Battle-fury is still an aching drumbeat in her bones when her father's staff drape the regalia across her shoulders, coat her skin in gold-dust, and paint bloody lines of red in a half-moon below her eyes. Her teeth throb like a mouthful of hearts as they braid her hair and whisper the rumors of the court into her ears. Amaunet wants to tear into them like a feral thing, a monstrous thing, a thing that is not bruised and battered from the tournament.
They will never see your wounds, they whisper in her ears like ghosts, all they will see is gold. She tries not to hate them, these dove-like fools, flitting on the edge of her sword and calling it a willow-tree.
Amaunet wants her wounds and her gold laid bare for the world to see. She wants to be a fury of a girl, a god, a sand-hurricane in the crowds of mortal men bloated with liquor and greed. She wants to be chaos, and embers, and a storm of a girl.
And she is chaos when she steps through the palace doors and walks down the stairs like a bit of smoke instead of flesh. Her skin is gilded in dew-gold and gold-dust. The cloak trailing in her wake where a shadow should be (she is too bright for even that bit of darkness to hold on to) is as blood-red as the tournament sands. The expanse of her wings does not settle, not even when the crowd pushes into her space like a pack jackals.
She is unashamed, brazen, and as furious as a star in the clouded brightness of the crowd. She is teeth instead of the simpering smiles of the nobility gathering in corners like mice and hens. Like a bear, a wolf, a lion, she circles the room all lighting energy without a direction.
It boils in her skin and shivers down her spine like a caress. It begs like a broken thing on bloody knees for anything, anything at all but tameness draped in gold.
Amaunet listens like a god to her magic and the lighting.
When she passes by him, the unicorn with the forest-green eyes an a horn as pale white as ancient bone, Amaunet lets her magic turn to prayer. She greets him as a storm might, with a bared throat and a smile that challenges instead of welcomes. “You look as bored as I feel.” A purr, a warning, and a promise all at once.
Because they don't have to be, not tonight, with liquor enough to conquer a world running in rivers around them.
And she wonders if he has been playing the game for as long as she has.
All of the worst parts are there - the nobles in their finery with their sharks-eyes gleaming, serving-boys weaving through the crowd with wine and stronger drink, the hum of violence outside that transmutes to a winking modesty within. They are snakes in fine skins, and he -
He may need them.
He has always been a quick study, but this is a game the general already knows how to play. It is a little easier, being Martell: he is a stranger, unwatched, free to make small talk and free to drink and dance. Even so he feels like a ghost, for there is no honor in others’ eyes when they pass over him, or respect, or fear. There is nothing at all, and inside he feels superior and despising and distant as a star.
The unicorn hides these things, keeps his brow smooth and his mouth a sickle moon, but not well enough.
At first, when she approaches him, he thinks she’s turning toward the stallion beside him. She is too obviously somebody, not only with her painted sigils and shimmering gold on her skin and binding her hair but the way the crowd parts before her and watches after she’s passed by. What he cannot tell is if she is shepherd or lion in the midst of them. Perhaps it is both, because she is watched with fear and desire.
But neither is in his gaze when he shifts it to her own. Only a sharp curiosity, and the reflection of her crimson and gold. At her question he drops his muzzle, just a little, and the tip of his horn makes a cut in the air.
“You mistake me - I am only observing. I’m too new to these customs to be bored.” The unicorn eyes her smile, her well-adorned throat, and meets once more her vivid eyes. Somewhere, there is the faint scent of blood. Before she can reply, he continues, his voice a note lower. “But I can see why you are. And you do not look like someone who suffers boredom for long.”
She wonders what he would do if she scraped the tender places of her throat against his horn. Blood might look like ruby dust on the whiteness of that sharp bone, or perhaps it would look only like blood until it ran in roots across his blaze.
Would he run back as the crowd would, or would he smile like a wolf and step closer towards the promised kill?
Would he scream in horror or challenge?
The music turns to carrion song, lion purr, and eagle cry in the background. It twines between the nobles in the crowd and hangs like black-smoke crows upon their brows. She can see it, in the corner of eyes, the way none of them know the right steps to the dance. This entire place is all bated breaths, and fury that hasn't learned how to bloom. And her magic feels it, trembles for it, beneath her skin like a tide pulling at the pits in the moon.
Her smile is fat with teeth and disappointment as he lifts his horn like a feather instead of a weapon, and smiles instead of snarls. Perhaps, she thinks, it would have been better to drag her lips across the point of his horn instead of her throat. She is the brightest thing in his gaze and the only thing worth anything when she meets his hollow forest eyes with her own halo-of-the-sun eyes.
He could be have been something. He could have...
“My mistake.” Amaunet says, sharp as the blade of a Davke spear. Her smile grows into constellations bright with bone instead of disappointment. “How strange we must seem to you then, a culture of warriors grown fat and greedy with no wars to fight.” She smiles. It is a not a gentle or womanly look.
Her hooves echo smoothly with the carrion song as she steps closer. Those mighty wings of hers whisper with the lion purrs and the eagle songs when she drags a line through them with the tip of his horn. She wonders if they feel like kisses or needles against his face.
Or does it feel like blood, thin and frail against the tide of gravity?
“But perhaps,” her wings settle at her sides, “you might indulge me.” The way she says might makes it sound more like will.
She does not step away, not now that she's claimed the space between them. She only settles her cheek almost sweetly in the space just against his (not close enough to touch, but enough that he might feel the feral fire of her skin).
Amaunet breathes into his ear, a whisper begging for the mountain of his horn to do anything else but be still. “What why's do you see in me with a stranger's eyes?” And when she laughs surely it feels more like a kiss than a sound in the frail and meager space left between them.
If she chose to pierce herself on the gleaming tip of his bone-white horn, he would let her.
Martell does not lust for blood. He is not a beast, slavering for the taste of copper wet on his tongue, but a man, with a man’s reason and ruthlessness. But surely there must be something cruel in him, something black that only grows blacker still at every soul he’s seen cut down. A congregation’s worth of men have met god at the point of his sword. He thinks no differently of it than if they were pigs, and he a butcher.
If she wants to bleed herself out on a stranger, who is he to stop her?
Her smile is sharper still than his horn. He sees the disappointment in it, a queen’s dismay, and he feels a general’s pique. But he is better at her than hiding it, for he has been a kind of servant all his life, and when she says My mistake his eyes betray nothing more than a nest of ferns in an evening wood.
“Far from strange, my lady. I have just seen what happens to such a culture.” His mouth slips where his eyes did not; his smile is savage, only for a moment, like a reflection shivering in a disturbed pool. The viciousness could belong to either of them, Martell or the general; they both have the right to anger, and know well the taste of blood.
The music winds like a serpent around them when she lifts her wings, and he does not give an inch as first their shadows then their touch alight upon his face. How easily his horn slides through; the touch against his cheek reminds him of the braids of a whip against the skin, the whisper before they become a weapon.
When she lowers her wings and lifts instead her voice, he is already staring ahead, so that their gazes meet as soon as her feathers fall away from his eyes. Martell does not answer her, but his eyes say that they are already beyond perhaps.
Oh, he can feel the heat of her skin, like midnight sand that still holds the warmth of noon; and her challenge, in word and laughter, raises a static-like shiver all along his carotid. And still he does not give her what she wants - no horn dimpling her skin, no cold touch against the burn of hers. Only a flash of ivory, when he clicks his teeth.
“You are not fat, as you call your kin, but I think that you are greedy. What could there be for you here, when already you have access to music, to drink, to any men - or women?” If her laughter is a kiss, if her voice is a leopard’s rasping purr, then his is a shackle of velvet and iron, a cuff around her wrist. “You like their eyes on you, watching as though you are a wolf among the sheep. But they are a dull audience, aren’t they?”
Now, at last, he bends his head. That slender, smooth horn (his weapon, his treasure, more than she or any other will know) descends like a sword until its point rests at the joining of her wing and neck. He taps, once, a conductor cuing something new. And then he lifts his chin and says, “What is it you’d rather be doing, tigress? Why are you here at all?”
Secrets wait to be discovered, like small sins, in the smoothness of his skin and in the things between his words that he says but does not say. Each flashes to her, bright and begging, like fireflies ripe for a paper-thin and made-of-iron net. Like a hunter, like any good tracker, she smiles and pretends her form is not tight and ready to lay her teeth against the shield of flesh protecting his heart.
She blinks, slow as a lioness in a dream, and brushes her lips against his horn quick and gentle as a hummingbird to a flower. A flash of color. A shift of wings. A memory of a thing gone as quick as it came. When something dark rises in his smile and his eyes like blood to a bruise, she answers it with her own. Her skin glows, and brightens, until she is not the wolf in the room but the young-god to lead her fat herd of sheep to slaughter.
Magic reaches out from her skin, tendrils of nothing more than the desert sweetness of her breath tainted with wine. It taints the air between them, incense and cedar and sand, begging to be inhaled just as the gold dust on her skin begs for lips, and fire, and blade. “And where have you been, Unicorn, that you have seen such a thing?” Chaos hangs in her smiling mouth full of teeth, and she grabs on to the hint of his secret like a rabid hound at a fresh bone.
Amaunet bites down. Hard.
“Glowing compliments. Shall I blush for you?” Her laugh is another eagle cry in the music, bright and wild enough that eyes turn towards them (and some know nothing good comes from this laugh). “I am not fat, but I am greedy for the gazes of sheep and the bodies of others.” The golden hues in her eyes turn to ember, and flame, and desert dunes beneath which monsters awaken for the hunt. She leans into the touch his horn, hard enough that he might feel all the weigh to of her that is hollow and wanting for sheep, and touch, and everything between.
There is not returning judgment in her eyes when she follow the lift of his horn and the darkness puddling like rain in his smile. There is only blade and flesh, wanting and waiting, and she wonders if he will be as quick as she to realize it.
The game has already begun and Amaunet is not accustomed to losing.
And like the tigress and the wolf he names her after (like a sinner naming the altar upon which they lay sacrifice after sacrifice) she does not snarl at her kill before she lays her teeth at its throat. She smells the blood, and the wildebeest lack of fear, and the way his head is still at the watering hole in the full-moon thinking himself safe when a cloud shifts across the light.
Behind that cloud she purrs soft enough that it might be nothing more than an exhale.
“I'm disappointed that you must ask me why. I had thought it obvious” She lays her cheek against his own, exhales once, just that one single time. Then she lays her teeth gentle as a kiss against the place where his cheek turns to pulse.
And she waits for another secret of him to be revealed. Will his pulse race or slow like a drum-beat on the eve of the apocalypse?
For a moment he forgets what she sees when her dragon’s eyes rake over him like they are counting coins and jewels. That his golden skin bares no scars like warnings, a dozen silver markings that proclaim him a victor. He might be as red as a warning now, red as blood to water the roots of a tree, but his skin is as smooth as an untried boy’s.
It gnaws at him like a coyote cracking bones to get to marrow to think anyone might look at him and think him weak.
But this was not home (home was ashes and bloated bodies, the bloody leftover of revolution) and he had needed a disguise. Oh, but if it had been, she would be addressing him with a mouthful of pretty words all meaning respect, even if they were hollow as empty pitchers. If it were home, she wouldn’t dare lay a touch to his skin. This is what that faint scent of cedar and incense and hot desert sand makes him think of, and the glow from her skin turns the red of his to crimson.
He meets her eyes but does not match her smile. In his words is the ring of weapons on armor, and the thud of bodies meeting dirt. “I have been at war.”
She laughs like a wild thing does, and he thinks of a panther prowling the dunes, the way they could shriek like a woman being slaughtered. At her question he raises a brow, nods infinitesimally at the new gleam of her. “Aren’t you already?” He can almost feel her skin beneath the final inch of his horn; he can see it dimple. He wonders what he might feel if it slid in - could he sense it, the warmth of blood, or would he feel no more than he ever had with his sword?
When they separate, he does not look to see if her flesh beads with scarlet. The space lasts for only a moment, only enough for his green eyes to harden to dark emeralds before she lays her cheek against him. Her skin is hot, and he can almost hear the blood humming beneath. He wonders if the red painted across her brow will now mark him, too, and when she puts her teeth to his throat his lips settle into a line grim as a drawn bow.
His pulse does not race. He is good at hiding his wants.
“I did not come here to be somebody’s game.” The unicorn’s voice is low, and rough as a lover’s. Perhaps that is what they look like, at the corner of the room, with the music serpentine around them. But if his tone is a caress, it’s the brush of knuckles that hold a whip. “I am not your plaything, and not your prey. You should look elsewhere if you seek such things.” His breath is warm on her neck; he watches it fog one of the thin gold bands that encircle her throat.
War he says. Her heart races at the sound of it and her feathers hum as if a quick storm wind has run though them. She tucks away the feel of it to savor later. For later will be when she unmakes his stoic gaze and his steady heart bit by bit until he is trembling and learning how to become the first unicorn who knows how to fly.
At his throat, through the vibration of her teeth, her laughter becomes a heartbeat of its own. It runs to an almost coquettish melody, like a rapier teasing at the fetching of an arrow. She lets it quicken and sing as his remains nothing more than the growth of an oak tree (slow, steady, and reaching for the sun that will never be close enough to taste).
Before he pulls away she runs her tongue along his pulse, painting his skin with the first attack in this game between them. “This is no more a blush than the sun is only the dawn. Someday I will show you the difference.” Amaunet does not ask, does not know how to do anything but trace the smooth of his horn like a blade she might purchase at the market.
She wonders how well she might learn to wield such a weapon as that.
Amaunet is not as disappointed as she imagined she might be when he denies her. There is no sorrow in her heart when he does nothing more than frost the gold at her neck with the heat of him. All she feels is the touch of a lash-tip, a fist wrapping around her heart, a breath upon her brow that has nothing at all to do with religion or want.
“Yes.” She agrees with a smile that is too gentle for the teeth held between it. “You are neither plaything or prey. But you are some thing. I just have not decided yet what I would like it to be.” Her feathers hum again as if she's flying far about this den of lambs and two beasts-of-war deciding who is lion and who is wolf.
This, him with his denials, makes her think of the pits.
He, a unicorn with his unmarred war-skin, reminds her of a challenger who bellows their victory before the fight has even begun. She knows them well, the cleverness of thinking that there is nothing in the world that might unmake them wound by wound and strike by strike. Only one of them carries scars on their skin not like a shield but like a clarion call to paint more lines in the map of them.
So she circles him as she would that same bellowing stallion. She turns from his frosting heat and his horn that makes her think of a thing to be bought.
Like he is nothing more than a rare rug in the market she peruses the lines of his spine, of his hip, the way he ripples with sinew even still in a crowd full of dancers. “You are either very bad at the game of war, unicorn...” She exhales against the point of his hip where it meets his loin. There is no touch, no caress, between her words. There is only air and the glow of her making the shadows of his rib cage stark where his flesh dimples around them. “Or you are very, very good at it.” Another only air exhale as she tilts her head to watch him as if that same rug has reveled a hidden magic.
Amaunet's smile turns dark.
Very good is still not good enough to best me. The lion says to the wolf as they watch each other across a river of lambs.
He is near enough to feel her pulse pick up when that syllable drops like a drumbeat. It is impossible that he could hear her heartbeat over the sound of the music, the laughter, the low river of voices and the high ring of glass rims meeting, but he imagines he can anyway. And if it races like that at only the thought, only the mention -
What would it sound like on the killing field?
She, this stranger who wore her claws out for all to admire, is still playing a game. And he grinds his teeth together when her tongue touches the place of his own pulse, hating the way it leaps in response, that its reaction to the nearness of her is something he cannot control. His hole life has been a fist held tight, control over chaos, only ever opening into a caress for her. To have his body tremble and want is a black betrayal when it is the only ally he has left.
He wants to punish it for its weakness. And then he wants to punish her for her daring. If he knew that her magic played a part in it, in the way his blood seemed to heat and hum - then maybe he would put his horn to what it was made for. Then he would seize the gold around her throat and twist until she realized who is in charge, and who is only a girl playing games.
But here in this foolish, lavish party in this foolish, lavish land he can do nothing but watch her with dark rage behind his fern-green eyes. And at the same time, even as he wants her golden eyes on his, begging for his mercy, he wonders what it would take for her to fight for him. Perhaps it would only take the suggestion. Do you want a war, tigress?
“And if you decide you don’t like whatever I am?” he asks, and touches his tongue to the back of his teeth. Now he wonders and what are you?. Perhaps she could be an ally. He could give her something to sink her teeth into. Even as she circles him his gaze follows her, and with these possibilities the anger and desire in him ebbs away so that his muscles are easy beneath his unblemished skin. And when she speaks again, when her breath raises gooseflesh along his hip and belly, even when his nerves twitch again with want, the unicorn smiles.
Each cut beneath her silk and war-paint sets to humming an end o’ war knell. The melody echoes in her heart and her magic. It echoes until there is nothing but the hunger of a dying thing, the need of a famine, and the ferocious heat of an ember on a sea of coal. Already, in the eve of her battle, it has been too long since she’s felt the clarion call of wrath, and chaos, and lust.
He is a wolf, snarling in a thicket, with his pack too far away to give aid. She, Davke girl, is nothing more than an animal without a noose of civility or tameness about her throat.
And animals, both wild and tame, know nothing about sin.
“Then I will make you into something I do.” The curl of her wings dips and becomes a mockery of begging submission. Her pulse leaps like a livewire in her chest; her heart grows wings in a storm cloud. The air in her lungs stutters and thickens to oil. Golden blush turns to high noon. Amaunet looks at the curl of his lips, his horn, and his free-from-scar skin, like she’d like him to burn holes in her skin.
When she drags her feathers down the curl of his neck, the dip of his spine, the flare of his hip, it is done with a purr in her throat (a pale roar of the coming lion). She stops again, shoulder to shoulder with him so that the whites of their eyes might look at each other in the language of monsters. Her skin begs for a bruise, a claw, a cut of horn and a wound of teeth.
It begs.
Her heart stutters again until it’s as thready as a hurricane wind and just as fierce. It stutters like she’s flying and diving towards the belly of a dune. It stutters in notes of love but Amaunet does not want love.
He is no wolf, snarling, his pack cut from him and dead and rotting at their den.
He is a hunter who will never again set down his sword. He is a soldier who will not forget the lesson of mercy’s betrayal. No beast kills for revenge.
The unicorn’s lips are tight against his teeth even as he smiles when she says make you. Nobody, he could tell her, has made him do anything in a long, long time. The thought of it - of her trying - makes his heart stumble like a hound when it crosses a new scent. There is vengeance, there is his due - and then there is something else. More animal. More pleasurable.
Her eyes are sparks even as they beg him for burning. His skin feels flushed, hot as fresh blood, even as his eyes remain forest-shadow cool, distant as an eagle overhead.
As her feathers trace along his throat he swallows a groan. As her skin begs to be bruised, his mind urges him to pluck a feather from her wing, a quill to call his own - to write his letters with.
“Meet me,” he says, as they stand shoulder-to-soldier like two dancers frozen between one step and the next, “outside the gates at dawn.” And then he steps away without a glance back, across the room, through the arch of the doorway. And as he goes he thinks and we will see who will make, and who will beg.
