Maybe. But it does not love me the way the sea loves me.
The first time Boudika truly met the sea, it had been as a child on a black-cliff island where it crashed day, after day, after day, upon the shore. Angrily. Furiously. The storms that hit the land were more furious than this, and they are in her blood still, as memories, as truth.
Perhaps it is Anandi’s fear that makes Boudika bold when she responds, “The sea will not always love you, Anandi. Perhaps this is practice for the day you are betrayed.”
Boudika’s willingness to relent, and turn, from the storm is a testament to the kind soul she once possessed. There is nothing subservient in the way she goes to Anandi; nothing that suggests, yes, I too am afraid. No. There is no ledge to talk her off of; no danger to save her from.
Who. Not a question. A demand.
Boudika measures the other woman; and measures her fury, her possession, the feral way the word is less a word and more a growl. Boudika’s mouth splits; her teeth gleam bright, almost pearlescent, in a smile that is humourless. Amaroq’s name dances on her lips, but to admit it seems to be a betrayal, or to offer some kind of satisfaction.
It is in your nature.
“Myself.” The truth is half-there, in that she had asked him. Boudika had wanted the change, had wanted her becoming. It belonged as much to her—if not more so—as it did to Amaroq. And, besides, it states blatantly what Boudika knows to be a resolute truth: she belongs wholly to herself, and the sea, and the salt, and even the storm.
This does not explain why Boudika follows Anandi; perhaps it is the fledgling nature of Boudika’s own creation, the way that she still thirsts for guidance, for companionship, for someone to dance with beneath the waves—
and already they are down the cliffside and Boudika is leaping into them.
The world beneath the water is composed of shapes and shapes alone. Dark shapes; lighter shapes; the swathe of foam and the echoed reflection of lightening on the surface. Furious bubbles pushed down by the storm; the meeting of cold and warm currents. They navigate their way deeper, safer, into an alcove beneath the cliffside where the storm is not so punishing.
Beneath it, Boudika glances up at the fury of the waves; to reach the calmer sea had been a battle in and of itself but, once there, she feels… strangely soothed.
She cannot help but ask herself if she would be so volatile a kelpie had Anandi Made her, rather than Amaroq. And so Boudika asks in a world of blues and greens and shadows, where Anandi is a brighter silhouette; “And what if you had changed me?”
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