Disclaimer: Tamora Pierce owns these characters; I do not.
Nawat has recently discovered drawing.
He's not very talented, Aly is forced to admit to herself, since he has never had much practice. At first he even held the charcoal wrong, so Aly had to correct him, positioning his hands properly around it so the drawings looked more contained and less like lines going every imaginable way.
He draws everything in sight. He draws the crows, and while it is not a direct representation, he captures their wildness and cleverness on paper. He draws his wife, with her hair now reaching her shoulders. He catches the intelligence in her eyes and the pride in the way she carries herself.
Aly notices that he doesn't use color. "Why not?" she asks once.
"Because you can't replicate the real colors of the world," he replies.
So he draws in black and white, never making paintings, always sketches, of the life he leads now and the life he used to lead. Once he put past and present together, by positioning a crow on Aly's hand, eying her necklace, but mostly he draws them separately. It's hard to merge two very different things together.
There is one drawing he's working on now that he doesn't show her. She always teases him about it, wondering how awful it is, but he doesn't relent. He keeps it hidden somewhere, saying he'll show her when he finishes.
When it is finally done he presses the sketch in her hands and leaves the room, leaving her alone with it. She takes a look at the drawing and smiles.
It's them, together. They don't touch, only look at each other, which is somewhat unrealistic for them but it works for the drawing, adds a poignancy that it would otherwise lack. The smiles on their faces are wide and their eyes hint at a kind of knowing, an understanding, the closest anyone can come to really conveying love on paper.
It is, as always, black and white. The shading gives it depth, and Aly realizes that he has put more effort into this drawing than any one he has done before.
It's a sketch, maybe, but if she looks close enough she can find real color in the happiness that her husband put perfectly onto paper.
Author's Note: I wrote this a while ago, but never ended up posting it here for some reason. Enjoy!
