"doused in mud, soaked in bleach"
This time when she lifts her chin and arcs the crusted wounds around her throat into the moonlight it's not shame than runs like oil through her veins. This time it's courage and bravery and pride that lick through her body like small, curling flames of red. The gesture fills the silence more than any chanting of a war-trumpet could.
Look, it says. Look, look. It even yells a little, bugling into the night shadows between them that seem, tonight, as wide as any sea. Look and see what glimmering wealth a crow thought to pick from my bones. She welcomes the sting of it and the pull of crusted blood on tender flesh.
Isra feels like she could carve the words her throat aches with deep into his bones (carve them like a brand).
Instead though, she swallows them all down like that raging acid. She devours everything but a soft whisper that sounds like the sigh of blade though moonlight. “It's not what he told me that matters.” For all their silence the words frost at her lips, air and moisture turned to ice and snow. She's winter steel, hard but brittle and hungry for a fire.
Each step she takes to close the distance between them brings more ice to her lips and the door behind them turns back to wood and closes with the sound a shovel makes against a gravestone. Acton has not come to Isra's room.
There is no Isra here, only rage and fury and righteousness. Now crow will survive the winter of her nor the spring that will rise to fill the belly of every orphan in all of Novus.
“It's what he showed me that stuck.” Isra waits until she's close enough for him to count the holes made in her skin by fang to speak again. She waits until she can count the veins running through the white in the corner of his eyes. And when she speaks again, the single stone between them changes into a flower, barbed and bladed.
Her voice almost whistles through the blades of metal as she lowers her nose to the metallic petals and breathes in pollen made of rust. “Raum showed me that I can have teeth too.”
Woe.
Woe to the man who showed her the sweetness of violence.
@Acton
