elif
Her gaze had been hawk-keen on her surroundings, the crude benches carved from canyon stone, the still and dust-dry arena. But the barest flicker of movement draws her eye, and she watches as the gilded stranger rises.
Elif is glad, then, for the unnatural cold, for it gives her a reason for the breath to stick in her throat, to burn like ice when at last she inhales. It is nervousness that has her falling so still (save for her blood, hot hot hot beneath her skin, and the bird-fast beat of her heart) but not the kind that is hand in hand with fear. It is the nervousness of when she was a girl taking her first dare, the nervousness of fly higher, fall faster. The kind that made her eyes shine, vivid green as spring.
He moves solid and grand as she moves light and quick as sunlight on water; he moves like her shadow, stretched too tall by a low son.
But Elif stops dead when he calls her a liar.
“I am not.” And she looks down her nose at him, though he towers above her, dark and forbidding as a dust-storm on the horizon. She does not care how big he is, how cruel the slash of his mouth or how gleaming his gold. “You know nothing of me, to tell me what I am.” Her eyes gleam in the slant of sunlight that filters in, now he is not blocking it with his wings; his own gaze is hooded, dark as thick amber. Still she does not shy away from it; it is not fear she trembles with, high-strung as a racehorse with the wind in her blood.
A wind that blows toward her like a caress as he arches his wings up and up, as if he might close her in. As if he could capture her with feathers and threats like she was nothing more than a songbird, rare and frail in the desert.
She is about to challenge him, then, but the wind loves her, and it warns her. Here in this pit where little breeze should stir it brings her a scent other than his own (which is unsettling enough, blood thick as ichor and rich warm gold). A scent that is half-cat and half-eagle and all predator, and only then does Elif breathe in the sharp and bitter tang of fear and flick her eyes skyward - only for a moment, but long enough to judge the time it would take her to rise up and up beyond the cliff-face.
Elif is certain she is faster than this stallion, but she is not sure about the thing that waits behind him, breathing softly as an eagle, as a cat.
His shadow falls across her; her gaze cuts back to his face. She does not look at the smile he wears (not unlike a lion itself, utterly content in its power), and she laughs at his next words. It comes as a surprise, that rush of sound, but it emboldens her too. She snaps her tail against her hocks and tilts her head at him, as if he is only another thing at market to be bought.
“Men like you never help for free.” She says it evenly, matter-of-fact, but there is already a dare beginning in her eyes. It is too easy for her to forget the beast at his back.
Who are you, she should ask then, and who is your friend?
“What is your price?” she asks instead, and the wind sighs in her ear, and dies away.
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