If there is a gleam that grows in his new-leaf gaze, there is one in her own that answers back. And maybe this is only how the two of them will really communicate: a shift of a hoof, a look in their eyes, a tap of a blade and a shiver of feathers. There is a coldness to her look, stone-hard instead of embers, twilight instead of spring. She is ticking down the number of his bones like seconds, and each one, each tibia and rib-bone and tooth, is a piece of him by which she might scry for the truth in his marrow.
This is how Thana decides, suddenly, that there is no place in all of Novus dark or deep enough for the poachers to hide.
He talks of the creatures of the woods, and death, and everything hungry in Thana cracks and unbinds itself from the aching places of her soul. She moves, finally, and it's quicker than the rot circles spreading out in arcane apocalypse patterns around her. And when her blade rises up behind her, like a cobra, there is only the sigh of it through the air and the whisper of movement in the tangles of her mane to suggest any gentleness in her movement at all. She remembers how easy it was to hold her weapon at the throat of her Regent, how easy it was to imagine rivers of his blood filling the cracks of the library floor.
It feels like it would be just as easy, to kill this boy who talks about hiding creatures and dead woods. Who says, never were, as if there is nothing left in this forest to save.
She thinks it might feel like coming home.
“Ah,” The sound of it falls from her lips not like language but like a gavel, or a guillotine, falling hard and fast for a spinal chord. She feels it wrapping around her throat like a noose even after the sound of it has faded into the silence of the fearful forest. “And what do you know of the tracks not running straight?” Each word is another gavel, another blade, another bit of her that's unbound from the parts that have learned to miss budding trees and unfurling flowers. She can imagine his blood too, leeching into the forest and the river like rain.
Because Thana knows that nothing being hunted in a forest can run straight, not through the thick trees and the bits of ice caught between bare roots sticking up like bones. She knows that the poachers understand the flight of hunted things. How else are traps and graves set down like maps on tables?
She moves closer still and lifts her nose up towards him. She inhales him like a lion inhaling the feast at the watering hole, she inhales like a wolf when a mountain cat is too close to her den. She inhales like she needs all the secrets of him more than she needs air (and like she needs violence more than that). Part of her, the one that Ipomoea asked to stay, knows that she should step away from him and do something more befitting a council member.
But--
To the marrow of her bones, and the wrath of her form, and the glacier of her magic, Thana is made for killing. So there is only the thought that perhaps she should not tilt both her weapons towards him like offering to a false god. There is only the thought, that stays caught in the tiny bound part of her, that dissolves to dust with her rage that has done nothing but grow, and grow, and grow.
Like death it has grown.
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