Solaris put his chains on the floor and climbed up under the little awning. He wasn’t cuffed to anything. He could’ve gathered up the chains and flown away entirely. Something must’ve clicked for him.
I was still wary, but there was a spark of hope, too.
While the color crew tied their horses to the back of the carriage and got inside, I figured out how to get up onto the seat beside Solaris and grabbed the reins. I looked over the horses curiously.
“They seem okay to me, but can you tell when we’ll need to stop next?”
Solaris nodded. “If we’re where I think we are, our next stop should be in about an hour. But we should start heading that way.” He pointed off to the right.
“Were we going in the wrong direction?” I looked around with some alarm. Granted, there wasn’t much to see—lots of crispy fields, some trees that looked ready to become kindling, and distant villages—but we were on a dirt road with clear wheel tracks.
“No, but over there will be a good place to rest.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He was being helpful. I side-eyed him for a moment.
Raising my voice, I asked, “Everyone ready back there?”
“Drive on,” one of them said with a knock on the wall.
Solaris made a gesture that was probably meant to show me how to get the horses to move, but the chains rattled against each other and the wood of the floor, startling them instead. Iended up pulling on the reins to get the horses to stand still again.
“Let’s lose the chains before you start a stampede or something.” I fished the key out of my pocket and handed it to him.
He smiled. I’d figured he would, but it wasn’t theha-ha I winkind of smile I would’ve expected. No, this was a delighted smile that transformed his usually sour expression. For just a moment, Solaris looked really beautiful.
My unease amped up.
I did the sort of flicking gesture with the reins, and the horses got moving at a nice clippity-clop. Now, I had my breeze. I might be sweating just a bit because Solaris was being weird, but the wind washing over me helped with the heat.
After a few minutes, he said, “I’ve been thinking…”
I grunted encouragingly, trying not to hope too much.
“I may have given up on our efforts to break the curse too soon.”
All I did was nod, not sure if speaking would break the moment.
“Everyone was very concerned in the beginning,” he went on. “We tried so many things. Over and over. We brought in the best spellworkers from every discipline. They tried to increase my abilities. They tried to increase their own.”
I could hear the yearning in his voice and could imagine how desperate they’d become with each failed experiment.
“But nothing happened,” he said, his voice deadening. “Nothing ever happened. Over and over.” He sighed. “And then when I started changing physically, it seemed to make everyone despair.”
I got it. I did. I took a chance and said, “Pushing through repeated failures is one of the hardest things anyone can do.”
Now he just nodded and twiddled with the hem of his tunic.
“How long have you been away?”
“A few weeks.”
Well, fuck. That had me feeling like an asshole. I’d assumed he’d?—
“I mean, I stopped trying a couple years ago and came and went, but this last time has been a few weeks.”
And never mind. He’d given up a long time ago. But, maybe it didn’t have to be unforgivable.
