HERE IS WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU: ICARUS LAUGHED AS HE FELL. THREW HIS HEAD BACK AND YELLED INTO THE WINDS, ARMS SPREAD WIDE, TEETH BARED TO THE WORLD. (THERE IS A BITTER TRIUMPH IN CRASHING WHEN YOU SHOULD BE SOARING.)
Her reflection wavers, nearly imperceptibly, in the gleam of the knife.
And Boudika experiences something strange, in that nearly undetectable glimmer of light and colour. We are not so different. Wasn’t that clear from their locked stares, the meeting of an unmovable object and unstoppable force? Wasn’t there a battle of equal wills, in their stretched silences, in the cruel humour of the silver captain’s smile, or the apathy of the tiger’s eyes? Was there not something to be said for Boudika’s jealousy, her anger, her emotions that for one moment were directed at this creature she recognized as the same and utterly different? I hate them too, her throat closed around the words, around tears, around a scream. Because that was untrue. I love them.
All because of a carving. All because of how intimately Boudika knows what it feels like to drown.
An interesting reputation is necessary.
In her mind: locks of her crimson hair falling to her father’s short, strokes of a knife. You cannot give them a reason to doubt you. The whispers, of the boys at the academy: didn’t you hear, her father, the general—when Bondike was a colt, the general took him to the sea and pushed him under the waves, and left him for hours, for th—the Khashran… and they came out of the sea, but didn’t take him? Vercingtorix, almost smiling, in the way that he did, when she drew blood in a long line on his cheek during a spar: you’ll always be faster than me. Her father, after the capture of Orestes, staring at her with respect for the first time in her life: you dove off the cliff, after them—and Boudika, not knowing to say whether it was out of fear of failure or love.
What is reputation? The academy, again, when she was punished for speaking out against an instructor—the weight of the rock sled as she dragged it, inch by inch, across the courtyard. The spectators as they watched, cheered, celebrated. She was the first of her class to complete the task. The only one who had not collapsed from exhaustion, to be dragged to the infirmary covered in sweat. Years later, her father: you took the Prince of a Thousand Seas, you took him by yourself— days, weeks, months later: walking down the Main Street of the city, as those she had fought so hard to defend threw rocks and stinging copper coins, screaming, betrayer, betrayer. The weight of the iron on her back could have been a cross. The way Orestes had first looked at her with the hateful apathy of a shark. The way he had later sung to her, the way he said, always said, it is in your nature.
It must be a novelty, Boudika thinks, to have the consistency to keep a reputation. Reputations mean nothing to her, a mare who had been first a savour, then a betrayer. A warrior who had been a general’s son, and later Oresziah’s banished daughter. Reputations were illy fit words, transient, unreliable. Perception, after all, was the only reality that matters. And reputation could never survive to perception, whatever it was. The only thing that had ever changed, Boudika thought. Was that I revealed myself as a daughter instead of a son. That was all it had taken, to skin her deeds of their meaning and bleed them dry.
Then there were the silver captain’s words, following Boudika’s deflated sense of anger, of righteousness. Her realisation, that they were not so different. Not a myth, or a story. Not a killing, either—just a warning, but not to sailors. And I’m a pirate. I don’t care much for tact. The Dark Strider. Once, the Sea Star, before my… before she went down in a storm, with the rest of my crew. I sail wherever the winds and interesting rumours take me—we rarely follow a set routes, and we seek what we can find. The story comes together between the aching silences, the stretching tension. It comes together in bits and pieces, just barely, and Boudika’s expression does not change. She knows she is too intense. She knows her eyes are too hard, too unwavering. Yet there is an honestly to the other woman that Boudika respects, that she appreciates.
Boudika wouldn’t have caught the nearly unnoticeable shift, the pause, if not for her intensity. The other woman states: once, the Sea Star, before my… the trailing off, the changing of thoughts, the shift of the sharp smile to something raw, jagged, wounded. Boudika would not have caught it, if not for her stubborn, predatory intensity. To someone else, the threads may not connect so easily. But it is a familiar patchwork to Boudika, a tapestry, where the story of a ship sunk in a storm to a mass of water horses weaves itself. Boudika sees them in her mind's eye, with gleaming skin and bright, predatory eyes. A feeding frenzy, like sharks overtop one another. It is too easy for her to see a horse gutted, and blood blooming like so many roses in the water. It is too easy to remember what it is like to drown, lightening and waves swelling large, mountainous, crashing overhead. Perhaps this is why the woman needed such a reputation.
Yes. Boudika understands this, more than any other thing. And perhaps she is overthinking; perhaps she is connecting constellations that do not exist, inventing a story she wants rather than knows. But her heart longs to feel not-alone, and in the brief, raw hurt of the other woman’s grief—that ephemeral, nearly imaginary shift, like light on water—Boudika thinks she understands. She knows what it feels like to rot inside.
She only asks, “Do you still love the sea?”
And waits.
And waits.
Boudika is too afraid to share her own truths. Passage. Rumours. Neither. A soul who knows my hurt. But the image of the carving remains fresh in Boudika’s mind, and she knows this woman does not yet understand how to love something she hates and, maybe, fears. So Boudika steels herself, and gives a truth. “I don’t know.” And in giving it, the rest comes. “I’m from an island that kills them. The water horses. An island with black cliffs and rock beaches, rain, fog. We’ve fought them for centuries. There aren’t any here, not really. Not like they are out at sea.” But how does she also say, I miss hearing them sing, at night, from the village. I miss their ghostly cries on the beach, and seeing them run in the shape of water, moving into the shape of something else? How does she say: without them, I don’t know who I am?
The huntress stares at the other huntress. She stares, and she knows, and doesn’t know. And her throat is tight and her eyes are steely, and she hates and loves this woman in the way she hates and loves everything that reminds her of the past. The aching in her is a hollow ring, the feeling of glass shattering, the sound of it beautiful even as it breaks. She at last moves, breaking the stalemate that has erected itself between them. Boudika shifts, her muscles slack with the leonine grace of something that can kill or laze, and leans against the wall a foot or so from the other woman. The Night Court is alive around them but Boudika feels as though, for a moment, they share a grave.
THE WAX SCORCHED HIS SKIN, RAN BLAZING TRAILS DOWN HIS BACK, HIS THIGHS, HIS ANKLES, HIS FEET. FEATHERS FLOATED LIKE PRAYERS PAST HIS FINGERS, CLOSE ENOUGH TO SNATCH BACK. DEATH BREATHED BURNING KISSES AGAINST HIS SHOULDERS, WHERE HIS WINGS JOINED THE HARNESS. THE SUN PAINTED EVERYTHING IN SHADES OF GOLD. (THERE IS A CERTAIN BEAUTY IN SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE AND WATCHING FROM THE CENTRE OF THE FLAMES.)
@Locust
