Post by max on Sept 6, 2013 14:31:56 GMT 10
Title: A Thousand Flowers
Rating: PG
MPP: #73 (Forgiven, not forgotten)
Summary: What lingers might be what counts. Sandry's pov.
Notes: Part three of In a Temperate Climate, you should read parts one and two before this. The first bit is from a poem by Sue Hubbard. The title is from a Portishead song.
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.
The truth is, she doesn’t forget whatever passed between them the night of their homecoming dinner. How he had held her hands. How he had made her promises – which look, in the wan light of day, like things they were not. Life has bred her sensible. She knows these things.
Still.
‘And this twist you do with your foot, they don’t do it in the other villages – Osa’s great-uncle told me that it came about because... two hundred years ago? Sea-raiders came up through the hills. But they prayed and Runog sent them a mist and – well, the soil up there is chalky and the pirates couldn’t see the rocks... and I don’t know what I could do with it yet but I can feel something in it! And I will figure out what it is.’
She nods and takes a sip of her tisane because it is easiest. ‘You will.’
It had felt as though Emelan had been made afresh for them that autumn, bright and new in its cloak of gold and ochre and the leaves falling from the vines and fields grown ripe with wheat. For one whole week Gorse had fed all of Winding Circle on richly stuffed dolmas and she had felt as drunk on the olive-drizzled fare as she had felt the nights the wind had blown the harvest music down from the high country to the sea to wake her into a listening, and a wistfulness. For two weeks, Yazmin had taken her students up into the hills, there to learn the dances in exchange for the extra hands they could provide during the day and Pasco had been nowhere, saying “If you’re going to learn their forms, you will learn what they mean,” in his high, husky imitation of Yazmin – only to return to the city tanned to a deeper walnut brown, eyes simmering with honey-coloured secrets.
Winter is tangible now; a pale stinging in the air and a surging in the ocean that Tris has taught her to attribute to the shift of the Pebbled Sea’s warm currents against her colder ones. This is why she is in her study at all by the pop and murmur of a brazier, wrapped in the blanket she had woven herself the year her siblings had left her while she goes through Toren accounts and Pasco tells her of the crop he had harvested from the traditions of the valleys.
It has nearly been five years since she first saw him dance, and he is the only mage of his kind. There is little left for her to teach him – but she had been his first teacher, the first person to ever see his power – and so he had come to the citadel (ostensibly looking for Yazmin) and wandered up to find her almost as soon as they’d returned.
‘The women snap their fingers on the arrests, too...’ An afterthought. He knows she does not strictly care for dancing as she knows he does not care for thread or cloth, but when her family had left her, when she had left Winding Circle, he had been the only friend with whom she could talk magic. For four years – as long, she abruptly realises, as I had had the others – this had been their accord.
‘I’m sorry about the dinner.’
For a split second, she startles him – she sees it in the way his eyes open, properly, while regret at the impulsive words breaks over her unbearable. The brazier snarls and crackles in its own tongue as if to complement the fire now flooding her skin to a Tris-worthy blush – then he waves his hand and says, ‘You don’t have to keep apologising,’ before taking clasp of her fingers in his own.
The movement is impossibly graceful because grace is what his magic is. One of the spells he can’t help but operate when his power pools in his every motion and she feels reassured in spite of herself.
But he needs no clarification for what she is apologising for, and this stands for so much more.
She tucks her fingers into his hold and forces him to meet her eyes. ‘I mean it. You aren’t my brother or sister, but you mean just as much to me as if you were. And I don’t mean for that to change just because we – they’re back.’
He eyes her strangely, and she waits for the question or argument brimming on his mouth like dew – but then he sighs, swallowing down whatever protest he was going to make.
‘I know you don’t.’
But only after he leaves her does she realise he hadn’t meant it in the way she had inferred.
At the time there are only these things: a sense of relief. Salt spray against the window. His hand, tightening imperceptibly around her own.
Rating: PG
MPP: #73 (Forgiven, not forgotten)
Summary: What lingers might be what counts. Sandry's pov.
Notes: Part three of In a Temperate Climate, you should read parts one and two before this. The first bit is from a poem by Sue Hubbard. The title is from a Portishead song.
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.
The truth is, she doesn’t forget whatever passed between them the night of their homecoming dinner. How he had held her hands. How he had made her promises – which look, in the wan light of day, like things they were not. Life has bred her sensible. She knows these things.
Still.
‘And this twist you do with your foot, they don’t do it in the other villages – Osa’s great-uncle told me that it came about because... two hundred years ago? Sea-raiders came up through the hills. But they prayed and Runog sent them a mist and – well, the soil up there is chalky and the pirates couldn’t see the rocks... and I don’t know what I could do with it yet but I can feel something in it! And I will figure out what it is.’
She nods and takes a sip of her tisane because it is easiest. ‘You will.’
It had felt as though Emelan had been made afresh for them that autumn, bright and new in its cloak of gold and ochre and the leaves falling from the vines and fields grown ripe with wheat. For one whole week Gorse had fed all of Winding Circle on richly stuffed dolmas and she had felt as drunk on the olive-drizzled fare as she had felt the nights the wind had blown the harvest music down from the high country to the sea to wake her into a listening, and a wistfulness. For two weeks, Yazmin had taken her students up into the hills, there to learn the dances in exchange for the extra hands they could provide during the day and Pasco had been nowhere, saying “If you’re going to learn their forms, you will learn what they mean,” in his high, husky imitation of Yazmin – only to return to the city tanned to a deeper walnut brown, eyes simmering with honey-coloured secrets.
Winter is tangible now; a pale stinging in the air and a surging in the ocean that Tris has taught her to attribute to the shift of the Pebbled Sea’s warm currents against her colder ones. This is why she is in her study at all by the pop and murmur of a brazier, wrapped in the blanket she had woven herself the year her siblings had left her while she goes through Toren accounts and Pasco tells her of the crop he had harvested from the traditions of the valleys.
It has nearly been five years since she first saw him dance, and he is the only mage of his kind. There is little left for her to teach him – but she had been his first teacher, the first person to ever see his power – and so he had come to the citadel (ostensibly looking for Yazmin) and wandered up to find her almost as soon as they’d returned.
‘The women snap their fingers on the arrests, too...’ An afterthought. He knows she does not strictly care for dancing as she knows he does not care for thread or cloth, but when her family had left her, when she had left Winding Circle, he had been the only friend with whom she could talk magic. For four years – as long, she abruptly realises, as I had had the others – this had been their accord.
‘I’m sorry about the dinner.’
For a split second, she startles him – she sees it in the way his eyes open, properly, while regret at the impulsive words breaks over her unbearable. The brazier snarls and crackles in its own tongue as if to complement the fire now flooding her skin to a Tris-worthy blush – then he waves his hand and says, ‘You don’t have to keep apologising,’ before taking clasp of her fingers in his own.
The movement is impossibly graceful because grace is what his magic is. One of the spells he can’t help but operate when his power pools in his every motion and she feels reassured in spite of herself.
But he needs no clarification for what she is apologising for, and this stands for so much more.
She tucks her fingers into his hold and forces him to meet her eyes. ‘I mean it. You aren’t my brother or sister, but you mean just as much to me as if you were. And I don’t mean for that to change just because we – they’re back.’
He eyes her strangely, and she waits for the question or argument brimming on his mouth like dew – but then he sighs, swallowing down whatever protest he was going to make.
‘I know you don’t.’
But only after he leaves her does she realise he hadn’t meant it in the way she had inferred.
At the time there are only these things: a sense of relief. Salt spray against the window. His hand, tightening imperceptibly around her own.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!