She met the steel of his gaze with a cold flatness in her own, a wordless challenge for his blame. When he pressed his way in she gave reluctantly, each line of her body stiff as an oak. She did not watch as he bent to her, and she had no name for the roil of emotions that churned in her like a dying thunder-bird churning in the dark water of the lake.
Only at the stirring of the unicorn, the thick murmur of her voice, did Shrike turn back. Into those silver eyes like frosted glass she stared and thought you saved me, you saved me, you saved me again until they slipped back closed. Her own sigh matched Calliope’s, and only the flicker of Raymond’s gaze drew her attention away.
I’ll take her somewhere safe.
A moment of hesitation, and then Shrike nodded.
The paint still said nothing as Raymond’s behemoth lifted her lion-heart; did he not know that safety meant nothing to Calliope? Safe was where the unicorn determined it was. But Shrike knew, too, that she had never seen her sister so brought low, and so she only watched as the giant and its two cradled figures turned away beneath the gunmetal sky.
Only when Ruth was nothing but another hill on the horizon did Shrike move to attend her own wounds, so foolishly and dearly earned. And then, still bloody, she stalked the empty battlefield, studying the bird-bodies and the bits of twisted blue glass made the moment when lightning met sand.
Would that war could make them all so lovely and strange.
don't do much these days
keep the wolves at bay
keep the wolves at bay
