W
inter in Denocte reminds of her of her first coming here; it reminds her of racing every day to the mountain and coming back by sundown to perform, a dancer, a pacifist. Those days are distant; they belong to a girl so different she is nearly a stranger.Boudika returns to the city, however, because it is her home as much as the sea is. There is a reason water horses have legs and not only fins; and there is a strange, foreign comfort she feels in smelling the wood smoke and walking past the citizens. She nearly returned to Denocte wearing another’s face—anyone’s face, but her own—but the idea seemed too much a lie, and so she had refrained from using her magic to veil her visit.
Instead, Boudika simply is.
She is the bonfires, and the singing streets, and the clamorous sound of voices in Denocte’s City Square. Normally so vibrant, the mare feels subdued tonight; quieted, as ghosts so often are. She haunts her old ventures; she even visits the tavern where she had performed, night by night. But then Boudika leaves it from where she watches through the window. She leaves it easily, as she has left everything else: with a delicate severing of ties, with the understanding it was never her own. And she returns to the hungry, boisterous streets of the city she loves.
There are lovers and children, patrons closing shop and innkeepers opening their own. The air is full of smoke and fog, and the city is beginning to lay to rest; quietly. Boudika is beginning to walk back toward the docks, toward the sea.
Until she hears the chiming.
Until she hears a sound like the sea, but in mourning.
Boudika wants to turn away. But the sound itself grounds her. While she is distracted, the two dragons abandon perch and fly away; the fog seems deep, impenetrable, as if brought in from the shore. Boudika had not noticed it so intensely before, so clearly—but it seems a harbinger of something else, something—
Someone she had thought dead.
Or lost.
(Really, is it not the same?)
Boudika wrenches herself from her stupor; she turns her neck to glance down the street and sees him there, clearly. The spire of his horn catches her eyes first; but it is the sound of the bones and shells chiming in his mane that captures her, that prevents her from running—it sounds like,
it sounds like
going home. The way the surf tumbles stones, sand, glass, shells end-over-end.
Boudika waits; she watches him, the way the crowd parts as if he is a blade cutting through it. She aches in a way she does not expect.
It is the ache of longing; of looking at something that should have been with the knowledge that it never became what it was meant to. The possibility is what hurts her; the resonant knowing of, he should have been there. With her. Teaching her, guiding her, helping her Become.
And he had left.
It is the burning question that keeps her from leaving.
Why?
Boudika approaches him with the confidence of a wildcat; she parts the crowd as he does and meets him in the street.
It is not right, she thinks, to be meeting here. For their reunion to be between the smothered streets of Denocte instead of the wide open coastline; if they had been there, she thinks, she might have been joyous. But here—she is stifled; she feels outside herself.
“You left.” Boudika says. Not a question, or even an accusation.
Just a matter of fact.
this is who we were, before bones, before dirt, even before light
this untameable expanse, this blue mirror of god. this heaving,
churning proof that we have always been deep, restless souls.
