elif
Of course he challenges her, and of course Elif lifts her chin again, baring her dark throat another inch, the band of wool around it a scarlet as bright as a cut. Each line of her is defiant as a hawk, her spine bold as the back of the desert dunes. In her ignorance (of what he knows, what he has done, the truth in that pearl-toothed smile) she is as solid as Solterra, ready to withstand.
“Nothing,” she repeats, only her eyes moving as they watch him, and her voice is firm and fierce. Oh, her tongue is a flame that will burn her someday. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold -
It is a lesson she has never learned; perhaps her brother might have taught it to her. Perhaps he had never learned it either.
Nearer he comes, a shadow or a storm sweeping across the desert toward her. Elif’s ears turn back, dislike clear on her stark, strange features. When his feathers brush against hers like curtains sighing sighing against each other in the wind her nostrils flare, even as she takes in each dripping loop of gold along his neck. Altogether they remind her of a snake, languid on a branch - and yet warning danger.
Almost she recognizes him as a fellow noble, then - the way he moves, the way his gaze assumes ownership of all things, some flash of remembrance from a meeting or a ball - but before she can open her mouth to say anything at all she catches movement from the corner of her eye.
Never is he forgotten as she watches the gryphon step out from the craggy shadows, moving like a drop of molten gold, but her focus is only dimly on the stallion.
His panic is as contagious as a fever and she can feel the quickening drumbeat of her heart, the way it urges her feet to follow. His voice is low and rough as canyon-stones where wind whines and rushes between the cracks and almost Elif flees for the door.
But her mind is as nimble as her desert-bred body and she remembers the way he had been lounging, like a lion himself, like this was his lair. There would be no nest secret from him, not in his kingdom. And her blood is hot as an offering, and she did not come here to run, no matter what she found.
“You aren’t alone,” she says, and rises into a rear, hooves flashing and wings flaring, daring the beast to meet her.
@
