anything could be holy enough to save you
Boudika walks across the land bridge. Something in her belly aches, and aches, and aches. Her teeth are sharp against her gums and she is yet unaccustomed to their bizarre weight. Perhaps she returns to the island because it is the last place she was with Amaroq, and there is a part of her that regrets—more deeply than she will ever admit—that she never asked his name. Instead, Boudika can only think of him as the water horse—the one that turned her and then… disappeared.
The changing of the seasons marks the passage with more dispassionate resolution. He is not coming back. What had been at first been anger toward his abandonment of her transforms again, into loneliness. From loneliness it became despair. He had not abandoned her. This she knows, in the way every pack creature understands it is nothing without the pack, the pod, the herd, the pride. There is something wrong in his absence, something that greatly unsettles her. Of course, Amaroq had promised nothing; but there was a part of her that had wanted more, a teacher, a, a—
Boudika does not finish the sentence as the sea sings against the bridge, and the strange island opens up in the distance. She cannot finish the thought because to do so would break her heart. The fact the island is not what it once was finishes it for her, regardless.
When she reaches the island, Boudika is forced to confront her worst fear, provoked by August’s admission that he had seen someone asking for her in the markets. Vercingtorix. The name is painful in that it is both full of betrayal and nostalgia. Could he have killed him?
Boudika knows he had, if only because there had been a note sent to her by a raven in a script she knew to intimately.
It was simple.
You are one of them.
V.
Her teeth are there, still. She refuses to feel guilty for them and abandons the bridge, leaping into shallow water to make it ashore. Boudika has never seen such snow; it hurts her eyes. She allows it to distract her as she walks along the shore of the island, gazing inward distractedly.
It is not long before the faeries find her.
They are minuscule orbs of light, with some kind of telekinetic agency. They pull at her mane and tail, and sing archaically in her ears. Boudika does not know what they say, only that there is something mournful in it, something that causes the ache within her to echo.
She bares her teeth at them and lashes her tail. They do not leave her alone. After a moment, she tosses her head and begins to run. Despite all their magic, they either can’t or wont follow. Boudika stops once she is alone again, on the edge of the frosted sea.
Boudika is full of anger. It coils in her, a viper, an adder, ready to strike. She dives her hooves into the waves; dashes them against the crest; rears and crashes down.
With her teeth bared and seemingly alone, she roars at the sea and in that desperate snarl there is something that begs
why, why, why?
The world answers her with a sudden flurry of snow. It bites at her face and tangles in her mane; the cold stings her very lungs, but she screams again, hoarser than before, more demanding.
And still, the only answer is the sky, the waves, the snow.
The faeries find her again.
This time she does not run.
