Like a Metaphor
By: Amber Michelle

09.08.10: Tiny correction made *cough cough* something about the sun rising in the west. Hahaha, whoops.

…

Naesala avoided Begnion's capitol at night, contrary to what his critics liked to think when they listed his flaws; parties, drink, and noblewomen weren't actually his thing, and if he happened to catch a signal light out of the corner of his eye, well- he couldn't pretend not to see it unless he wanted to go home and find ten cases of the plague as greeting because he broke some stupid pact. A pact, he would add one day when someone asked (because surely someone would) - a pact he hadn't even signed. He'd given up trying to figure out what made a blood pact sound like a good idea. Never mind what kind of delusion would make a guy like Lekain Senior, predecessor to the slimy bastard holding the name now, look remotely trustworthy. Greater minds than his should tackle that one, he said to Nealuchi - or sharper eyes, not that there were many who qualified.

But even the average raven could fly the skies over Sienne at night, and see everything lit up below him - the cathedral with its ever-burning lamps at its doors and tower windows, the mansions of the senatorial elite, the university and library, the playhouse, the white streets all lit up by iron lamp posts - and Naesala's business thrived because of it. Beorc didn't look up when they walked; the palace guard aimed their bows at the ground, or at windows- usually not at the blank, smoky brown of the sky unless they were expecting him. He passed over the wall, banked around a minaret, dove into the cluster of maples butting up against the north side of the imperial residence, and nobody batted an eyelash. The scent of gardenias greeted him when he slid from raven form to human on the balustrade of the empress's balcony and folded his wings to jump down between the granite columns.

Her doors snapped open before the clomp of his boots had time to echo, revealing the silhouette of a girl in white and silver armor with a hand on her sword. Naesala tensed, ready to leap back over the rail, spread his wings.

"Oh." Sigrun might've rolled her eyes; she liked doing that around him. Her hand dropped to her side and she swung the other door open. "You."

"Me," Naesala repeated, patting his hair to make sure it was in place, folding his wings against his shoulders so he would fit through the doorway. "Here on business, don't worry. I'll be out before her bedtime."

Her sharp sigh ruffled the tiny feathers on the arch of his wing, and the blast of warm air when he entered, after so long flying in the cold, was like a hot, dry blanket thrown over his face. A dozen crystal lamps illuminated the imperial chambers, a fire blazed in the hearth, mirrors above the mantelpiece and between the bookshelves shined it back at him like little suns and made the dark yellow and red of her decor feel like daytime. The empress, seated in a large chair by the fire, legs kicking back and forth above the ground, threw her slim shoulders back and straightened up as soon as he announced himself and made his mockery of a bow.

"You said eight." Her pert little mouth turned down in a frown.

"It's only three past," he said, squeezing his wings between the sofa and a table. His passage ruffled some flowers and made a vase rattle; he smelled roses. "And if Sephiran wants to take a shot at me, being on time isn't going to help, you know."

Sanaki grabbed fistfuls of her ballooned pants and squeezed them between her knees. "Sephiran says punctuality is the sign of a virtuous and hard-working individual- of which you are neither."

Naesala snorted and gave in enough to laugh. "Didn't do him a whole hell of a lot of good in the vote today, did it?" Five votes to two putting down laguz rights to own property- and that was just the senior senators. He didn't know the numbers for the lower senate and didn't care; he didn't live in this country, and anyone who wanted to pick up and migrate to Kilvas - any laguz - was welcome to try. "He should've known better - they're not gonna pass a motion if it means they have to give property back to the sub-humans."

"Shut up, Kilvas."

Already picking up on her beloved minister's mannerisms- what was she, six, seven? He ducked his head to catch her eye when she looked away. Her blunt-cut bangs lay thick over her forehead and shaded her eyes. "I though we were here to do business? Sigrun's looking frowny-faced over there, so it must be time to-"

"You can just sit there and wait until I finish thinking," Sanaki said, jerking her chin away to stare at the fire. Her dark hair swayed over her ears - small round ones, like shells, too short to flick like he would if she were a raven child. "Unless you don't want my gold, that is."

She was like one of his own, sometimes - hiding in Sephiran's shadow at parties, her golden eyes flicking back and forth between adults while they talked about things supposedly beyond her understanding, shining, calculating. When she threw a shoe at Culbert, she timed it so he would trip; when others asked for favors, even her lovely Sephiran, she always extracted payment in return. Lekain would ask her opinion at council, and she would kick her legs back and forth like she did just now and say she hadn't been listening because there was a pretty bird outside- and someone had better go to capture it before it flew away.

Times like that, Naesala actually considered doing her a favor or two for free.

He hooked his foot around the leg of her ottoman, pulled it an appropriate distance away, and sat down. The bulky shape of his wings rubbed up against another chair, but he didn't feel like getting up again to move it. Instead he watched the halo of firelight crowning her hair and picked at his cuticles with a nail. "Did your Sephiran come up for supper?"

Her silence answered the question, but he waited like a good raven for the child-empress to shake her head.

He looked at Sigrun, who was still stationed at the balcony doors, and she raised both eyebrows. Get on with it. Naesala widened his wings so the shadow would get Sanaki's attention. "You want to cheer him up, is that it?"

Sanaki's legs thumped against her chair and went still. She dipped her head. "I thought maybe chocolate," she said, mumbling, her fingers still working her silk pants. "But he doesn't like it that much, and he doesn't care about jewelry, he's so picky about books..."

'Picky' was a good word for him - pedantic, pretty, picky. "Kiwi," Naesala said, thinking of Rafiel, bright green fruit, and lectures on propriety.

His answer tricked the empress into looking up. "Fruit? How blasé."

"No, no-" He leaned in on his elbows. "Sephiran prefers fruit to candy, your majesty, especially the tart ones, and your plantations don't grow much of that - he dropped a large sum of gold in my pocket last year to bring a crate of oranges, and Kilvas is the only island near Tellius that grows pineapples, which he loves." Naesala grinned, steepling his fingers together between them. "One thousand gold, and his table will be overflowing with all of his favorites."

Sigrun yanked the doors shut. Their glass panes rattled. "That's obscene, King Kilvas. Duke Tanas quoted much lower prices when he recommended you last time."

"Tanas has boats, lady. Who do you think is gonna carry this to Sephiran's doorstep?"

"It's okay, Sigrun." Sanaki sat up straighter, tucked the ends of her heavy red robe between her knees. She sat like a queen, then, almost regal, except that she had to stretch her arms too far to drape them over the arm rests. "I don't mind the money. What I want to know is how long this will take, and how fresh this gift will be when it finally gets here."

Naesala cracked his knuckles one finger at a time, ticking the possibilities off in his head. "Within the week. Pineapples and kiwifruit take about that to ripen if you pick them right."

"A whole week? But-"

"It's a thousand leagues, empress. I should be charging you both ways."

Her frown was dark because of the shadow cast by the fire. The heat licked at the ends of his feathers, warming the left side of his leather coat while the other stayed cool. "Fine. Within the week. Pineapple and kiwi, and strawberries, both fresh and dried varieties."

"That'll cost you extra," Naesala said, bracing against his knees to rise.

She flipped her little hand in the air, dismissive. "Sigrun, give him half now. The rest will be paid on delivery."

Her knight's frown was slighter and more fleeting, a brief shadow, and it wasn't the fire; Sigrun pulled a velvet pouch from behind her breastplate, let it dangle by the strings until he snatched it. Gold clinked and clanked inside, warm from its nesting place. He smiled, and his lips creased wider when her eyes narrowed.

"Kilvas."

He turned around, cramping his wings against his back to avoid hitting the table and its vase, or Sigrun, who would probably try to cut them off on the pretext. "Yeah?"

Sanaki was still looking at the ottoman, her hands still on the rests of her chair, but her arms drooping. "Why do they hate laguz so much?"

There was no reason to ask who 'they' were; if their discussion hadn't been about senators, the word could have applied to anybody on Tellius, maybe everybody - every beorc, in any case. Naesala opened his mouth, closed it again, felt the heat of her rooms as a weight, a pressure, like a blanket trying to bind him, his wings to his back and his arms to his sides, his mouth shut. Why did she have to go and ask that? Easier topics had been broached before, like what did the duke mean when he referred to 'getting into Lord Sephiran's pants'? For what? when she was five, or what were you doing at Culbert's manor last night? just the other day, or his favorite: are you teasing my prime minister because you like him? because that's what Sigrun said he was doing-

"Sephiran tells me they're envious of your abilities, so they want to lay you low." Sanaki looked like a doll in her big chair, her legs still and limp, her wrists tied to the sides, her head drooping as if a string had been dropped. "Sigrun says your wings bother them, or tails, or the ears." She twisted her neck to see him, eyes gleaming in the lamplight like gold coins. "I don't understand."

Those were sound reasons, he could have told her. He'd heard the same speculated before. Human nature was like that, inclined to want things it couldn't have, and his business - selling escort service, delicacies, his talons, himself - he thrived because of it. Naesala remembered when laguz were still slaves in Begnion; he remembered going to Serenes to see his favorite royals, and hearing that Prince Rafiel had disappeared- there was blood on the leaves where he was last seen, and footprints, a strand of his hair caught on a thorn and snatched from his pretty head.

Rafiel.

"I don't know," Naesala said. He didn't recognize his own voice. It echoed in his ears, caught somewhere down near the hollow that burrowed in his chest whenever he thought of Rafiel's long white wings tangled in nets, crushed into a cage. "Maybe the goddess hates us." Or maybe the goddess was just a myth - which was a discussion the little empress was too young to have. "Anyway-"

"Ashera loves all of her children, Kilvas. Sephiran said that's why it grieves her so much to see us fight."

Her dark, feathery brows drew together. He tried to modulate his voice to a reasonable volume. "Yeah, well. Sephiran is wrong about a lot of things." Naesala turned around again and stalked to the doors. Their paddle handles rattled when he shoved them open. "Remember that."

"Wait!" She dropped to the floor and her feet thumped across the room, slapping onto the stone balcony after him. "He's not wrong!"

Of course not. That was why the goddess let her children die in chains that weren't so metaphorical for five hundred years, why she let her supposed representatives manipulate other nations with their stupid blood pacts, why she let a defenseless heron prince die for some senator's pleasure-

"I like you!" Sanaki's voice went shrill at the end, and she took a deep breath when he stopped, gathering her nerve. "I like you, Kilvas. Your wings, and-"

Naesala angled his wing aside, looked over his shoulder. Her fingers had woven together and clenched tight, and she stared at them, unaware of his gaze. Night made her a tiny shadow against the blaze of the doorway, like a metaphor.

He hated metaphors. "How much do you like me?"

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see the glint of hers, lit by the ambient glow of the sky and the huge yellow crescent of the moon behind him. Her head lifted a fraction, her brows, her lashes, her gaze, peeking from beneath her bangs. "Two thousand extra?"

His snort turned into a laugh that startled him when it bounced back from the walls in echo. "Sure." Naesala's shoulders shook, and his wings until he stretched them out and flapped to release the tension. Her gardenias swayed and drowned him in perfume. "Deal. See you in a week."

She opened her mouth again. He leaped onto the rail and shoved off before she could ask another question, or worse, say something nice. His wings caught an updraft and lifted him into the hazy sky. Kids didn't lie about stuff like that, but Sanaki wouldn't be a child forever; she would grow up so much faster than he did, learn how her people did business, lose that cute open-mindedness of hers that let her say she liked laguz, and Naesala, and his wings, as things other than trophies. She would stop talking about the tragedy of Serenes and start calling it that regrettable incident- you know, the one where an entire clan of innocent, defenseless human beings were slaughtered and burned and looted because a hint of a rumor of an announcement said they should be.

She would lose it. Or she wouldn't, and this sinkhole of sin would swallow her like it did Rafiel and so many others.

Rafiel.

Why did the beorc hate laguz?

Why did the moon hang in the sky? Why did the sun rise in the east? Not even the goddess knew.