Perhaps fear should fill her like liquid nitrogen; perhaps it should freeze her blood, still her heart, send her limbs trembling. But Boudika is a huntress, now; and if she is a huntress this storm is her camouflage, the long grass through which she wades. How many tales of sailors drowning in such a tempest are there, in which it was not the storm that did the deed but some ghostly screaming beneath the sea? There is something archaic within her that laughs, nearly joyous. Yes. It is terrifying. Even if she had lied Boudika would have known the truth, even if she had lied simply looking at Anandi’s delicate, beautiful features it would be easy to discern you were made for a different kind of hunt.
Yet the remnants of Boudika that remain civilised feel privileged by the confession, just enough to take the hard edge from her expression, just enough to still the strange, predatory angle of her head. In a tone strangely dry for the circumstance, and darkly ironic, Boudika says, "Why? It’s only one side of the nature of the sea.” Can Anandi not feel it? The humid, intense pull? The way the storm was brought in by the waves, by the chill of the ocean crashing with the heat of the land?
Rather than retreat from her approach, Anandi nears her. There is no way for Boudika to know that once her Maker held Anandi’s throat between his strong jaws in a silent, predatory threat beneath the water. She could not have known. But she felt the same urge now; the urge that belongs to the lion crushing a still-blind leopard cub. Boudika works her mouth. Her tail flicks slow, thoughtful, with all the indolence of some great cat.
But in the end, Boudika steps toward her; she steps so close she brushes the length of her jaw along Anandi’s neck. Her breath rests at the nape of Anandi’s ear, nearly an embrace. “You know what has happened to me.” It could have happened no differently. Boudika would never have been able to master Anandi’s thoughtless grace, her beautiful but delicate intensity. No. Boudika always belonged to something less refined, more granular, a different type of atrocity. Perhaps a little more honest. Perhaps more bare-boned. Boudika rests there for a long moment, her mouth stretched long and ugly and glistening with each thick, leopard-seal like tooth against Anandi's side.
Then she draws away and takes another step toward the route Anandi must have taken to reach her.
Boudika’s ears flick back toward the cliffside, and the sea; her mind fills momentarily with the image of plunging from a cliff after two entangled bodies and she wonders how different things would have been if she had leapt like this, full of vigour, full of intensity. But then her ears flick forward; her tail lashes; she says, “Then lead the way, Anandi.”
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