so we let our shadows fall away like dust
Her smile softens when Djinni laughs. The dapples fade and the grey darkens until it is the much more familiar steel and white that Luster remembers from before. She had forgotten how she had done this when they stood beneath the stars, wearing chestnut and spots like the nearby deer until that, too, had given way to grullo. She cannot help but reach out and touch the darker skin, pressing pale lips and a quiet smile against the soft arch of Djinni’s neck. “Why do you do that?” She asks, soft and in a voice like silver, her eyes wandering gently over the delicate angles of that beautiful face. “Is it to hide?” It should sound like prying from any other lips, but the worry in her brow and the concern in the quirk of those pale lips are enough to soften it.
But then their eyes are back and on that belly, on the gentle swell of life beneath her ribs and Luster’s face is bright again. She knows she is too young to think on these things (too young to think on many of the things she has been in the last several weeks, she realizes with a blush) but it is hard to come from parents like Shahrizai and Ilka, from a family like hers, and not wonder (and hope) if one day she might have one of her own. They are too tethered, too bound, too entwined in all things, too content in their closeness for Luster not to have tucked some fragile hope away in that delicate blue chest for herself.
Goddammit Stillwater.
Suddenly the world is in slow motion, time is still or moving backwards, sound is hazy and disjointed and nothing seems to make any sense. Stillwater? Even his name makes her heart pound, makes her chest heavy and her belly ache with quiet yearning. Stillwater? But why had Djinni named him, had she heard the echo in Lusters thoughts, read that dangerous flicker of hope where it hid in her chest? Impossible.
Her eyes are so dark and so uncertain, round with confusion and hurt and a new ache she cannot name when time finally catches up with her and she remembers how to form words against the soft of her tongue. “Stillwater?” It hurts to say it out loud, feels like glass in her chest, in her throat, in her mouth and she is choking on it. I'm sorry Luster, that's probably not the reaction you were expecting. There is a nose against her neck and she thinks she might have flinched away from it because suddenly it is gone and she has drifted a few steps back.
You'd think a queen and her consort would be happy but...I didn't...I wasn't...we weren't planning on having children.
It is too much and too fast and too hard to make sense of, and when she takes another step back it is to avoid new words, new secrets, new truths that keep spilling from those steel-dark lips. Stop, she wants to say, please, stop. But the words won’t come and it does not matter anyway because she is starting to understand and somehow this feels worse. “He is your consort.” She finally manages, numb, uncertain, wide-eyed and ruined. Softer, and she does not know why she asks, why she needs to hear it again, why the first knife in her heart was not enough, “He is the father?” Of course he is, of course he is. Djinni had already said we. We, weren’t planning.
She is suddenly cold, suddenly shivering against the same wind that lifts her mane from her neck in a spider-web of black and silk. Her teeth chatter quietly, it isn’t all that visible from the outside, but she can feel them tapping together at the back of her mouth, a rhythm to match the ache in her chest, the erratic beating of a heart in its death throes. Her eyes are restless and everywhere – everywhere except Djinni’s face, except that swollen belly that now makes Luster ache inside, makes her dark with something that feels like guilt and shame and, worst of all, envy. But there is nowhere else to look, nowhere else to hide, and those dark eyes slip back and against a face of steel and pewter and wild beauty. “Do you love him?” She asks, closing her eyes to shield herself from what the truth will look like, from what it will feel like when it blinds her. But it matters, this matters.
Because –
I do. She thinks, she aches, she keeps those eyes glued shut. I must, or why would this hurt so much. But she cannot say it out loud, will not say it to the woman he is paired to, the woman who now carries his child. His family. She flinches again and the pain is exquisite, cold fire in her chest and it is burning everything, catching in her veins until even her blood feels like agony beneath her skin. But she will say nothing, show nothing, because she deserves nothing, because she is selfish and foolish and came between a queen and her consort. She can’t even apologize because she isn’t sorry for loving him, because not loving him would be worse. Is worse.
She drifts back again, further, always further, and when her eyes open again they are wild with the hurt that thickens in her throat, darkens her eyes with bruises. This time she can’t look at Djinni, can’t stomach the guilt and the hurt and the confusion that twists so violently in her belly. “I think-“, and she tries to be firm, to be more than she is, but her soft voice shatters out from under her and she trips clumsily over words that should be so simple, “I think maybe I should go.”
