Paper Confines

xxiii. Time

PAPER CONFINES.
23. / Time

✶

By the heart of January, Amoret had blown eighteen imaginary candles and finally managed to carve a memory of Tom's childhood from an unseen recess of his mind. At the glimpse of it—a young boy swaddled in a hospital bed with a bruised cheek and a bloodshot eye—Amoret believed it to be planted to garner sympathy. But she had grown capable of differentiating a truth given from one taken. When Tom gave, it was mostly to prove something he knew Amoret wouldn't believe without seeing herself. He lent it reluctantly, scoffed as if it were absurd of her to distrust him, but gave it entirely, and let it be hers until he claimed it again. It was a feeling too intrinsic to compare to holding a hand, though she'd initially tried; it felt instead like pressing palm first to a mirror and finding her reflection's arm attached to another face.

When Amoret took, it lasted only a second. It was airtight. She inhaled the memory and Tom lurched with an angry child's hands to grab it back. He went alight with something before settling to indifference again. She hungered to call it fear.

In the meadow, little fish leapt from the lake. Little fish and little rabbits and a murmuration of starlings, all white as the moon. Amoret spent long nights in a temple of blankets against the big oak tree, occupying an empty vein that sought impossible answers for impossible magic with things she understood instead. It had been ages since she'd found the time to study something of her own desire.

A half-finished star chart was strewn across her lap, tonight at the Astronomy Tower rather than the meadow, if not for nostalgia's sake then to compare the two skies. Amoret was curious to see if the meadow, which seemed to be of Tom's creation, would reveal anything about him in its differences from a true sky—if any such thing still existed. All she knew so far was that the castle and the meadow were occurring in different times. She had half the thought that the meadow might have even been so expansive it contained multiple times spanning the width of it alone. At the lake was a winter where Jupiter shone, and in the deep of the woods an early spring, shadowed by the vacuum of space.

The castle felt in another world entirely.

Amoret chewed the chain of her necklace while she scrawled notes of near-incoherence. Quill to ink to parchment to ink again, until her hands were stained and the stone balcony of the tower looked like it had been struck by droplets of black rain.

"The starlings have laid eggs," Tom said without introduction, the clangour of his shoes on the metal staircase enough to announce his arrival.

By then, Amoret had covered a quarter of Nadya's dormitory wall in tallies for the days. It was ninety-five that night.

"Have they?" she mumbled without looking up.

"Two of them. Eight between them both."

"Hm."

She was in the middle of a thought, half-scrawled with aching wrists—something about Libra and the moon—before a knotted wallflower fell on her lap.

Amoret finished her writing in a scrawl she probably wouldn't be able to translate later and looked up with a scowl. Tom didn't appear much happier.

The flower was shrivelled and tinged beige, its stem frayed like split silk where it coiled around itself, as if it had been sewn together in a rush. She held it, unimpressed, and placed it back in Tom's hand.

"My cat has brought me dead mice that've made better gifts than this."

He scoffed. "You instructed me to practice."