My gift to @coat-the-boneless for the KKC gift exchange! I hope you enjoy it!
There are nights when the wind is silent. On those nights, it hides under the leaves on the ground and behind closed doors. It sits on the stars and drapes across the moon so gently that only the movement of the earth reminds it that it still lives.
Then there are nights like tonight. Tonight, the wind is awake and alive, pulling at tree trunks and sliding through clustered branches. On nights like tonight, the wind is telling its story instead of listening. If you know how to listen, it’ll tell you the most enticing things you’ve ever heard. It’ll pull at your hair and tease your tear ducts. It’ll leave your face flushed and your throat breathless with the words it tears out of it. It will move right through you, push you and pull you until your heart is struggling to lift itself from your chest and fly away with it, leaving the husk of your body behind while it balances on the edge of a breeze. On those nights, I don’t try to call it at all. I think I could, but I like to listen to the stories it tells and the way it moves on its own. The path that is chooses to move through, the things it decides to lift.
When I hear her voice, I’m expecting it.
“Today I brought her a dandelion,” comes the small piping voice. The wind carries it to me, nestles the words into my ear and then calms slowly. I let my arms fall and carefully turn around. The girl’s hands are cupped around the top of a flower, the trimmed stem peaking out from where her palms press together.
“I brought her a feather,” I smile. I reach into my pocket and pull a large duck feather from my cloak. Her eyes widen in delight when she sees it, and she takes another step closer to me.
“We should give her our gifts at the same time,” she says boldly.
She takes her palms and stretches them out towards me. I reach the feather out and lock eyes with her. We don’t count, but I know the moment that her tiny fingers begin to unfold that I can send the feather off.
The wind catches the threads of dandelion and feather, swirling them around us lifting them higher and higher. It reminds me of a tavern, small white tendrils and one large one-moving and lilting with no sense of rhythm. They move with purpose, going in no direction and with no destination. Five steps to the left, a gentle fall towards the ground, then lifting up all on a rush, then dropping again. I let my eyes catch the girl’s, which are sparkling with delight.
“I’ve brought something,” I say carefully.
“That’s good. I’ve brought you something as well,” she muses dreamily. “We need to be patient, until she is done.”
I nod, turning my eyes back to the remaining dandelion tendrils. My feather has disappeared somewhere off the roof, and most of the pieces of the flower are beginning to settle as the wind gently calms.
“She liked our gifts,” the girl whispers. “She doesn’t get very many, you know.”
I do know. So I nod to her, then to in the opposite direction towards the sky. She seems satisfied with this.
“I’ve brought dandelion wine and a secret,” she says seriously.
“It’s at the bottom. It’s a quiet one.” Her eyes are glowing, but there’s a small wrinkle in brows.
“I see,” I say, carefully removing the basket from under my cloak. “That’s quite lovely, thank you.”
“And what have you brought?”
I open the basket to reveal a loaf of bread, a chunk of hard cheese, and an assortment of wild berries. “This basket has many things in it. Bread, cheese, berries, but it has one more thing you can’t see.”
Her eyes light up at that. “What else does it have in it?” She peers into the basket curiously.
I speak slowly, carefully. “A game.”
She looks skeptical. “What kind of game?”
I have a theory. I’ve wanted to test this theory since the first time I saw her, skittering about the roof in her threadbare rags with her hair springing in the wind. I’ve waited to test it, because I wasn’t sure if I would lose the small amount of trust that she’s placed in me since we last saw Kvothe. We’ve moved from one to two words over the span of a glance, to sharing gifts and meals. Now I think there is a chance she will play along, but there is a more likely chance that she will absolutely not.
She stares at me now, then looks to the basket. She gives a quick nod, then begins to divide up the food between us delicately.
We eat in silence and I try to mirror the small bites she is taking, the care and pace she is setting. We pass the bottle of wine back and forth.
When we finish the food, there’s still a bit of wine left. I take a breath, and look at her. Her eyes are set on my patiently, her hands folded in her lap as she waits for my next words.
“To play this game, I’ll point to something. Then you’ll tell me its name. When its your turn, you’ll point to something and then I’ll do the same.”
She nods once, and I smile, plucking something I’ve spotted on the ground near us. It’s a small caterpillar with blue spots and fuzzy spikes. I’m glad I didn’t manage to squish it between clambering up here and laying out my cloak for our picnic. I hold it out to her and it squirms. She blinks once before smiling at me.
“That’s Tallows,” she says easily. I don’t ask her why. That’s not part of the game. She holds out the half empty bottle of wine to me and I take a sip before I see where her other hand is now pointing. There is a spot you can barely see with the dim lighting of the night, but a spot that I know well. It’s a place between three trees where you can sit with you back against one and your feet pushed to the others, and it feels like the trees are carrying the full weight of you.
“Carrion,” I say. She nods at me, then takes her own sip of wine. I point her to the cloak I’ve laid our food out on.
“Oak,” she says quickly, surely. I lift my eyebrows in approval, and she grins. Then she takes a small flower from the pocket of her dress. The petals are bruised and wilting like it has been carried there for a while.
“Dh’olisea,” I say calmly. Her eyes light up and she almost looks like she wants to wrap her arms around me, but she stops quickly, nods once and replaces the flower in her pocket.
“Now I have one more, this is the most important one,” I point my finger at one of the dandelion tendrils, still floating in the wind and moving back and forth on the roof.
Her face darken as she looks at me for what feels like an eternity. But its only a moment. She shuts her eyelids and I hear the word pass through her lips like honey.
The wind lifts all at once, it carries the edges of my cloak and the dust that has settled around us. It lifts our hair and the folds of our clothing and everything is moving up, then abruptly it falls down. I feel the power in it move through me and then all at once, as it was asked- it stops.
“I believe you’ve won the game,” I whisper.
She nods, taking the final sip of the dandelion wine.
“Would you play it again?” I ask.
The wind is completely still around us.
“I’ve found the secret,” she says instead. Her voice isn’t broken or hesitant. It’s bold and knowing, it has a gentle power bolstering it.
“The secret,” she whispers softly-inching closely so I can hear the cadence in her voice. “The secret belongs to the wind. But she liked our gifts, and so she is okay with sharing her secret.”
“That’s very generous of her,” I nod.
“The secret is that the wind is lonely, and that she loves to dance.”
I let my head back and laugh. It’s a deep belly laugh and I know she’s smiling because she knows I’m not laughing at the secret; I’m laughing because its true. I heave myself off the stone and reach my arms out again.
“Then we should dance with her!” I shout. Sleeping babes be damned. I move my arms in time. There’s no motion, and the wind is still against me. I bob my head up and down and sway, my feet moving clumsily in time to an invisible beat. The wind loves to dance.
The girl watches me for a moment, but then she lifts herself up. I see her point a tiny toe out, then retract it. She reaches out a tiny finger, then retracts it. She carries herself with a royal grace, fingers folding and limbs moving in front of her and to the side. I laugh again and let myself dance more, I let the feeling push through me and I lift my feet faster. I’m jumping so much; I don’t notice when the wind starts again. It pushes under my shirt and yanks my arms up before abruptly dropping them down. There is gooseflesh covering the skin there, the hairs standing in a vertical line across my forearm.
The girl is dancing now too, eyes open but glinting with fever and excitement while her limbs float around her. It’s like she is weightless, like the wind is carrying her and holding her while she dances.
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