In the Night Garden

And the girl, his girl, looked at him for a very long time, as still and strange as she had ever been, her dark eyes showing stark in the first pale light that tipped the trees like snow. She stood there, her hand clasped tight in Solace’s painted hand, a Djinn at her shoulder, a Firebird at her back, a spider at her feet, and an old grandmother with her hand resting on her shoulder. He wanted to run to her, but he dared not. He did not belong; he knew he did not belong with them. He would be sent back to the Palace to sit alone on a hard throne. But as the sun rose up like a pearl in the winter sky, Sorrow looked at the boy, her boy, and smiled, her eyes bright as feathers.

“Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me the tale of how we met when we were children, how we walked in a Garden and you were not afraid of me, and how we went into the world, and learned even more strange and wonderful things than we could have guessed at when our walls were made of flowers. Tell me a tale I have never heard, with a boy and a girl in it, and a long, wide road.”

Sorrow held out her pale, thin hand, shining in the morning like a promise.

The boy looked back over his shoulder, at the Palace, but only once. He laced his fingers into hers.

As they walked into the wood, Lantern sang out the morning bells. Behind them, in the golden light of a scalding sun, a purple bracelet slowly sank into the snow.