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Cam has barely finished scrawling, “I love you Palamedes,” onto a loose piece of paper at Nona’s request when Nona flops onto her back on the bed. Her legs kick aimlessly in the air.
“Palamedes told me about eyes today,” she says.
Camilla says, “Surprised you haven’t heard of them before,” and grabs for her Just Nona Things notebook. Nona huffs a lock of hair away from her forehead.
“I mean, how our eyes work. The different colors. Palamedes says when you give yourself to someone, your souls show up in each other through your eyes or something.”
Camilla’s pencil pauses in its hurried scratching across the notebook. Her—Palamedes’s?—grey eyes glint against the light.
“Is that how he put it.”
“Well, I’m not as smart as him, so maybe I didn’t say it exactly the same,” Nona hedges. “But he said the first part for sure, about giving yourself to someone.”
Camilla turns to look at the wall for a long moment. Breathes in through her nose, then returns silently to her notebook. A frown pulls at the corners of her mouth.
Nona sits up. “What’s wrong, Cam? You look sad. I’ll pay more attention to his lesson next time—“ A hand touches her knee, briefly.
“It’s not you,” Camilla says, “I promise.”
“I’ve never seen you sad before,” Nona says, and her voice comes out smaller than she meant it to. Her body feels itchy, like she needs to move—her legs bounce up and down over the side of the bed involuntarily, and suddenly there are three strands of dark hair between her fingers where she’s pulled them out of her scalp. Camilla reaches over once again from her chair to still her.
“Sorry, Nona.” Her deep voice fills the air between them. “It’s just not how I would describe…this.” Camilla makes a poking motion toward both of her eyes with two fingers, then returns her hand to Nona’s knee as it begins vibrating again.
“Like giving himself to you?”
“Right. If he thinks it’s some sort of gift to me, it’s not,” Camilla says, and the lines on her face where she frowns grow deeper. “I don’t want these eyes. They should be in his head.”
“They are awfully pretty eyes,” says Nona, leaning in for a very innocent closer look. Camilla raises an eyebrow and sits back with her notebook, breathing out a laugh when Nona pretends to still be jittery. It doesn’t work on her, of course. Nona settles, pouting, until she has another thought. “Palamedes wasn’t always inside you, though.”
Camilla’s facial muscles go through the most complicated range of emotions Nona has seen on her yet. But all she says is: “No, not always.”
“So…what does he look like? Is he handsome? Wait! You can draw him for me.” Nona snatches the note Camilla wrote for her earlier from where it rests on the bed and thrusts it forward. “Here, on my letter to him! Please, Cam?”
Camilla takes the page gingerly, slowly, out from Nona’s grip, but there’s something faraway and distant in her gaze now. Nona deflates, feeling like she must have said the wrong thing again.
In Camilla’s hands is a letter addressed to Palamedes, not the Master Warden of the Sixth. The author is a girl so good-hearted and bright, who wants to see him so badly she’d ask for a crude drawing—and Camilla feels like she’s been here before.