A lion does not rule the jungle as a king rules a throne. There are no laws writ by the point of his tooth or the tip of his claw. In his eyes there is not a gavel hammer look of justice, or vengeance, or compassion. Upon the lion’s brow there is no crown and on his shoulder there is no blade. He has nothing but his violence, his hunger, his gurgling belly that demands flesh and blood and bones upon which to pick the sinew out.
But even the lion, with his violence and hunger, is a mere sheep in the face of his lioness when the spring comes.
Amaunet is no lioness caught in the jungle boughs with humidity dusting her cheekbones with dew. She is no thing tethered to a pack with something as mortal as hunger to give birth to the violence in the curl of her neck and the snap, snap, snap of her wings as she pushes back the darkness with the rose gold blush of her skin. Amaunet, born out of a pack of wolves and lions, has long been a creature starved even in the middle of war.
And tonight, just before dawn, she is not starvation but the dark and bloody thing in the belly of it.
Each of her feathers feels like paper and her gold feels like chains hooked and waiting around her pretty, hollow throat. The dunes are clouds beneath her feet rolling and parched of rain. The city’s fire embers smoldering at the coldest edges of her white-blue inferno. There is music somewhere in the distance playing a eulogy to all the soft things dissolving in the acid of her wrath. And when she starts to hum it is the sound of marching feet and men with collars around their necks smiling as they lay their spines upon a butcher’s block.
The low moon is a pearl crown shed from the tangles of her forelock. It is not the scythe it should have been when the stallion told her to come. A lioness does not listen to the lion when he tells her which buffalo to gut from heart to live.
Again, it must be remembered, that she is no lioness. She does not gut from heart to liver to feed the starving pride and the gluttonous king. Amaunet does not share.
But still she waits a week late, an arrogant thing that does not bow her head and listen closely to the tip of a horn laid against her pulse point. Somewhere that music is still playing and her lips are still alive with the wasps in the sound of men with collars around their necks heading off to war.
He had waited for her, that first night, until daylight made its bloody birth, until crimson began to fade to pale pearl-blue, until the midnight-things crept away to their dens and the buzzards woke.
And when he returned at last to his rooms he was furious, his muscles tense with hot blood that had nowhere to go. If he had known of the fighting-pits, then, he may have worn out his frustration there. Instead he fell asleep with it, a black poison pooling around his heart, but even then it was better, far better, than thinking of Isra.
After that he didn’t return.
But he found an orphan boy with wings as sooty as a city dove and paid him a penny each night he kept watch. A week later, as he is scraping his horn along the windowsill of his room as though it is a whetstone, there comes a hesitant tap at the door. Behind it is the boy, and Martell knows that she has come.
Still he does not hurry down to the threshold of the desert like a young lover giddy with the promise of a kiss. He takes his time, watched only by the moon as he moves down the city streets. It sits like a fat drop of gold on the line of the horizon and is disappearing behind it when he joins her at last.
The unicorn finds that his rage is no less for having waited. Maybe that was her intent - for him to seethe and pace like a tiger on a chain. But he thinks that she is young, and foolish, and too used to having what she wants. Martell thinks that he will teach her that the sun will not always rise and set on her command.
“I thought, perhaps, you were afraid.” His voice is cold as the desert night, level as the surface of the sleeping oasis. The unicorn stops before her, near enough each of their heat brushes up against the other - but he does not yet touch. In this way only does he ask for permission. In this way only is he a gentleman.
“Instead I find that you are insolent, which is far worse. Is there anything that is not a game to you, Amaunet?” Her name is another kind of warning, for she had never given it to him.
But Martell thinks that he will take more than that from the desert-city and from her. He will take everything that he wants.
There has always been a thrill in the sight of something dangerous, some hidden monster of the flesh, rolling across the dunes to her. Her heart quivers and her skin spikes into a feverish glow at the deadly gleam of his pearl horn in the moonlight. The pulse in her veins stutters and takes up a dim echo of his steps through the dunes-- slow enough and steady enough that she knows no man, no mortal beast of war, is not so still without a hundred oceans of rage rising in a tidal wave against his skin.
This icy look in his gaze, full of a careless and emotionless warning, is why she did not come the first night.
And when he pauses before touching her, she wants to laugh at his askance at the gates of her. She had hoped, as all hunters that hope for a thrilling chase, that he would take his horn and cut tameness into her skin with nothing more than a snarl.
Amaunent has no want, no need for a gentlemanly thing. Chivalry and softness are nothing more than bones whittled down and strapped to the tip of her training spear. She devours things that ask and so perhaps, she thinks, she will devour him.
Part of her had hoped to be tamed, or chased, or hunted like the queen teryr in her bloody cave.
But perhaps he is no better than any foolish idol of violence that thinks to best her in the pits. Perhaps he is no better than a boy with a leash in his mouth attached to a tiger called a pet. Perhaps he is no better, no more dangerous, than a thing raised and felled by the chaos in her blood.
Her smile is a feral thing, all feral and violent and bright as his horn in the moonlight. The sound her wings make as she snaps them out against him is deafening in the night (the one that is only not-silent by the hush, hush, hush of their heartbeats and their lungs). And she does not try to push him away but pull him closer, close enough that his horn is whittled down into a weapon of touch instead of war.
Amaunet does not want a war with him-- not yet.
“What had you expected, unicorn,” a warning for a warning and a touch for an askance of one, “if not a game?” It is always easier, in the end, to swallow up a nameless thing.
The general has his answer in her pleased Cheshire smile, wider than the moon’s and prouder than a lion’s.
Oh, if he had his knife he would flay it from her face - or maybe he’d carve it wider, press the point of his blade to the dimple of her cheek, ask her why she smiles. His anger has always been held in a firm grip on a tight leash; it should trouble him, that it’s snapping now. There is something about all this sand, so like and so unlike his homeland, that makes him want to see how much blood it can swallow up.
Of course he doesn’t think it’s her doing (not that all of it is; he was tipping already so close to chaos). Martell does not fully understand the magic here, how common it is in so many veins, a toxin from a poisoned well.
If he knew, maybe he would have rethought before reacting. Or maybe he would have struck all the harder, determined to do more than bring her to her knees.
Her wings enfold him, an embrace that blocks the pre-dawn blush and surrounds him with a darkness filled only with the heady scent of her. For a moment they may have been lovers, locked in intimate embrace; for a moment his horn shivers along the hollow of her throat, his teeth pressed against his lips pressed against her breast-bone.
And then he twists his head (careless of where his horn goes, what resistance it meets or cuts), seizes one of her long flight-feathers in his teeth, and tears.
