your heart and my heart are very old friends
Everything she had heard of him is true. The way he is a burnished gold, a palomino so bright he can hardly be considered such. His scars are exactly as she remembers, but now they are filled with an inner luminescence, a glow that is from within and without. They are cool silver in the night, without his god’s blessing. They look more like tattoos rather than burnings, metal seared into his flesh to bind his Soul. His expression is aghast; ravaged; he stares at her like a man condemned, but Boudika cannot blame him. The past does come back to haunt. When she had heard of Vercingtorix in Novus, well, it had gutted her as deftly as any knife. It had almost made her wish she was dead.
But Boudika wasn’t. And she measures Orestes with her eyes when he says, calmly: Yes. And who are you?
She knows how magic changes. She understands how it saturates the pores and can make someone become other, beyond themselves and whatever they had been. Perhaps that had happened to him, when the sea forsake him. Perhaps that had happened to him, when the Sun God saw something of promise in his fragile soul and so breathed new life into the Prince of a Thousand Tides. As she thinks it, she repeats: “Prince Orestesiahzrah’Zanrekiah’reta’Mournansuin." His full name. The name given to him by his people. The name she pronounces fluently, effortlessly. It is unclear if Boudika is answering his question, or simply repeating his name.
He is staring hard, as if trying to discern something past her skin. Boudika, after holding his gaze, glances out to the sea.
The sea—always, always back to the sea. Where life begins. Where it is so swiftly taken. Where the world repeats itself, again and again, a rebirth, a resurrection, a condemning. All things come from the sea; and all water leads itself back.
Except, perhaps, for him.
He follows her gaze out to the waves as they crash against the Solterran coast, all sand. The dunes meet the water and where they meet is a colliding of two very different, barren worlds. It is a little like that, Boudika thinks, between them now. All of this time of anticipation, all of her searching, Amaroq’s words resurfaced—and I would help you—seem to pale in comparison to the moment, the actualisation of her want.
She had never expected to find him. And she had never, ever anticipated the rumours that surrounded his being; that he was the Sovereign of a desert kingdom, made barren with tyranny and dissent.
But the woman who began to look for him, and the woman who found him, are two very different people.
“There is a land far away where the Old Gods reign.” Her voice, even, seems to belong to the distant gust of coastal wind. “And in this land there are a people who have warred, and warred, and warred. They could not have been more opposite, these people. One, patriarchal, almost agnostic. The other, matriarchal and devout to the mother sea. They were at war because the foreigners who colonised the island could not leave, because of a magic keeping them there. The magic of the natives, the Khashran.” Her voice cradles the word. Khashran.
She had participated in the genocide against them. She had ended it, even, when she had followed Orestes and Vercingtorix from the cliffside to save one of them.
The memories belong, it feels, to a girl. Young, naive, adventurous. Someone who had known pain, and suffering, but as a type of fairytale. The adventure-novel of soldiers. The poetry of warriors. All of it was so romantic and yet she stands here with a regret so enormous it cannot be quantified.
“The Last Prince of the people, the one who carried the Souls of all the rest and all their memories, came one day to ask for peace. They had been at war so long, all the other Princes were dead or forgotten. I think he cared the most. My father before me had Bound a Prince; and his father before him. It had become a kind of family tradition, irrevocable and necessary. But the Prince I bound, the Prince of the Thousand Tides, the Prince of the Lost People, the Last Prince—he was the most beautiful thing I have ever destroyed.” Somewhere, the story—meant to be pragmatic, distanced—is lost in the actuality, is lost in the myth. What begins as a fairytale ends with a confession.
As she had been speaking, Boudika sheds her magic skin as one does a cloak—Orestes’s old colours drain away until, standing before him, was only Boudika with her stretched jaw. How could she ever say, I became what I once killed or do you see, I regret it?
When Boudika looks at him again, wrenching her gaze from the water on the horizon, it is to say: “You made me love the sea.”
Perhaps she had always loved it. Perhaps it has always been in her woman’s blood, when the first settlers were forced to breed with Khashran women to keep their lines going. Perhaps it had always been in her blood.
But looking at him now, she is filled with such strange devotion and remorse: she knows he is not who he had been. How could he be, mortal, Soul Bound, his people taken from him when he had begged for peace and they had refused? Her eyes are wet. What he had given to her was uneven, and unfair. He had given her herself when she had deserved his condemnation, his hatred, his disdain. It is in your nature.
“It sings to me at night, and it says you are no longer a part of her.” Then: “I am Boudika. And I fall asleep every night to the memory of a sinking ship, beside you, and the way when the waves engulfed me I did not feel fear. I only heard the song of the sea.”
