Eventually the day began to fade into evening, and Lucina convinced him to join her outside to watch the stars blink open before she was unable to enjoy the night. He liked watching her, bathed in the powdery light of the celestial bodies, because she was so peaceful, about to drift into sleep but just perceptive enough to marvel at the nocturnal heavens and be just as awed by its majesty as he was. They were equals under the darkened sky, side by side in the minuscule little woods. He felt as if they belonged, him to her and her to him.
"They say the stars are the souls of people who have passed," Lucina murmured, her voice a bit rough as if she were speaking with the throat of the wolf. "But when my grandfather died, we all questioned the truth of that."
"Poetic." Priam scratched his chin and frowned at the sky through the trees. "I've never heard anything about the stars, but I once heard that the trees were spirits."
"I could tell you that legend. And there are more spirits in the water, too." She glanced sideways at him, her smile knowing and smug and just a bit condescending, he thought. "What stories do you know about the tree spirits?"
"I don't know any stories. It was just something my father told me when he taught me to chop wood." He muttered halfheartedly to himself and laid back so that the grass was his bed. The blades rubbed what skin he had left exposed in an irritating and uncomfortable manner, as if exploiting his powerlessness, and he thought ever more of Lucina. Now that she had learned he would submit to her hands she wielded the hegemony of the household. Once he had been alone, isolated, but then he had been a king. When he lived with such liberty, he bowed to nothing but the elements, and even then he liked to imagine that it was by free will that he chose to remain indoors when it snowed; the kingdom had consisted of him and no one else, but he had been its god. Now, with this woman who could read his early years through the slope of his shoulders, the population had doubled and received a new deity, and she was every bit as malevolent as she was magnanimous, he determined. If a storm ever came again, she would personally escort him to the sky to banish it, but then abandon him as the lightning rolled in. And yet, even as she wrested command and masculinity from his very grasp, his heart swelled to know he had nurtured her into this state of sudden power. He had found her a dying beast, and from it tempered a sorceress, a queen worthy to ascend into the stars. The thought was selfish and bold, but its truth could not be denied. He had crafted something from her.
"We could use some more materials for blankets," she commented suddenly, much softer than before. "So that I can have a place to sleep when I am a wolf, and you can take back your own bed."
"It is rude of me to sleep in a bed while my guest uses the floor," he argued. Adjusting to match her tone was not an instinctive skill for him as of yet. "I have no issues with the floor."
"Except that autumn has descended and you get cold easily," she reminded him as she tugged at the thick sleeve of the shirt across her slender arms. "You take the bed. I have thicker skin."
"I do not like what you are implying."
"I know, but I do not mean any insult." Suddenly she jerked her chin upward and her eyes filled with celestial light as a shooting star skated across the glassy sky. Something deep within her had taken hold, a primal reaction as elusive as her transformation, and he sat back up to observe in wonder. How could he remedy the situation, or did she even require aid? When her lips parted, it was deliberate, the opening of a young rose into the sunlight for the first time, and her voice was preternatural, "A soul just abandoned its post. Where would it have gone?"
"To be reborn?" he suggested, utterly baffled by her in every way. "You are the expert on stars. What does it mean?"
"Perhaps," she began ponderously, "it is a sign that something that once seemed eternal is now different? Or something will come to pass, something altering."
He could comprehend both, given the circumstances of his lodgings and the unwelcome tug in his chest, but he believed it could only be an omen for the future. That unknown event would haunt him until he could finally understand it in a visual, tactile way, but when it came to this gray existence between the light of pure life and the black of ultimate death, nothing was tangible.
To save himself the terrible stirrings that arose when she spoke in that magnificent whisper, he quickly determined a new topic. "I can make a trip into town tomorrow, for those blankets, but we will have to sell some of what we have a caught recently. We can rebuild the complete stockpile after."
"I..." From the way she pinched and prodded at the dainty flesh of her arms, he could tell that her metamorphosis would come at any moment, but he hoped this last topic would ease her mind as she changed. "I like that. We can hunt again together, at least for a little." She inhaled sharply and her eyes were then eclipsed by the waning moon, so he placed a hand on her shoulder and only listened to her with a portion of his usual attention. "When we had no reason to hunt... I was afraid we were going to lose our one means of connection. But it seems this still unites us. Perhaps... it is not so much of a curse... after all."
The morph was excruciating, but he allowed her to writhe in his arms and seek comfort from contact until he held the wolf instead of the woman. Perhaps it was not a curse; he understood the wolf perfectly, and that allowed the woman to observe his intentions through a clear lens. He ruffled her mane and grinned, pleased with the thought of her suffering eased by his attention. "We have enough in common as it is. Tomorrow I will buy you a real dress so that we can still be told apart."
