – though perhaps the wind does blow a little harder, or maybe that is just her imagination.
She is two weeks out of practice, but her mind is as much a muscle as any other, and the projection settle easily. She weaves it small, tucks it somewhere in the back of his mind. A tight bead of emotion that he can always find, an intangible touch of magic that she had not even known she had the power to wield. (And she doesn’t, not really; the wind picking up had not been her imagination. There are other powers at play here). The man that isn’t her husband will feel it now, and at first the jagged edge of pain will overwhelm him as it does her. As agonizing as it is brief, pain fades to sorrow. That becomes joy that seeing him always brought her, or the way he had always made her feel valued and cherished yet always free. Then is the attraction that has given them seven children that could have been seven thousand, and the tenderness and pride she knew when seeing him with them. And though she doesn’t mean to add it, the taint of sorrow returns, clinging even as the rest of them are gone, fading out until it is thinner than spider silk and then gone entirely.
Breathless from the invisible exertion, her words are tight when she speaks another command. “Tell him that I never mean to feel any of it again. Never.” A list detailing each thing he has taken from her would have been kinder, but Lepis is not feeling find anymore. She is not feeling much of anything at all. “And tell him that it’s his fault.”
@[Wolfbane] hi did you order a novel? |
