WERE I IF I COULD, I WOULD ERASE YOUR ARMOUR RIGHT WHERE YOU STAND, BURNISHED HEAD TO HEEL BY SUN, A VERITABLE GOD. I WOULD TAKE THE SPEAR AND RETURN THE LYRE, but i can only stare at your golden back as you march off to the dance of war--
If the conditions were different, Boudika would recognise the other woman for what she was much more quickly. Despite all the unfamiliarity of Novus, one thing remains unerringly the same: the military is the military is the military. Irregardless of branch or sect, Day Court or Night Court, Dawn or Dusk, a rigid discipline and soldierly aura occupies members of “soldiering class”. It is more apparent in this pegasus than many others, even as Boudika whirls on her with all the fury of a tigress cornered. The air steams out of their nostrils, creating small clouds. Perhaps they are little more than atmosphere, this high in the mountains. Those semi-opaque clouds drift and disappear between them, and Boudika’s hot fury is met by a cool, weapon-sharp and weapon-grey gaze. Marisol is made of mountain crags. She is wings and dark, dark, dark earth with blooming red hips, lips, and those wings again.
Boudika takes a few long moments to assess her new companion. The answers are there in the close-cropped mane and the hard-lined physique that suggest not just toil, but years of disciplined physical training. Boudika knows this, because her frame reflects similar discipline. It is there in the sharpness of their faces, the tautness of their brows, the confident set of their shoulders and necks. Boudika’s eyes narrow and her anger simmers into embarrassment. Of course. Out of all of Novus’ occupants, the one that finds her screaming atop a mountain had to be a soldier. Her throat burns. Boudika recognises the tears as they swell, but do not fall. She recognises the sting it takes to hold them back. Because what had she always been taught? What had been the basis of her education? Discipline. And here she was, loosing it, and it was to easy for her to list the long sum of men she had just disappointed in her expressive weakness. Thank the gods, Boudika thinks, with a tinge of seething bitterness. That they are all dead or as good as dead.
“No,” Boudika’s answer is curt and immediate. “This is my first time here.”
Then she lets the silence grow, and drag. Heavy between them. Her eyes are hard, and there is a part of her that echos Marisol’s unspoken sentiment: yes, she would love a fight. She would love a physical entity to vent her frustrations on. She would like the dig her teeth into flesh and forget everything but copper and iron. But too quickly her mind fills with the repercussions of such a vice: and there are bodies, and there is Orestes, and there is the pit-fall wrongness of what have I done.
So the silence stays silence, until she speaks again.
“What court are you?”
Boudika wonders if she really cares. She wonders if it means anything. Really, it doesn’t, to her. But she asks it anyway, hoping that by playing a part of Courts with Kings and Queens it will make her feel a little more grounded, a little more belonging. She turns from the cliffside, from the edge, and in the back of her mind her scream continues to resound. You pretended to be good enough and now she is a hollow thing, full of that scream, afraid of her own thoughts of violence. “You’re a soldier.” It is not a question, and she does not know why she says it, only that she does. And her eyes are almost accusatory. They do not betray her earlier pinprick of tears. They do not betray the yawning chasm of her heart that beats like a hollow drum and aches, aches, aches to scream again, to scream I used to be one, too.
But now she is only a dancer, who dances to war-songs.
Now she is only… only… what?
And she cannot finish the sentence. In the absence of an answer, she feels the winter's cold for the first time.
