Characters/Ship: Wyatt/DG/Glitch, and Raw might be about sometimes, but it's primarily C/D/G
Summary: Early autumn brings DG and Glitch to Wyatt's strange little house, blessed with a romantic history and a magical little orchard. As the three friends prepare for the annual harvest festival, they find the twisted and bitter fruits of their friendship might be salvageable if they can hold on to each other.
Note: Takes place after "Lilies to Tread." ... The same as it appeared when first written in 2008, although all these years later I'd like to edit it, but I won't.
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1.
As the Crow Flies
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It had been quite a long while since DG stooped neck and shoulders over a piece of luggage. One piece of luggage, that was all she needed, from corner to corner, as long as the flap latched, one piece of luggage was all she needed. Twenty minutes before, the mess of clothes atop the bed were in neat stacks. Sifting through them while on the prowl for a particular blouse, and then tossing an article from the carpet confines, and doing this far too often, brought swift disorder. She knew where everything was. She knew what was in the bag. Whatever was left behind would not be without her for too long.
She hardly ever got away. She hardly ever got a chance.
She hardly ever wanted to.
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In the first year of her return, she'd learned the seasons. She spent long hours on the patios or in the gardens of all her family's homes. The change was not so much visual as it was an internal whisper, a congruent sense of time within the realm and within herself. The first time she felt that connection, tears dropped from her eyes; she was herself, brought to herself, brought home from a place none had wanted her to be.
And this late September of her second year, the intuition caressed internally, and the right moment came to announce to Mother and Dad that she was leaving the Northern Island for Finaqua, and would see them at the waters anon. Mother wrote to her daughter a few days later, and in print described the newly fallen snow, the blaze of the white of the mountains against the brilliance of the sky, but DG was not sorry she had missed it. Snow rarely fell in Kansas, she recalled the cold fluff of one frozen winter's day, and recalled it without fondness. The Northern Palace was equinoctial. Finaqua was solstitial.
Finaqua bestowed blessings of temperate silence and whispering rain. The staff were quiet mice who ducked into their mouse holes whenever she walked by, who bowed and obeyed without a twitch of whisker and scampered off joyfully as if to play. They were barely known by face, very few of them by name; rather she knew their identities through their tattles, their tails, the work they did. They were busier than ever: the palace had to be readied for enclosing date of the Queen's arrival.
DG kept busy herself, but it was not for far and distant travel that she had emptied wardrobes and chosen the plainest clothes. Finaqua was lonely, of lowlands and shallow crevices of water, of wispy grasses and a faraway gloom on the sides of drowsy mountains. All the wildlife in the surrounding landscape could not soothe the eagerness to be with her friends again.
By eleven in the morning, an unaccountable weekday like so many others, she and the carpetbag were fast friends. Side by side they sat on a stone bench carved with grapes and vines of a fictitious size. The leaves of deciduous trees, she had learned their names by now, were dusty at the edges in all the typical colours of an autumn gradually descending. Against the muddy service road, from barns to kitchens and to the nearest town beyond the fens, the reverberation of a vehicle propped her to booted feet, and the carpetbag went with her. There was no family to say goodbye to, no quick and painless farewell ripped from her like an adhesive bandage. Only a glance over the shoulder, a twinkle of an eye, the upward tilt of a mouth suggesting unsaid words of departure glee and no sketch of remorse.
She knew the driver, and he knew her, but he was business and it showed. In the back of the car, the fresh air coming in through cracked windows and ceiling, perfumed a bit by the tiny herbal buds tucked in vases beside the ceiling handles, DG gave what concentration she could to maps and articles and the outlines of nature essays she planned to pen, "oh someday". The run of trees turned more to pine and less to leaves, and the air dried as elevation was breached. She knew the road, knew its master Persephone, perpetual spring, where dragonflies always flew and birdsong reigned.
A crimson gash bloomed from the trunks and the green. It bobbed in time, with ebony steps, atop an obsidian tangle, and led itself into the dusty verge as the tires crackled pebbles in approach. DG did not have to ask the driver to halt: it was done. The door swung outward with a push of an arm, smiles exchanged, and quiet greetings given. The driver blessed the boot with two more light bags, and he manoeuvred slowly, slow enough for the exchange of an embrace in the backseat, for the touch of mouths and the twisting of fingers about each other. Glitch said a few words about the condition of the road he'd travelled, how pleasant a morning it had been when he'd left the palace. He pinched her chin and congratulated her on the expertise with which she had developed the plan, and kissed her again because she hadn't forgotten her last piece of luggage, him, waiting in the spray of asters and goldenrod along the side of the road. They hadn't wanted to be seen leaving the palace together. The palace mice talked, he said, and the less they talked about Master Ambrose and Princess DG, the smoother the household flowed, and the more they pretended their secret was safe from the world. But after two years of love in the shadows, the rules were known well, and flawlessly dispensed.
This was the first holiday they had ever planned to take together. To the chagrin of the one they visited, it had taken them three weeks to coordinate the schemes, and only twenty minutes of packing, two hours of walking, a half-hour of driving, to execute it. Wyatt had wanted them as guests nearly a month before, yet assured them, in his last hastily-written note, that the date was always open: Come when you can.
Glitch tilted forward to hand a primitive map to the driver. He leaned back and cuddled an arm around DG's shoulders, her hand at his knee. She remembered the map, half in photographic memory, half in ideal, the line through the mountains, drawn straight when she knew there would be squiggles, to an "O" and an "X", one being Wyatt's village, one being Wyatt's house.
It's fifteen spans, so Wyatt penned in one map corner, from the palace, as the crow flies.
DG decided crows fly swift and hale.