the sea speaks more honestly to those willing to drown
Boudika smells her before she sees her.
It is flesh and blood and warmth, and things that make her mouth water.
Boudika smells her before the kind words, or kinder smile, reach her.
It is lavender and chamomile tea and wood burning.
Boudika smells her, and that smell ignites every visceral instinct within her new body. This ignites a new resonant scream, pinched off and pained, as a creature born with such primal urges would know how to curb them. She does not. No. She does not, because her maker has left her.
The copper-headed mare snaps her neck in the direction of the newcomer. Her eyes focus on Corrdelia, and Boudika registers that there is nothing but kindness in the stranger's violet eyes.
Something else within her sings a song. Something else drags Boudika foot-by-foot into the sea, until it laps at her knees. Seaweed tangles in her hooves. The tide drags her out, out, out, and her expression softens. Her mouth longs to form the words that will bring the storm-coloured stranger into the sea—
But Boudika does not. She stands there, looking forlornly over a shoulder, the wind whipping her mane into a frenzy. She says, “The sea is saying something I cannot yet understand.”
A long silence.
The pull of water.
The high whining of the faeries laughter. And then Boudika turns from the sea to face the kind stranger. Her mouth almost wavers into a smile, but a tiger—even one made, and not born—knows that to do so would show it’s teeth. And so Boudika does not smile.
When Boudika asks, “How long did it take you to learn how to fly?” there is nothing left but the lavender, the chamomile, the warm smell of burning cedar. There is something sandpapering her edges; something smoothing out the hunger that roars, fathomless and bewildered, within her.
