It sang to her in a voice sweet and pure. In a voice sharp and melancholy. It sang to her, the grief of widows, the grief of sailors drowned, the triumph of navies, the predatory cry of the orca and the silence of the shark. It sang to her, and always, Orestes’ voice with it, telling her, beauty is but the beginning of terror. A poem. A poem, his people loved. A poem, he had shared with her, when he saw the adoration in her eyes that she could not hide.

Boudika stepped forward, up to her knees in the water. It felt strangely warm, and the salt tingled along her legs. Beneath her hooves she could feel the island’s perpetual heartbeat, one she was not certain was real, or merely imagined. The night was strangely silent, as though the strange birds of the day were forgotten, just for a moment. She closed her eyes and raised her head, ears pinned against the breeze, against whatever the ocean would throw at her.

She loved it, because it felt like Orestes’ island.

She hated it, because he was not here.

And all the time, she hoped the relic would be spat out by the sea.

My. You’re a lovely creature. And in that voice Boudika could only hear the sea, the way it sang at nighttime, the way it sang once to her in her prison cell. Soft and delicate, warm, nearly torpid. The heat of a humid climate, like the one they were in; or the warmest summer night in Oresziah, which brought in the storms but first, first, the silent night and lulling sea.

Boudika was split apart inside. So are you, she wanted to say, in just the same way that the tiger hunter would always admire the robust colour of the feline's coat, or the lion hunter the ferocity of the beast. The beauty would always enchant her. Are they not beautiful? Vercingtorix had once asked, of their bodies, heaped like that of so many fish. They shone with scales and horns and bright, glassy eyes like marbles. Walrus-tusks and teeth rowed as a sharks, needled like a barracuda, and they were all the colours a horse could be. Chestnut and bay and roan and grey. Black and white and sorrel and palomino. Some were frilled with fins or crests, or adorned with the nacre and pearl of the sea. And all of them in shapes of change, all of them seeming to shift even in death, as though in the last throes of life.

So Boudika did not tell the sea creature she was beautiful. How could she, when she had seen so many bleeding? Was that not sick, to think, you are more beautiful dying?

Her lip twisted wryly. The salt of the ocean stung and scraped. The moon shone bright and she answered, quietly, “It is only the moon.” It must have been, Boudika thought, that this creature had never seen the night sky. “It is not often you see the sky?” The sentence began as a statement and ended as a question.

She cocked her head, curious, leonine. The water felt strange about her knees and her tail lashed at the waves behind in, first in languid flicks, and then vicious ones. The island remained eerily silent to her back, and Boudika did not turn to glance at it. “Are you searching for the relic?” she asked, quietly, and beneath the question lied another: or are you searching for flesh? But there was something about the green-eyed kelpie, the softness of her voice, that invited Boudika to remain gentle, and calm, and always in the back of her mind swam the image of Orestes as he drowned, and his words, always his words—

It’s in your nature.

Could she not fight nature? And so Boudika waited. Tense, but responsive. Tense, but not murderous. Tense, and captivated, and afraid of her on heart as it beat within her chest with all the fury of a bird in flight.

“What kind of king?” Boudika wondered. She remained expressionless, aside from a slight narrowing of eyes. What a strange water horse. The kelpie shifted in the water, nearing Boudika, and the huntress watched cautiously. The water horse, grey and white and green and frilled with red, elongated her neck—reached for the air.

If Boudika were to kill her, that would have been the moment. The jugular gleamed like an offering, catching the moonlight just so. A spear or a trident or even a knife, expertly thrown, would have ended it. Boudika had none of those things… but it did not matter. The life ebbed there in that gleaming throat, exposed like a virgin at the alter.

Boudika would not have recognized the change that overcame the water horse, had she not been so experienced in watching them. There was a sharpening, a sudden and brilliant attentiveness. Ah, Boudika recognized that head-tilt, that virginal offering. The water horse had been scenting the air and on it was Boudika’s very flesh. She had seen something similar often enough. The wind shifting during an ambush, alerting a herd of Khashran of their approach—the way they lifted their heads, not equine but predatory, and turned their eyes sharply in the directions of the wind.

It was not so different.

As a courtesy… Boudika’s lips turned wryly into a smile that belonged not to flesh and blood, but a blade. It was not a smile that said prey.

Boudika answered the breathy, wanton voice. She stepped closer. The water lapped higher, now, and Boudika knew the depth at which she stood would delay her movements. She knew the risk very well, and a larger part of her whispered, run. Was that not a tactic they had taught at the academy? She had been one of the top students. She remembered her lessons very well. It would not be so difficult, to incite the predatory instinct of a water-horse… to seduce them into a chase… but why else did Boudika run so far, so fast, so often? Her sure-footed land-legs would not fail her. But lungs accustomed to water? Would they fair so well? Boudika wanted to run. She wanted to lure the water horse—

Orestes. Orestes, in her mind, standing beside her. The only time they had not had bars between them was when they had been led to their death sentence. They had walked in chains, prodded and jeered at by a large crowd, and had walked side-by-side. His flesh and touched her flesh, and it had been so much warmer than she had expected a Khashran’s flesh to be. And in her had welled the fear of mortality, the fear of an un-lived life, and he had brushed his killer’s-mouth against her jaw and whispered, tenderly, “You will not die today, Copperhead.”

Her desire of violence fled abruptly. She watched the water horse's salt tears.  “Don’t apologise. It’s your nature.” There was no insult. It was as matter-of-fact as when Orestes had said it, of her, as Boudika sobbed out her guilt of Binding him to his equine form and no other. It is in your nature. There was a wisdom to those words Boudika would never fully understand; an acceptance, of knowing something for what it was and not attempting to change it. Sometimes, there was no malice in deeds—sometimes it was as simple, as factual, as the wolf eating the lamb. Boudika cocked her head. “I won’t leave. Come, water horse. We can find you something more suitable for you to eat.” In those words was a kindness Boudika did not expect to find. She cleared her throat, stepping slowly backward and out of the water, ensuring she made no abrupt or flighty movements. “… can you leave the water?”

Boudika stood in the sand, staring. She was caught unawares when the water horse asked about her—and she discovered that she did not know what to say. “My name is Boudika. I’m a dancer in the Night Court.” It was clipped, factual, one statement after the other. It was not her. It was an identity she scarcely understood, or related with. I am a dancer who chased down a criminal. I am a huntress who fell in love with what I hunted. I do not know who I am. 

Boudika did not want to say that--but at the same, it felt like a lie to refrain. Haltingly, she spoke again.  "Before I lived here, I hunted a speices very similar to yours. We called them Khashran. They're gone now."

The way she admitted it, they're gone now was not cruel. She could not help her voice from catching. She could not help but remember Orestes' dark face streaked with golden dust, his eyes staring at her with a pain of eons, of oceans, of an entire people. Gone. 
"That was a long time ago, though." And the night sang to her, and the sea sang to her, and perhaps it would not be so terrible to be drowned by a creature so beautiful.

 
Perhaps it would even feel a little like forgiveness.