He knows, he knows, he is not the only thing in Novus’ waters with sharp teeth and sharper hunger. After he had Made the pegasus (a used pair of wings, she had said, a vessel for duty; he wonders if she knows differently now, if she marvels at her wolf’s teeth and lion’s instincts, she who had seemed so numb, half-dead) the kelpie had left the waters of the mainland. There he had waited out the winter and mourned the passing of the zenith of his powers, and there he had wondered whether he might be pursued.
But it is not the horses of Novus he is wary of now. From that first roiling of sea and earth, from that eruption of smoke and birds thick and fleeing and chaotic, the unicorn sensed the change. Something was different. Something was loose. Behemoth shapes slid long as structures in the dark far beneath the surface, and things with too many tentacles, and monsters that would dare to chase a kelpie back to the frothing shores of Denocte.
Yet the pull of the magic is stronger still.
It draws them all, a hum at the back of their throats, a buzzing in their blood, a new kind of need. It draws Amaroq, too - but not until night, and not until late, when the ivy is withered and all the pearls have been swept into the sea. Only then does he come, dark beneath the starless night, the seafoam color of his mane and tail like the path of the moon on the water as it sweeps over glistening black rock. When he arrives he keeps to himself; when he chances to meet another he listens only, long teeth hidden behind dark lips, nothing but another stranger in a crowd of them. There are many rumors, and none are of a kelpie who attacked a girl. They are far more interesting than that.
He is not sure he believes in gods, of Novus or no. But he believes in magic, and that is a thick thing here, almost electric. And he believes in power, and that is what the Relic must be. And Amaroq believes in monsters, and oh, those are here too, he can smell their hot breath, hear their panting in the dark.
The island is all strange - trees and plants that fruit and flower out of season, birthing things of metal and stone. Birds who sing too many notes in terrible patterns, too many eyes that shine out of the dark. But it is Amaroq who feels out of place here, with ice in his veins against the wet heat of the place, wandering inland from a sea that churns with creatures who have woken from a slumber of dread dreams.
The unicorn picks his way through the forest in the dark, and ice melts in his footprints like the ring beneath a glass. No stars can cut through the canopy; the only light is the flicker of insects, the glow of mushrooms, the blue gleam that curls up the stalks of vines. He follows the sound of a stream (but nothing so commonplace as the laugh and chuckle of a brook - this water wails like a violin, it crescendos and fades like a symphony) until he finds the source of it. It cuts black, black, black across his path, and he can’t make out the bottom.
The water laughs, and sings, and he wonders if it is singing in him, too, if it is a black thread to the heart of the island -
Before he can drink, a figure separates from the tangle of foliage across the water. The way Amaroq lowers his horn then is both question and answer.
AT NIGHT I LISTEN TO MY DEAD HEART AND NAME IT AFTER A DEAD COUNTRY THE BIRDS IN MY BLOOD STOP MID-FLIGHT. WHEN I THINK OF YOU, A WAR ENDS.
The darkness became her; caressed her; transformed her into a thing belonging, a thing unnamed and treacherous. Embraced by the shadows of the trees with a canopy so dense the stars could not strain through, the black was almost absolute. It was broken only by the bioluminescent glow of some strange fungus or plant, and those Boudika did not trust. The forest could not be trusted; especially at night. And she moved with all the self-awareness and external preoccupation of the hunter, and hunted. She was both; listening for the strange calls of the island's birds and great cats, remembering all too well the ocelot-like feline she had seen when first arriving.
The unpredictable nature of the island, by now, was expected. Boudika had been searching for days, for the god’s gift; for a relic that may or may not have existed; for a favour that may or may not be bestowed. Boudika was compelled with an obsessive, furious energy—an energy that was as dark as the island’s own heart, throbbing perpetually beneath her feet. A bridge of pearls and nacre, blood-red berries and ivy and beasts twisting in the sea. Everything about the island was at once familiar and unknown; beautiful and horrific; and it made her heart ache exquisitely, nostalgically. For what?
Time, she thought. Tonight was a night during which she could not face the sea; she could not face the gentle rush of waves, the glint of starlight at the raucous surface. The tropical climate of the island was too foreign for her to find nostalgia in it; but the nature of the island, capricious and wily, was familiar. It made her think of her old home which, now, would be far more alien to her than Novus, than even the accursed island on which she roamed. Boudika sought time; she sought the ability to turn it back; to ask a favour.
Boudika could hear the running water of a stream. Compelled, she followed. A feeling had possessed her, for all the days she had been on the island; the feeling that the thing she sought so desperately would be found just around the corner. The faith Boudika kept was a fragile one, but one nonetheless. The water screamed at her, but the forest gave way to the rushing presence of the stream. Boudika would have called it a siren’s call, if not for the piercing wail that possessed it, as sharp and beautiful as shattered glass. But hideous, too. Boudika continued to weave in and out of the trees at the stream’s bank, moving quietly, very quietly. In her mind, she revisited a memory:
“What kills them?” the professor had asked.
The children responded with a chorus of answers. “Iron! Steel! Copper! Gold!” Anything heavy, Boudika wanted to say, but did not. And then Vercingtorix answered for her. “Anything heavy,” he said calmly, cooly. In that moment, she knew he would be a general. The professor went on. Anything natural that is then made, not-natural. Ores manipulated into weapons. The earth transformed into a killing-thing.
Boudika took notes as the professor explained, more elaborately, “Anything that was once natural but has been manipulated or forged. That might sound common-sense, but wood won’t kill them, and neither will stones. Only the purest metals can Bind them. That is why in our culture, we paint ourselves with the colour gold when going to war with the water-horses.”
And she remembered:
The iron chain-links were thrown over his back with enough force to break the skin. The metal sizzled his blood and he bowed beneath the weight, held between two of the Dreadnaught soldiers. The Prince of a Thousand Tides fell to his knees before her, broken, and the golden collars were fixed about his neck. And then his eyes bore into her own, his eyes like the tumultuous sea, as she streaked his face with golden dust and spoke the words of the Old Language, Binding him. “Avur’ut masa’raila.” He would never be the sea again. Only a horse.
Only a man.
And those tumultuous eyes broke before her, like water on rocks.
Something cracked in the forest. A perceptible noise. A noise that meant she was no longer alone. Boudika froze, one hoof still lifted.
The huntress saw him, and her blood cooled to something reptilian, draconic. Demonic. She saw him, and his words returned with a sharp clarity. I can Make you, he had said, and Boudika only now realised how badly she wanted to be unmade, transformed into a creature she could not recognise, a creature she could forgive. Perhaps the cooling of her blood was not her old hunter’s instinct; perhaps, instead, it was fear.
But fear was something Boudika could not bare to face, not there, not in that moment. As the kelpie lowered his head to drink, she stepped forward, revealing herself. His horn glinted in the dark not-light, the strange bioluminescence, the shockingly unnatural forest in which neither of them belonged. She was a tigress amid the foliage; her dark shape provided an almost disembodied entity of a chestnut head that bled into a bald face, skull-like face. Her striped haunches disappeared and her white socks were nothing for the knee-high jungle brush to conceal.
It was not where she had expected to find him again. No, this temptation she had expected from the fresh and haughty sea. Not the confines of the forest, with its choking thickness and its wailing stream.
Her horns dipped. A question. And an answer.
“The jungle is choking this stream.” Her tone was clipped and the darkness concealed her passion. At once, she loved and hated him for being there. At once, she loved and hated all he represented. “Why else would it wail to you so?” Then, as she stepped forward: “This island is no place for a water horse.”
But then, did that not mean there was no place for their huntress? If they did not belong, was it not true that she, herself, did not? The forest, at their meeting, seemed strangely silent. The island's heart-beat was no longer the only one she felt; no, her blood pounded in her ears, her mortality, and her mind was full of golden paint.
his place is like a fairy-tale - though even more unfathomable than that, to a man whose childhood fantasies were still of places caked in ice, glaciers blue as the cold heart of the moon, beasts that drifted like birds through frigid waters. It is like a myth, and so he he is not at all surprised at the woman who steps forward into just enough light to make plain her bald face, pale as a skull.
She greets him, like to like, and Amaroq smiles in a way that leaves his teeth hidden. But his tongue touches them, a press against sharp points, the way one might pinch themselves in a dream. All the birds fall silent, sensing a predator; between them, a thick silver ribbon, the water laughs and cries.
“You think it wails to me?” he says softly, and touches the tip of his horn to the water. At once ice blooms there, like a flower, but the current is too swift: it takes the new bloom and whisks it downriver, tumbling it away, a small ice-floe that may never reach the sea. He wishes he could freeze the length of it, choking it to silence, and walk his bridge of ice to the secret heart of the island, the birthplace of the stream. The shells and bones in his hair chime against each other, rattling like teeth, as he lifts his head again. He is not smiling now.
“This island is no place for those who must rely on a bridge to go to safety.” He does not blink, when his ice-chip eyes seize her like a fist. There is a challenge there, a wolf to a tiger, beast to beast. For the moment, he disregards all else that might wait and hunt in the dark of the trees, in the deep of the sea. He watches her step forward, the way the light slides against her stripes and each hard plane of muscle, the gleam of her crimson eyes cat-like in the dim. Once more there is water between them, and something else just as quick and just as deadly. “Are you going to run again?” This time, there is almost humor in the question. This time, he thinks he might pursue her if she did.
AT NIGHT I LISTEN TO MY DEAD HEART AND NAME IT AFTER A DEAD COUNTRY THE BIRDS IN MY BLOOD STOP MID-FLIGHT. WHEN I THINK OF YOU, A WAR ENDS.
You think it wails to me?
Boudika would have said more, but did not have the opportunity. The kelpie dropped his horn and ice bloomed in the rushing current, only to be overtaken. It was beautiful to observe; perhaps because of its transiency. The ice's abrupt disappearance evoked a startingly clear image to her: she remembered a body-choked beach, like so many fish out of water. Dead, buoyed by the sea as it caressed, touched, reached—drawing them back, tugging them toward her forgiving depths. Someone, farther down the stretch of black sand, tugged a trident from the chest of a Khashran. The motion, she thought, was not so different from the ice as it was devoured by the current. Her expression was hard when she looked at him; unforgiving; and Boudika stepped nearer still.
The darkness between them existed as an almost living entity. Clinging. The bioluminescence merely softened the jagged sharpness of the dark and revealed his true nature: a predator, with the angles of one and the hard, unrelenting lines of muscle. But more: the illusion of the darkness itself was almost water-like. It laid heavy upon them; and it was not difficult for Boudika to imagine their encounter as some deep, underwater meeting in the ocean reeds. Did the air here, not taste of salt and humidity? Did it not fill her lungs with the ocean and the rotting scent of soil? Boudika did not dwell, however, too long on the concept; the wailing of the stream brought her back.
“And yet… it wails.” Her tone was nearly dismissive. To say: your magic has done little to silence the scream.
In one leonine motion, with coiled haunches, Boudika launched herself across the stream. Below her, something startled in the current; it disrupted a flow of hair-like algae. The algae began to glow fluorescent blue, nearly turquoise. The colour trembled in the water, and undulated, from cerulean to violet to crimson. There it remained, illuminating them from beneath in a ethereal, unwordly sort of way. It belonged to the island; to the mythic bridge to nowhere. The light. Throbbing. Throbbing. Throbbing as the island throbbed; as her heart throbbed; as the sound recurred, again and again, blood sluiced from the vein. She landed beside him; heavy and silent all at once; and the panicked algae turned to the same mauve of a bruise.
“This island is no place for those who believe in safety, or seek it.” Boudika countered. But her words trembled. He was right, Boudika knew. And was that not the very reason she had stayed so long, searching for a relic that likely did not exist? Searching for Time, to take back all her deeds? But his challenge was not answered in her words; it was answered in her proximity, hot and furious, like a tropic storm. They were very near one another; and her eyes bore into him, belonging to something feral, something old. Perhaps her very gods danced within her veins; the gods of old Oresziah; of stone and torch; of the dances Orestes had shown her; of the streaked gold of her people. In a way nearly impish, she dipped her tail into the glowing creek and flicked the water at the kelpie.
“I will not run. Will you?” Perhaps it was the distance of the sea, that gave her such courage. Perhaps it was because in that moment, close enough to smell the salt on his flesh, it was easy for her to imagine she was where she belonged. Dark shapes twisted in the stream, drawn by the algae or the ice or both; they were malovent and hypnotic, and in their swirling, chaotic dance the algae bloomed in shades of iridescent, unimaginable azule and emerald. The light was thrown wildly upon them; and the darkness swung wildly back.
t feels like a dream, here below the trees. Amaroq is grateful for the mercy of the night; in daylight so much chaos and color and noise would turn him away. The air smells vivid green: the green of sap from a branch just-snapped, the green of rot below tangles of roots and blankets of leaves, the green of things forever growing and dying. She is not wrong, when she suggests that he is out of his element. All he knows is blue and white and a bare and biting kind of cold. But this is far from the first adaptation he’s had to make to survive, and all streams run eventually to the sea.
He watches, impassive, as she steps nearer. The pale strands of his mane cling to his neck fine as spiderwebs and his eyes gleam as pale as the moon and the stream. When the wind sighs through the winding curl of his horn he smiles in a way that says something is always wailing in the night.
But he is not all stillness, not all ice. When she leaps the kelpie rounds on her like a wolf, angling his chest toward hers, his head high with warning. Yet the flash of color that limns her white face catches him, and when she looks down to the water he follows her gaze, falling back unmoving but for the rise and fall of his breath. Even the silver of that catches in his throat to look at the colors unfolding below them, blooming and receding. When his eyes sting it takes him a moment to realize why -
that it looks like home. That it is a kind of imitation of the curtain of blues and greens and golds and reds that once unfurled across his frigid sky like one world opening onto another. He remembers how it felt to swim in waters of emerald and violet with his people and hear the voices of the whales as they sang songs of wonder. How holy those nights were, such long ago glories.
Sorrow makes him furious, but beauty and wildness softens him; when he withdraws from her, turning his finely carved head away, it is because he doesn’t trust his teeth. Cold radiates from him the way heat does from her, as though she’s painted with living fire. It’s a wonder there isn’t a storm between them, and now Amaroq can feel his heart beating in his chest like a sealskin drum with the ferocity of his feeling. “No place worth knowing is,” he answers her, but his words are as flat as a glacier plane. Amaroq can feel her eyes on him, burning like cupped flame, but he does not meet them.
Not until she dips her tail into that painted water, and colors him with it. Then he looks at her, and he is not quite smiling, but there is something unsettled in his eyes, a mad kind of wildness. The thought of home is an anchor that can still drown him, but he wills it buried in the dark silt of his heart. I will not run, she says, and the water she flicked on him turns to ice on his skin, and with the way the blues and greens trace her, softening and deepening her crimson, they could be underwater.
He says nothing when she turns his question back on him. But he reaches out, and the charms in his hair cry out in little voices of warning, and if she does not turn away he touches his nose to her cheek. There is something tender in the gesture, despite the war-drum of his heart, like something fae marking a child for wonders unknown. His skin is as velvet-soft as a seals’; compared to his ice her body seems to burn, like it’s stolen the warmth of fire along with the color.
“Hunt with me,” the kelpie says, and it is not quite a question.
AT NIGHT I LISTEN TO MY DEAD HEART AND NAME IT AFTER A DEAD COUNTRY THE BIRDS IN MY BLOOD STOP MID-FLIGHT. WHEN I THINK OF YOU, A WAR ENDS.
You think it wails to me?
Neither of them belonged in the illusion, in the night that cried with unseen predators and a stream that sang, and sang, and sang in a pitch like mourning. But his impassivity enticed her; the slant of his neck, the sharpness of his singing horn, the glacial coolness of his skin. It was at once familiar and foreign. It was at once everything she had ever known and nothing she knew at all—and that, there, was the source of her enthralment. He was the aching answer to a question she had never thought to ask.
When she leapt nearer, he spun upon her like the beast she knew he was. But the predictability of the reaction was a comfort, and Boudika did not flinch. Her girl self would have called her foolish. The Boudika that had arrived mere months ago, the one that had first met him, would have cringed at her boldness. But not this Boudika. Not this Boudika, who ran through fires to capture strange, barred boys and kept herself on an island that seemed like a curse. Not this Boudika, who ran until her heart felt like bursting and screamed from mountain tops. Not this Boudika, who dreamt at night of ocean things singing ocean songs.
And with their eyes on the twisting, gleaming stream her attention roamed to him. There is a catch there, in his expression; an echoing sort of emptiness and glint of eye that Boudika is familiar with, because it is sorrow. An emotion Boudika had come to embrace; had come to know with all the intimacy of family. Seeing it in his expression, reflected so clearly—
He moved away. No place knowing ever is. Boudika said nothing, because it was the truth, and it was perhaps the very reason she was there. Because. There was an aching answer in the darkness, to a question that filled her with fear.
And they were fire and ice. Crimson and cerulean. Where they met, they were opposites; where they met, they did not belong in the throbbing darkness of the night, or the unfathomable colours of the stream. Were they not both hunted? Were they not both the last of their kind, in one way or another? He withdrew, his gaze, his self, and the chasm that opened was one her heart echoed—because she knew the pain, she knew the hollowness, and his promise came back to her. “I could Make you. I could Make you like me. And then you could search for him below every shore, in the trenches of the deep, in the corals and kelp forests. Everywhere. But more and more Boudika knew—he was everywhere. Had those not been his very words? I will always be the sea.
Boudika could not help but step forward at his downcast eyes, attracted with a sort of gravity that could only be explained in that level: gravity. It was the weight of planets, of meteors, of things celestial.
Or more—the crushing pressure of the ocean. Boudika felt as though she were sinking, when he looked at her again. As though there were some force beyond her, crushing her, but not in a way unpleasant. The bones in his hair sang. The water sang. The night, full of things unknown and unknowable, sang. And when he touched her there was nothing but wildness in her veins, nothing but a demand, more, more, more and the song of the wailing stream, the colours as they turned subdued—and began to fade in shades of indigo, of sapphire. Were they not already underwater?
“What will we hunt?” And it is not quite an answer. But the question ached and ached and ached within her, worse than any type of arthritis, worse than any hunger. Boudika stepped forward, and the heat of her flesh was there to meet the icy coolness of his; a jaw that, lest his move, would slide nearly threateningly along his neck. And a horn, when cocked, which would clink every so slightly against his own as she passed, until they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and she found her breath short and fast and—
It felt like everything she had ever loved and feared about the sea. Her tongue tasted like the memory of salt. Her heart, with the memory of battle and violence and the sucking pull of the sand beneath her hooves, the ragged crash of waves, and the sensation of falling—always falling. It’s in your nature he had said once, a lifetime ago. And in it perhaps he had only meant it was in her nature to be tied, irrevocably, to the wild thing she hunted. Was she herself not Bound to them, in her fear, her enthralment, her preoccupation? Had she not sworn some oath, a soldier's oath, to a cause that nearly married her to their feral, wild, twisting nature? Had she not been Bound, too, when her own people had sentenced her to death, to die alongside the last of them, of her water horses?
Would it not sicken them to know, the world was full of such creatures?
The stream went dark again, aside from the slight light of the original blue bioluminescence of fungi on trees.
In the darkness, she felt only her own heartbeat, and heard only his breath. And Boudika did not know if what she wanted was the freedom of the hunt again; or the death that every hunt must end in.
hat will we hunt? she asks, and she does not turn away from his touch - she responds to it, she turns it back on him like a parry, like they are playing at war.
Well, aren’t they always? Isn’t he always, in a way, when his life comes down forever to another creature’s death - blood and salt?
Amaroq smiles at the sound their horns make, rattling softly together like spears. He smiles at the sear of her skin on his, her teeth near his throat, stripes against spots, predators each. Against the cold of his skin, humidity-slick, she’s as warm as a fire - and when he inhales, there is the faint smell of smoke, too, bonfires of cedar and incense. The unicorn-queen’s city on a hill, he thinks. She had invited him there, when they met many full moons ago, and he had said not yet.
Nothing waits for a wolf in a city but death. Such places were for rats and sheep. Without the wind, without the stars, without the heartbeat of the ocean in his ears and the pull of the moon, his teeth would be blunted, his mind dulled.
Amaroq wonders if that is all that separates them. If there is a part of her that wants to be feral, that sneers at a life made easy.
(What will we hunt?)
The kelpie laughs, low and black, water below ice. “A relic,” he says, and when he pushes himself away from her, pale as moonlight against the black, his strange cold eyes ask And what else would you hunt, side-by-side with such as me?
AT NIGHT I LISTEN TO MY DEAD HEART AND NAME IT AFTER A DEAD COUNTRY THE BIRDS IN MY BLOOD STOP MID-FLIGHT. WHEN I THINK OF YOU, A WAR ENDS.
A killing-thing. What does it mean, to be so close, to a killing-thing? Blade-like, razor-sharp and whistle-thing—yet more whetted than any steel. Death is here, in the fickle sensation of tingling skin, adrenaline coursing headily through her veins. Oh yes, Death is here. Exquisitely present, an old friend rediscovered at the end of the world. Yes, Death is here. The Almighty courses between them in the vivacious, thundering beat of her heart. Time stands still, because Death is here, and he wears a kelpie’s skin and a huntresses tiger coat. He is a whisper, a promise, the tension of song quivering in the wail of a strange island’s heart-stream. This is where Life is real, present, where everything is felt and experienced. Intimately held next to Death. Touching the flame. Pulled beneath the waves. A knife biting at the air where flesh had just occupied. Beneath the wolf’s crushing jaw, or the tiger’s claws. In the fight. At the precipice, the edge—ready to leap—to leap—
That proximity, so intimate, is gone before her mind can comprehend its depth. He withdraws and Boudika feels cold. They are well-versed in Death’s dance. Amoraq's nearness, his cold skin, is an unpoetic reminder of past brutalities—in his shape she sees hundreds of other shapes, and she remembers the weight of her trident at the end of her mind’s reach, the certain angle it must be wrenched from unmoving meat so that it does not catch on flesh or bone—
He has answered her. Her thoughts reel. Boudika cannot remember if she has ever given this water horse her name, or if she has kept it a secret between them. His does not come to her mind. Only water horse, only the cold breath of ice and the curious memory of her swimming in the winter sea. He could have killed me then.
A relic, the water horse replies, and draws away. The darkness is there again. It fills the space that opens, chasm-like, between them. They are hard, shadowed angles and lines. She is a fool. For a moment, disappointment wells within her, and she cannot name it, she cannot find the spring from which it spills. What would we hunt, she had asked, and he has given a kinder answer. In the empty darkness, in their growing distance, she hears another echo: each other. Her heart, however, is a writhing thing; an animalistic thing; and incomprehensibly, she thinks of Orestes’ teeth through the bars. Flashing sharp and long and wicked, but beautifully so. We aren’t savages, Copperhead. There is nothing as beautiful, as sacred, as the Hunt.
“And when we find it?” She cannot imagine an answer. Her head cocks in the darkness, and her movements are leonine when she trails in a tight, small circle around him. There is something enraged about her. Something fire-bright and hot, smouldering. Her tail lashes again, a smarting flick toward his chest.
And then she remembers his promise.
And I would help you look.
She stops. The sudden stillness at the center of a storm.
It does not matter why he wants to find it. It only matters that he does. Her mouth feels dry. He is the only one who could help me find him. She could say that. She means it. But those words do not come. Instead: “What do you love about the hunt?” Because she needs to know why she can hear the blood rushing in her ears.
Do her eyes not answer him, bleached by the moonlight, ethereal, belonging to the deep? Do they not say, anything?
e watches as she circles, the pale moon-shine of his eyes following her, his teeth barely kept behind his dark lips. When she snaps her tail toward him like a whip a shiver runs through his muscles, a tensing like his body is wanting to leap. But the unicorn only follows her with a tilt of his head, the long bone of his horn pointing like an accusing finger. “Is there nothing you would ask, if you won a favor from a god?” His voice is flat, distant and cold on this humid, symphonic island.
But he knows that she is right. Amaroq keeps no gods (none but the sea, and the stars, and the ice) and there is nothing this relic could mean to him, nothing suggested by the scant rumors he has chanced to hear. And yet - there is the island. There are the animals with eyes of stone and the flowers that drop pearls like perfect fruit. There is the music he has heard, sometimes, as he’s moved through the heart of the island like a patch of moonlight, a strange song born of the wind or the trees or the birds that shouldn’t be. And what else has the kelpie to do here (hunted, and alone) but look?
She stops. The crimson of her hair and head is the color of dried blood in the bluish night and her eyes burn out from the bone-pale of her face, needful, demanding. Impudent. If she were of his people (and how that thought stirs something in him, a want he quells with the cold control of a strangling fist) she might be praised for her questions, numerous as a new-whelped pup’s, or cuffed.
But she is foreign, strange as the island - except for the way she watches the sea. Except for the way she says the hunt.
For a long moment he is quiet, regarding her. Even in the wet heat of the island night his breath is a silver cloud between his teeth. There is only the stream laughing out to the sea, and the jungle dark and choking on both sides, and a woman who moves quick and restless as fire and himself, stoic and hard as ice. But this time, when he speaks, his voice is soft, and shifting, and holy as the aurora.
“I love that even the hare is made divine when the wolf’s teeth close around it’s neck.” His eyes flicker silver; the wind rises, pulling fingers through their hair, setting the bones and shells in his to soft chiming.
“I love how my body sings of purpose in each stretching sinew on a wild night coursing seals beneath the sickle moon.” It is hard not to think of home (to ache with the thought of it), and there is frost creeping up his fetlocks, forming delicate as lace in fractals down his back.
“I love how it is to hunt with my people, in harmony down to our breaths, each knowing the role they must play if we are to fill our bellies before the freeze comes.” And now that ice must have reached his heart, for it is tight with pain, seized between jaws that are closing. If he closed his eyes, he might see them: scores of kelpies limned in moonlight, horns like masts jutting from the surface of the sea, the blue-grey-silver of their pelts quick beneath the water. But Amaroq does not close his eyes; they seek out her own, they swallow her up.
At last he moves, quick as though coursing through water. His chest is a hairs-breadth from her shoulder, and he wonders if she feels the cold of him the way he feels the heat rolling off of her; he wonders how hot her blood runs beneath her flesh, whether it might smoke like a dragon’s if spilled. His muscular neck is arched, his muzzle above the nape of her neck, his teeth hidden behind dark lips until he begins to smile (and there is nothing kind in it; it is fierce with pride, a savage kind of joy).
”I love to know that for another day I am the strongest.”
It is difficult, to turn his head away until his gaze is level with hers. It is difficult, when he is so close, not to touch, not to taste, not to wonder -
And to know that she must be wondering, too.
Yet there is no blood in the air, only a night blooming strange around them. And his smile melts away until once more he is cold and impassive as a star.
“But I hunt to live, walker. It is my purpose and my birthright. Why do you?”
AT NIGHT I LISTEN TO MY DEAD HEART AND NAME IT AFTER A DEAD COUNTRY THE BIRDS IN MY BLOOD STOP MID-FLIGHT. WHEN I THINK OF YOU, A WAR ENDS.
The story is this:
Two enemies meet. Fire, and ice. In another world, Robert Frost writes:
From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire—
And Boudika’s heart beats in her chest; her blood becomes an orchestra. Her eyes remain a challenge as everything within her rises to a chorus, a crescendo pitch, a scream, the cry of valkyries.
And Robert Frost goes on to say:
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice
Boudika knows she is too close to his teeth. The proximity of his flesh is unnerving, exhilarating, and his words match the raging rhythm of her heart. A favour of a god… The words take the shape of her obsession. It is a question, inviting response; but hypothetical, rhetorical, and the mare bites her lip and refrains. She would reveal too much, by saying that she would ask, to bring them back.
The thought strikes her with the violence of a blow. Would that mean all of his people too? And staring at him, with the island humidity writhing from his skin in a steaming mist, she cannot help but think of horns cresting the water in moonlight, the swell of many bodies beneath the dark surface, bleached of colour. The whole scene is silver, silver, silver, just like the strange water horse before her. She asks: “What favour would you ask?” And in doing so she is filled with a strange and traitorous hope. But there is something trembling in her voice, and where his had the chipped quality of ice, her’s is the uncertain amble of a flame headlong into oblivion: consuming, consuming, consuming. Even itself.
Were they not both seeking a god for the same reason? Were they not drawn by the same words. A favour, a favour, a favour.
The story is this:
The shapes of two enemies meet. A hairsbreadth separates them. His neck is arched, his words are betrayers in their own right. “I love that even the hare is made divine when the wolf’s teeth close around it’s neck. I love how my body sings of purpose in each stretching sinew on a wild night coursing seals beneath the sickle moon. I love how it is to hunt with my people, in harmony down to our breaths, each knowing the role they must play if we are to fill our bellies before the freeze comes. His voice is music. It is the song of the Khashran, a new time and a new place; it possesses the divine simplicity of the wild. And without even realising it, Boudika is learning toward him; she is looking into his eyes, searching for an answer she knows is there. He is cold. He is ice. But she knows the intimacy of which he speaks—or nearly knows at least.
It reminds her sharply, exquisitely, of what she shared with Vercingtorix. It reminds her of their partnership; the way his body had been a continuation of her body and when the moved, they had always moved together. She guarded his throat when he lunged, and he circled back to protect her flank when she parried. There had been a beautiful intimacy to their work, to their hunt. It reminds her even more sharply—painfully so—of how beautiful they had been, an entire race. How she had scarcely seen anything as beautiful again, and it is the same beauty that Amaroq reminisces. Slightly terrible. Fearsome. The beauty that most are afraid to look at, to accept; because it is life and death, entwined.
The water horse breaks their stalemate. He moves with the rapidity of a viper and as her breath catches and her stomach drops, she thinks: I cannot live without this. His chest is nearly against her shoulder, and she feels the chill of his winter-skin. There is nothing passive about his posture, his arched neck and threatening muzzle—but she is strangely, not afraid. She is exhilarated. There is an arch to her neck, a leaning, an openness; she does not shy from him, she dares him with her eyes, her posture, with the leonine flick of her tail.
I love to know that for another day I am the strongest. Part of her wants to challenge him; it swells and rises within Boudika like the sea at high tide, and within her, too, is a fierce and dangerous pride. Her eyes flash bright garnet. Her eyes are tiger eyes, and the line of her mouth turns hard—until his question unhinges her. Until it takes the earth from beneath her, and she may as well be falling into the deep sea.
And she is left with the proximity of him, a glacier, a glacier with a heartbeat she can nearly echo.
His words are all she has ever known.
But it has never belonged to her; it has only belonged to her, the way a tiger’s pelt belongs to the hunter. The way the hunter spends their whole life watching the thing they kill, knowing it more intimately than they even know theirselves. But… how different does that really make them? I hunted, because its as my nature. And her eyes bore into him, and those words come back to her, again and again: because it is your nature.
So she says them. The thing she has always been afraid to confront; words borrowed from someone whom she had taken everything from. Words borrowed from someone who gave everything back to her. “Because it is my nature.” What else could she say? She could tell him the legends of her people, that hundreds of years ago they had been forced to interbreed with the water horses when they were vikings shipwrecked on Oresziah. She could say, I have more of the water and salt in me, than the rest of them. But it is simpler than that. It is I love the way the ocean sings and I don't know what to become without this, this, this--
It is her turn to play the game of proximity. She turns into his almost-touch, so there is no longer the threat of almost. Her shoulder brushes his chest, and her neck curves until they are nearly cheek-to-cheek. He is taller than her. But, eye-to-eye, she does not think it matters. The bones, the shells, the things he brings with him from the sea—they are singing, singing, singing. Boudika raises her head, presses her lips almost against his ear, and whispers:
“Let me show you… Catch me.”
She lunges away from him, across the stream, and into the jungle. The branches and vines tear at her, and above there is a chorus of mysterious animals, screaming, screeching, taking flight as she thunders past. She reminds herself: this is your element, even with the knowledge that he has to be pursuing, that he too must be running headlong into the darkness after her—
Toward the sea.
She doesn't know what happens next. She doesn't know what happens if--or when--he catches her. It is simply that for a moment, a brief and ephemeral moment, the story is this:
Two heartbeats running through the jungle, toward something they both know is beautiful, and terrible, and everything in between. The ocean is there, somewhere, if they can only run fast enough to reach it. It is the simplicity of one stride, and the next, and striving toward something that is an aching question in a dead night.
But I live to hunt, walker. It is my purpose and my birthright. Why do you?
