Running Close to the Wind

by Alexandra Rowland

Some of his best work, really. He’d rhymed “strap-on” with “denouement” and had thought himself very clever.

Oskar seemed as though he might imminently weep, but Brother Julian looked like he was trying not to laugh. This would normally have caused Avra to categorize him as a potential ally or protector. He was too appallingly gorgeous for that. He had to be up to something. People that pretty were never not up to nefarious schemes.

Julian was indeed huge and blond and projecting the general air that he’d just stopped cradling a newborn lamb a moment ago in his strong yet gentle arms and might go back to it if he wasn’t otherwise required for anything.

“I prefer it when people feel sorry for me. Some may ask if it is better to be loved or feared, and I say: Neither. It is better to be pitied. Then people don’t expect anything of you.”

“Yes,” said Avra. “I mean no. I mean, no, I wasn’t here, yes, you gave me orders, and yes yes yesyesyesyes I went and took care of them and, hhhhh, Tev, I know things, oh Tev, the things that I know, the things I have discovered and now know and have the knowing of, because they are in my brain and I know them—”

Several people said variations on Oh! Well, in that case in tones of understanding, cooperation, and a general willingness to accommodate Julian as long as he kept being hot in front of people.

“You’re so good at manipulating me,” Avra said happily.

Julian waited by the door as Cat and Avra approached—he looked like a sun god, standing there in the light like that with his long, long hair braided and shining like a coronet of glory, bare of that grey wrapping he’d kept the queue bound into. He had the sort of blond complexion that went gold, rather than burning easily, but he must have spent a great deal of the day walking outside—even with his resistance to sunburn, his nose and cheeks were a little pink. A very rude man, Avra decided as they came up to him. “You should wear a paper bag over your head. Julian, this is my—my friend Cat.”

“If you don’t mind my professional curiosity … Were you able to speak or grip a pen afterward?” Julian grinned. “Oh, only whispering for two days, and my handwriting was atrocious for a week.”

The following diatribe was a glorious disquisition on institutions of power being no better than kings, and how humans by their very nature would mutilate even holy, sacred words if it meant they could gain power and accrue material benefit for themselves, and that while the impulse to conquer and consume was indeed also a part of human nature, and indeed part of the nature of all living beings, there was a moral obligation for all people to interrogate such impulses within themselves, or else risk consuming and exploiting even their fellow humans—

if there is any shred of doubt as to whether you did your job properly, the institutional powers above you will not extend compassion to you the way a person would.”

“Intelligence knows,” Avra said airily, “that ‘sane’ doesn’t exist. Nobody is sane. Nobody has ever been sane. Sane is fake. Sane is…” He waved to his own face. “One of those things you wear to a masked ball.” “… A mask?”

“Very unfair of you to pull me around like this if it’s not followed by pushing me against a wall,” Avra said.