Has it been a year since I have been civilized and dawned upon my brow the crown of a princess instead one befitting a wolf? Has it been a year since I danced to music and pressed my silver-dusted shoulder into horse-flesh instead of predator fur?
Has it been longer than that? Less? Do I care?
Music is different here. It's deeper than the war-songs, slower, sunshine instead of blood-red. There is nothing of the soot and cedar poetry that I remember from Denocte. This is nothing like my mother's stories with meanings that I rarely care to unravel or grow cautious by. This is my father's music.
But maybe, when the crowd ebbs and flows together in violence and sin, it belongs more to me than anyone else in the room. The notes of it run through my skin like fire and the gold and glitz reflect across my skin like I am glass instead of flesh, and bone, and blood. If I was not a wolf I would be blushing, or smiling, or batting my too-thick lashes like I know a secret no one else does. And despite the elegance of my collar I am a girl of flesh, and bone, and blood and all my pearls are black as the bottom of the sea.
Foras keeps close to my side with is feral gaze swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. His eyes are too wild and too hungry tonight. I can see his jaw when he smiles as wolves do and the bones of his hock when I turn to look at him. The music reminds me that I should caution him, cool the itch in his skin telling him that this is not where he belongs.
There are always a million others things I should do but the ones that I choose to do.
My wolf and I turn into the crowd and and we do not dance even as we walk arrow straight though the press of dancing bodies. And here is another thing I should not do, but I do it anyway---
I whisper, wake up, wake up, wake up, and the instruments of the band start to flutter around the musicians like leaves in a storm. The musicians looked horrified when their song continues without the touch of their mortal skill.
It's then that I start to dance, laughing in a way that sounds more like a snarling wolf than a princess.
It doesn’t matter what he was doing before he sees her - what nobleman he was talking to, what fine or less-fine vintage he was drinking. As soon as the music changes to something just a step off-tempo, something a little minor, a little frenzied, the unicorn turns to the dance floor. All the dancers have fallen to stillness, just for a moment - all but her.
It is the princess, and her wolf. And as her laugh hangs like silver on the air, as the rest of them - uncomfortable, perhaps, but not to be outdone - take up their dancing again Martell looks from her fierce mouth and dark eyes to the instruments. It is true, then - she is a witch like her mother. And she is reckless with her power.
There is something of the ocean in the way she dances, or maybe the way clouds roll above it, reflecting on the water. Her coat is gunmetal gray, her scales black as shark-eyes, her lace collar a net. How many men, he thinks, will dash themselves to pieces on her rocks. And she will laugh just like that.
Martell pays no attention to the crowd when he goes to her, and so it parts for him. He slips through like blood down a cut, casting a brief glance to her wolf before his dark green eyes find her, intense as a pin in a moth-wing.
“Avesta,” he says, low. There are eyes on them, this blood-and-black stranger and the returned heir to the stars, who is almost a girl no longer, but for once he ignores these, too. “Are you here with your father?” And his tongue, well-practiced, does not divulge the hate that curls his heart like a bit of burned paper when he says the word father.
Martell moves with the music, but it is not so much dancing as treading cold, black water.
What would the world taste like, look like, if I was still just a unicorn with nothing more than a horn upon her head instead of a crown and hope in her heart instead of hunger? What would it taste like if I saw the skin of the world instead of the blood pulsing hot and begging beneath the stone and mortality?
What would I be like if I did not, as the sea does, clash against the shore over and over again until it dissolves into mud at the ferociousness of me?
Perhaps if I was anything else, anyone else, I would have slid my shoulder against his and laughed as a girl should. Perhaps I would not have snarled and bared my teeth like feral thing. And maybe it's more Foras than me that turns to him with a snarl that has nothing to do with warning and everything to do with the pulse, pulse, pulse of blood we can see at his throat like the low bass beat of the drum hanging above our heads. We feel like the sea, and the forest, when the winter turns to spring and there is only hunger the the violence it brings.
I do not smile. I do not tuck my teeth away as a princes should. “And if I said that you will not find him here,” We step closer as two wolves instead of two young things dreaming of the taste of war (we already know it, we know it as well as we know our shapes). My mother told me stories of all the ways a young unicorn should be cautious, of all the ways a princess can be reshaped by things other than her own will. “what would you do?” I cannot tell if my voice is more challenge or warning. I can never tell.
And when I smile at him then, I do not care if I am challenge or warning, because I am all sea-storm waves and dead things washing up in the tide.
All the instruments tumble to the floor and the sound it makes it an explosion against the soft sweetness of the music that is no longer. But I keep dancing, my horn held high as war-banner, daring him to step closer as two unicorns caught in the chains of music should.
He is not afraid of her, this girl who more resembles the ghost of her mother as she was than the false skin she wears now. He is not afraid of her and her wolf, their color like smoke, their teeth gleaming white with youth.
Even though he knows that she has killed. Martell has heard the stories from the others on the ship - tales of her bravery, her savagery. They were awed, of course, by Isra and her daughter, worshipped the pair of them - and the stallion, too, quiet and stolid and scarred, with his axe that whistled in the air as it worked. Isra’s mate.
If he had been there, for that battle, would things be different?
Surely not all four of them would still be alive.
Her words are defiant, more threat than answer. He wonders if she remembers him at all, that day they’d left, as goodbyes were said on shore before both ships sailed, leaving behind a ravaged city with smoke still curling in a dozen places like a dragon’s sleeping breath. For his part Martell does not respond in kind; his mouth stays even, a smooth red shoulder shrugging. Both his relief and disappointment he tucks away. “I would say I’m not surprised. He doesn’t seem a fan of parties.”
Almost before he gets the words out her grin turns feral, and there is a tremendous crash, followed at once by gasps and shouts. The unicorn flinches instinctively, but even as his gaze cuts between the aghast musicians and the girl he knows it was her doing, and he wonders how many other dancers know, too, or wonder. Surely they find her a strange thing, this gunmetal girl who chose to go away to war, daughter to a woman who could be a goddess, if she wanted. (Did she want?)
Avesta makes no attempt to hide her strangeness. And Martell does not like the eyes on him, not when his skin itself is a secret, but he still lifts his head higher than hers and looks down at her with an expression that is almost sardonic. “I didn’t care for that song, either.”
His body remembers all the instincts mine has forgotten in death, and war, and loving a wraith wolf. He flinches like a unicorn should and my smile turns feral at the quiver of his made-for-more-than-dancing form. I do not try to comfort him nor do I let the musician gather up their instruments and make poetry in the silence. I only feel the eyes gathering on us like shadows, and warnings, and drops of rain. Each is a weight I've become easy with feeling.
Or maybe I am too buoyed by the sea to feel like anything but a warship on the endless tide. Or is it winter? Or death?
Am I even me?
But it doesn't matter what I am, not when he steps closer in the silence where only I am brave enough to dance. And I do not return to the conversation of my father because the stallion, with his unicorn instincts, already seems to know the answer to the question. I want to ask him why he bothered to ask at all if he already guessed, but maybe it's the way of men to fill the silence with their own words just to hear how they sound. My dancing takes me closer to him, bringing the weight of the many-eyes with me so that it might feel the tide of it crashing over his head.
A musician starts to sing with no drum. And I want to rip his tongue out of his mouth as much I want to beg him to never stop because anything is better than the silence fat with the roar of the sea. His words are full of love, and hope, and life enough to fill the sky with solar flares. The music is full of all the things me and my wolf will never be.
Foras yearns towards the music as much as I do.
I turn away from the unicorn as my wolf steps closer and looks harder at him. Our hearts stumble in our dead chests. A flute follows my thoughts, forgetting in the tide of my yearning that it is no longer 'mine'. I drifts past my shoulder towards the stallion and I cannot help but follow it even as I known I had already decided to dismiss him and his unnecessary questions.
My feral smile returns to hide the tidal wanting in my dead heart and my young-eternal soul. “Play me something you would like then.” And I wait and I wonder what other instincts his body knows that mine has forgotten.
Neither of them care anything for the party or the sheep who attend it. This unicorn, this small gray storm-cloud, is a creature of war the same as she is; even now when she looks around the room he can tell she’s judging the pulse just beneath every throat.
And he thinks she should be my daughter. If she were my daughter -
Then he kills the thought before it can leave another track in his mind.
Instead he watches her and her wolf, the roll of the ocean in her steps. A voice rises up like a wind from the silence, wavering and soft at first, then firm and true. There are lines about love and wings and moonlight and it is all nonsense, but Martell sees the way Avesta listens to it - he watches her even over the wolf’s level, hungry stare.
He can see how she wants. That is a feeling that he knows, too - that yearning for beautiful things, things to be dreamt of, things he can never have. By the time the flute joins in, he has lost interest in the song.
“None of these are instruments I know,” he says, his gaze leaving her, just for a moment, to make a dismissive sweep over the musicians. Martell had been trained on other tools, ones that sought blood and not beauty. Oh, in camp there were the war-drums, and the great pipes blown to signal troops and put fear in the enemies’ hearts, but they were not his duty.
But when his eyes drift back to her he smiles, not so feral as hers, but unreadable as a pattern in the leaf-litter or the clouds. “Did your mother ever sing you songs from the old country? There is a lullaby called Dream Me Home that every Elettran child knows.” His look turns considering, and he leans away with a sigh. “But I suppose a girl like you has no interest in lullabies.”
How disappointing, I want to tell him. I want to etch his failures into this skin for all to see. My
jaw wants to carve them into this throat before it devours them down into my stomach so the rest of the world might never have to bear witness. I want, oh I want, the flavor of his failure on my tongue and I want to call it anise.
The sea roars in my ears like I am nothing more than a wasted, empty shell spit up onto the sea by the wrath of a storm. It lingers in my heart like a stone, like a tide, like a net of seaweed in which my once-soul is caught. And I know, I’ve always known since the deep poured into me through my eyes and my mouth, that I’ll be caught there until I die.
If I can die, really die, anymore.
Do I even care?
His body is scarless when I look back at him, another man gilded and gold and red in a sea of useless genetics. I wonder what he thinks of death. Does he taste it on his tongue when he blinks the dream-sand from his eyes? Does he taste it on his tongue when he talks to girls with sharpness in their smiles instead of coyness?
Does he wonder if it’s something more than want of a song in my gaze when it flashes black as the midnight sea?
There is no kindness in my laugh. Nor is there anything coy and gentle in the sound of my amusement. My laugh is that of a wolf before an army of sheep. And I know I sound like my mother when she laughed her way to war because it was the only thing thick enough (thick as blood and oil) to drown out the sorrow.
Foras snarls for there is no amusement that might take seed in the soul of a wraith wolf. He flickers and his paws sink through the stone floor. His frost sticks to my tongue as his jaw shifts and forms where fur and softness once was. And maybe, maybe, now there is true amusement in the sounds my throat is making. Of course we have no need for lullabies. It’s another failure of this stallion to even talk of something so foolish and childish to a girl that counts his heartbeat instead of his steps.
I wonder if he tastes like brine or like sand. Surely it tastes nothing like war.
“If my mother sang me any songs at all I have forgotten them.” He really should have stepped back instead of settling on nothing more respectful than a lean. Foras steps closer to remind him. My smile turns both darker and brighter when my wolf snaps his teeth at the stallion’s knees. I follow the arc of the spit that falls from his jaws.
My own hunger spikes and turns feral. Brine rises from my belly like acid.
“A girl like me has no interest in many things.” I don’t bother to hide the pointed insult flashing in my eyes like lightning. And I don’t bother to show any caution as I turn from him to dissolve into a place in the crowd disappointing men will not follow.
Because a wolf hiding in the skin of a unicorn-dead-at-sea does not show her belly to a mere lion.
The end of pain, the end of glory. The end of want and need. Sometimes, Martell dreams of it, and what it feels like is peace. And what peace feels like to a man such as him is nothing at all.
Maybe he is a fool, for the way he does not see death when he meets the dark pool of her eye, the sea below a storm. The blood bay sees the impetuous coldness of youth, the careless superiority of a teenage princess. Oh, he does not doubt she has killed. Oh, he does not question the sharpness of her wolf’s teeth.
But he does not fear her. She could pierce his heart here, amid weeping, whining instruments, and he would only laugh and, dying, sigh you should have been mine.
Cold seizes the room; it takes him a moment to realize it comes from her companion. The beast is changing, flickering, unstable - and he assumes the girl before him must be the same. He had hoped to snare her with thoughts of her mother, of the homeland she had gone to to free (and had left without seeing how long that freedom might last). But she is as frigid and feral as her wolf, and he can demand no respect here, when he is nothing but a stranger.
“A pity,” he says cooly, his only answer to both of her statements. The wolf snaps at his knees and he stamps a black hoof, a warning unheard amid the chatter of the room. But his teeth grind together as he watches them go from the room, those two silver beasts who must be taught to bow.
