It had been weeks, and she could still taste the water. The nasty grain of it, flat against her teeth and tongue, stinging at her nostrils, her throat, her eyes. She could still taste the mineral quality, so sharp, that it brought to mind pools of blood or sharpened, razor-edged metal. She smelt it. She smelt it far from the shore, she smelt it in her dreams.
It was a combination of rot and life rolled into salt, seaweed, sand, sun, angry, angry smells. Whenever Boudika believed she had at last escaped, at long last, it came back to her—in a slight catch of the breeze, the sweat from her very skin, or when she was on the brink of sleep, the scent rushed back, aggressive, sickening, overpowering.
Boudika could admit she had not been doing all in her power to dissuade the scent; it was her last attachment to a life she no longer lived, to a self she no longer identified with. And so with it came a certain comfortable—and malevolent—familiarity. It did not smell of the Terminus Sea off the Night Court coast. No. It was all violence and cliffs and pitch black sand, that she smelled. It was a land far away and not far enough; and it clung to her skin, her dreams, her very breath. A haunting. A soliloquy of poetic images; all belonging utterly to themselves, and no longer to her. An addictive nostalgia.
That is how she awoke, long before the sun would rise. With the taste fresh in her mouth. Storm water and salt dreams. It was a routine she had practiced many times since arriving at the Court—and so she stirred from her slumber and rose, creeping quietly from the court to the outer reaches of the territory, seeking solace.
The only thing, ironically, that allowed her to escape the torture of it was to exercise in the same fashion as her youth. Vigorously.
Boudika had been running since before the sun. Having awoken early that morning, sweat-soaked and fresh with the taste of the sea in her dream, she escaped to the prairie. There was nothing like it on her homeland; nothing remotely close to the vast hills and grasses, with the brilliant and brazen sky overhead. No. Her home was mountainous island terrain, rugged forests, and always the sea—beckoning, beckoning.
Out on the prairie, she could not smell the sea.
She pounded along the earth in the sweet darkness of pre-dawn. The stars illuminated her path, and the moon; and Boudika followed no path, save one—forward. Pushing, always forward, toward the mountain range. Her route skirted the strange maze and took her over hill after hill, always summiting, practically chasing the sunrise. Her new life of an entertainer could not give this sort of challenge to her; dancing and song did not accomplish the rigorous vindication of weakness that came from pure physical suffering. It did not surmount her limits, or challenge her to truly strive. This did. Her lungs burned fiercely; her muscles trembled with each limitless, leaping bound. So she ran; and she ran for hours.
Boudika was a god.
Far from the sea.
Watching the sun crest the horizon, turning the world bloody, as though the Novus gods were warring in the sky they all claimed—and then daylight, breaking across the Night Court violently, casting the prairie to shades of gold and enshrining Boudika in the same hue. At some point she had turned back toward the Court, despite her desire to go where she had not gone—the mountains had loomed large and foreboding before her, and she reached for them. But it was not for today.
She slowed from her ceaseless, mile-eating canter into a walk. The Court came into view once more. However, Boudika was lathered in sweat, and unprepared to journey back toward civilisation—there was a restlessness in her heart that warranted more, more, more, and yet she could not name it. So she turned away, back toward the proclaimed wilds—searching with her crimson eyes, wanting something she could neither find nor name.
A name whispered at her from her heart somewhere, almost like a prayer—Orestes, Orestes, Orestes? it said, with an infuriating question mark. And her mind answered, fierce logic: dead, dead, dead.
And then Boudika smelled the sea, and she was no longer so certain. But her ear flicked away the direction of her distant gaze—had she heard something? Was she no longer alone? The thought brought a nervous prick to her limbs and a flutter to her heart. She was in no state for company, with foam on her haunches and withers, her chest heaving in great breaths, her mind half-wild for something Boudika did not know.
