The only thing Boudika had ever feared was the sea.
Her father had taken her to it when she was newly born—stumbling on trembling, confused legs, without speech to clarify her thought, without words for the emotion she felt. The memory stood out starkly. There had always been something missing about the moment; and it had taken Boudika many years to conclude it had been the presence of her mother, who had died in childbirth, an act of matricide her father had never forgiven her for.
These were her thoughts, as she stared at Terminus Sea, out on the edge of the Night Court. She stared and stared.
Her father had taken her to it, on her trembling foal legs. He had taken her to it, and with an aggressive muzzle, pushed her forward, stumbling, into the surf. It had foamed at her hooves and an innate fear had struck her, a fear like a lightening bolt—she had leapt back toward the presumed safety of her sire, only to be pushed, again, toward the danger of the sea.
Boudika would later learn this is what the Oresziah, her people, did to those young infants who were cursed as mother-killers. Especially the young fillies, the females. They offered them to the sea. Yet that day had been storming, tumultuous, and it drove the Khashran from the dangerous ocean; they would come to shore stark, raving, slick as oil and as untouchable as the deep of Mariana’s trench.
Her father’s insistent urging against her instincts drove her step-by-step into the angry waves, until she stood up to her chest, and press of water nearly took her from her feet. There were shifts in the waves all around her—breaking, crashing, slippery shapes, easily mistaken for flashes of light or shifts of sea. Boudika was too young to fully comprehend the swarm of Khashran that had appeared, that swam beneath the water in forms foreign, in forms unknown.
Her father had watched anxiously from the shore, for his only offspring to be taken into the deep. And Boudika had stood with steel and iron grit. She had stood without trembling, without the heart palpitations of true terror—even when the surf had broken before her into the form of a horse—but only a creature trying to be a horse, a creature almost ripped apart by the urge to be something else— bearing a ghastly smile full of teeth, and she had later thought she knew what the gods were, and the gods were cruel, primal things.
The eyes on that almost-horse would visit her for many years in her nightmares; reptilian and fish-like all at once. A ageless a shark’s primordial stare; slick with silver and running water. The stallion had stared down at her, with a mouth full of razor teeth, a mouth of crushing jaws, a hunger for flesh. Those eyes slid from her, too-slick, and had settled on her father beyond.
That day, the Khashran did not take her. And her father walked her back to the cliffs as she shivered against the brisk breeze. He walked her back to their homestead and shut himself away for many days before reemerging. When he did, he told her she had been chosen; he told her she would never be called Boudika again, only Bondike, and they would disguise her as a colt. One day, he said, she would be a general.
Because she had no fear.
Now, at the Terminus Sea, she felt that fear again. He had been so wrong, to say that; her fear had only been masked, perhaps, by her curiosity—her draw to the siren’s song, the allure of the Khashran her people had long-since forsaken. But even now, to wade into the cold, winter-wet surf… it was difficult for her. She knew these waters were not populated by the same monsters; she had been told as much. For each step Boudika took into the lapping waves, her gaze jerked along the near water, then the horizon—searching for the quick and deadly shadow of her old enemies. There were none, and somehow, inexplicably, that disappointed her. Why did they have such dead eyes? She had wondered. Why did they look so predatory?
You’re just a dancer now, she remaindered herself, transitioning from her questioning, the words ringing hollowly within her. Another step, and another—pushing now, chest-deep into the sea. Her mind rang with an emotion; her heart; her body. What was it? She did not know, but part of her wished it could be consumed. Another step, another—her feet off the sand, the waves pushing her from the solidity of the ground so she was weightless.
The water was stinging cold. The type of cold that was so cold it burned, it became hot. She stared at the bleak horizon—the weather didn’t even know what it wanted, half-way to a storm, but not quite there. She closed her eyes and with a forward propulsion of her limbs, dove beneath the water, exhaling deeply.
Deeper, deeper—and then her lungs burned, her muscles ached, her body demanded a reprieve—and she sat heavy, fighting her own buoyancy, thinking about what it would be like to drown.
But the call for air was too strong and she reemerged, quite a way from the shore. She gasped for breath and wondered for how long she had been submerged—too long, not long enough. It was a trick she would never have dared to try on Oresziah—the thought, sudden, abrupt, unwelcome, shook her to the quick. She immediately moved back toward the shore, fighting down a feeling of sickness, of great and terrible fear.
Boudika, when her hooves struck sand beneath the waves, began to run. She was slowed by the water, but began to make time once she got knee-deep, then shin-deep, then ankle-deep, and she was breaking free. She shook her head, violently, snorting water from her nostrils, blinking against the sting of salt in her eyes.
What had changed? What had changed that she could fight her fear and swim in the sea? What had she been looking for, beneath the waves? She licked the salt from her lips, from her hide, violently flicked her whip-like tail—and stared, stared, stared at the sea. What had changed? There was something in herself, growing larger and larger every day, that she did not recognise. Something wild, untapped, undisciplined; a surmounting desperation, a need that was borderline lustful, but for what?
He had been whelped on sea-ice in what passed for summer, when the sun never set but rolled along the flat horizion, dull and red. His nursery was foam and ice and turquoise water; he swam before he could walk. Sometimes, when he dreams, he is taking that first gasping breath with his head thrust above the surface, his nostrils slitted against saltwater and the gulls crying a frenzy overhead. Sometimes he remembers the leaping, fierce joy his people shared as they swam beneath the aurora, horns jutting like masts of pearl and bone, a savage, strange fleet beneath the stars.
Now he is the last, now he is the only. Now he is a ghost along a foreign shore, too loud, too warm, alone alone alone -
But at last it is winter. At last ice does not live in his veins alone, thick and sluggish as bad blood. The kelpie glides just below the surface, the gray and roiling sky on the other side of a pane of glass, and with a breath of magic he freezes that skein of water that separates him from the world. Now it is a fogged window he peers through, now the sea-birds winging above are blurred and distant.
It is quiet, below the waves. Here there are no icebergs to sing in the wind, no whales whose mournful voices carry across the empty miles. He dives deeper, swimming through a forest of kelp whose blades drift along his skin like slick fingers, grinning at fish who dart away like silver arrows.
At first he thinks it is a seal he hears, breaking below the waves into his world. Graceful as an orca he turns, licks his teeth, listens. Amaroq steals a breath from the surface then dives again, low and silent, ghostly in the blue. He is hungry for things other than meat, here in winter with the moon growing fuller by the night, but he is a predator and will not miss a chance to hunt.
But it is no seal.
Oh! The way his heart leaps in his chest to see her, plunging below the winter waves - for who other than one like himself would dare such a thing? He can just make out the red arch of her neck, the white slashes of her limbs as they cut through the water. Further, he wants to urge her, see me, and he begins to swim toward her as she turns back to shore. To watch her go - now his loneliness seizes him with teeth of desperation, threatening to shake him in its grip. Now he pursues her, froth in his wake, his heartbeat drumming stay.
When he surfaces he does not feel the cold bite of the air, not for the current of his hot blood and the hope that tightens his throat -
He stares at her across a few lengths of frigid water and begins to feel a winter gale howl within him. Saltwater streams from him in currents and his long hair clings to him, trailing away into the water like a drowned bride’s veil, while the drops of water rolling down his horn freeze in perfect pearls of ice. And all the while he is silent as snow, waiting to see what she is, if his hope will bloom to joy or rage.
ON THE NIGHT OF MY DEATH, YOUR DESPAIR WAS SO LOUD, THAT I COULD HEAR IT CLAWING THROUGH THE EARTH TO FIND ME. ALL THE MEN SCREAMING, BEGGING, STILL COULD NOT DROWN OUT THE WAILING OF YOUR HANDS.
She wondered—what if? What if she could return back, a boat born upon the current? Tossed out to sea and away, away, away until—at last, home. Even contemplating it made her a fool; Boudika knew as much. And perhaps that was why when her hooves struck the sand—making a pop, pop of sucking water—she felt relieved. A childlike part of her marvelled at her own completeness, at her ability to emerged, unscathed, from the very abyss that would have once consumed her. The sea clung, nevertheless, to ever bit of Boudika. It flattening her short mane upon the muscular arch of her neck; dripping, cold, from every surface of her form. It changed her coat, the copper of her head darkened, darkened, nearly black—her eyes a stark contrast of crimson, turning back to the sea, roaming—
And there, an apparition. What struck her first and foremost was the colour of his hide; the grey was just dark enough, in just the right places, that at first she mistook him. ”Orestes—“ And the hope, barely formed, cut off abruptly. No, not Orestes. The creature that had appeared brandished a horn of twining pearl; something that the water horses, the Khashran, had never possessed. Boudika was first struck by her disappointment—the sickening, twisting emotion of guilt that washed over her, that this was not Orestes, that he was dead.
Had he not saved her life? Had it been at the expense of his own?
But the appearance of a creature so similar to her old enemies evoked a calm rationale, as well—Boudika’s stance changed, leonine, as she twined to face the slick water horse. He could be nothing else. His beauty spoke volumes; the water dripping from his hide; the slick wetness of his mane, pasted down the length of his chest, his neck. The comfort with which he stood in the depths of the sea, appearing, almost, as though he were simply a manifestation of the waves. Boudika’s nostrils flared and she swear she could smell the rot of the ocean through the sharp bite of cold air, the salt, the seaweed, the fish. The mare exhaled, and out billowed frosted clouds. She ought to have felt cold; instead, her body felt searing hot, and her tail flicked with the lethargy of a large cat.
”Water horse.” That was all she could say, as quietly and reverently as a prayer. Oh, how Boudika disdains him! And how he entices her; how fiercely her heart strains towards the silhouette of the familiar, and unfamiliar, all at once! Does he know the songs of the sea? Could he sing them, as Orestes had sung them from iron bars? She transitioned quickly; to the image of their bodies locked in combat, and the thought of fighting him filled her with a rush of pleasure. All her dances of today mimicked old battles with these wraiths of the sea who, as far as Boudika knew, possessed the fierce grace and elegance that belonged to no land-dweller. Boudika forced herself to remember, however, she was no longer a fighter. She could not fight him—she could not.
So what did that amount to, with only so much water between them? There was a shape to his mouth she did not trust; a shape that betrayed the presence of jaws meant to deliver one to some other realm. But still—the shape, so familiar, so vibrant, drew her to him. Boudika did not know if it was his kelpie magic at work, or merely the longing of her own heart, that pushed her again to the brink of the water. It came to kiss her hooves, gently, placatingly, if she did not know better than to trust the sea. ”Are there more of you?” She asked. The only thing that keeps her voice even are the years of military discipline her father enforced.
It was strange to feel a connection so deep and instantaneous to something so horrific; to a strange and foreign creature that merely mimicked her old enemies. And why, Boudika wondered, was she filled with such sentiment, toward even her enemies? Was it that she longed so fiercely for a home that would not have her? Or was it, Boudika wondered, the songs of the sea? Her eyes stared past him, waiting for the crest of curved necks and sharp heads as they pushed against the froth, surging above the waves. Her eyes stared past him, as she hoped for the sudden and violent appearance of the Khashran, whom she both loved. And hated.
I ONCE HELD YOUR SOLDIER HEART BETWEEN MY WAR TEETH, AND SHOOK IT LIKE A DOG WITH A BONE, UNTIL IT KNEW THE FEAR OF GOOD LOVE. DO YOU REMEMBER?
It is the first time that any of them have spoken it - have given tongue to what he is, even in terms so vague. It spreads a grin along his mouth, too high, too far, like a crack splintering darkly through the ice.
At the same time it tells him that he was wrong, that his hope was misled, that she is not like him at all. They are both left with disappointment flaying their ribs like a fish-knife. When she names him he lifts his head, saying yes with the tilt of his chin, the swift run of his pulse just beneath his jaw, the proud glint to his pale eyes. Amaroq does not miss the change in her, either, the way her shift widens to a fighting stance, the knowing curve of shoulder and hip.
As another frigid wave eats up the space between them he wills her forward, nearer, nearer yet, close enough to meet the end of his horn. Close enough to see his grin and his disappointment sharp as the point of his bone-white teeth. The wind whines along the spirals of his horn, a strange music; the gulls cry warning and grief, but to which of them?
When she steps forward he watches her, rapt as a tiger watches a doe. The foam spills lace across her hooves, tugs at her ankles, urging her to him. She does not come.
When she questions him he exhales his own white cloud of breath. His tail lashes behind him, drawing meaningless patterns in the waves; what to tell her? That he is the only, then last, and therefor weak? He will not fall prey to a woman whose eyes are the color of old blood.
"There are other kelpies here,” he says at last, and narrows his gaze at the way her own strays past him, out to the featureless winter sea. "But I am the only one of my kind.”
While her attention is beyond him he takes a step nearer, and another. Amaroq reaches for his magic, and, obedient, it reaches in turn for her: ice fingers along the waves, turns the foam to frost, veils the wet sand around her in a frozen sheen. It is not enough; nothing is, in this half-life he lives, and he grits his teeth and wills the anger and disappointment in him to turn to ice, too.
“And you,” he says softly, but there is a snarl beneath it, for his foolish hope and the way it is dashed. “You are alone too.” When he smiles there is no joy in it, only weariness, and hunger.
@Boudika | I want to meet Orestes and the Khashran! you write so vividly <3
I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN FOR THE CALLS OF THE RUNNING TIDE, IS A WILD CALL AND A CLEAR CALL THAT MAY NOT BE DENIED; ALL I ASK IS A WINDY DAY WITH THE WHITE CLOUDS FLYING, AND THE FLUNG SPRAY AND THE BLOWN SPUME, AND THE SEA-GULLS CRYING
He had named her Copperhead, when they stripped her of her identity.
Orestes said none of his people had such intricacies; there were no copper water-horses, but palominos, greys, blacks, whites. He said she struck, when she struck, with the poisonous intensity and self-assured confidence of the snake. He said she was brilliant for her fire, for the way she brandished her head like a crown, a self-prophesied right for reigning. He had given her a name, after her people had taken hers. Orestes had given her a name, when there had been nothing left of her.
It had been like this since the beginning.
Boudika was nothing without them. The disappointment he was not here filled her with rage, grief, bewilderment.
She could dance, she could sing; she could fight mock battles upon a fire-lit stage and leave her story in the froth of her very sweat. She could cry out, keening, in a song beautiful and terrible, but worth only applause—a performance. She was an empty player; a doll-like figurine, with the physique and scars of something other, something that could not quite fit the mould of pacifist. Boudika’s grief was an intangible, foreign thing, in a realm where she had become a ghost of her former self—it howled within her, an empty cavern, screaming for the sea. And she sought it viciously, vibrantly; she left her heart dashed out on the paving stones after each and every performance. She ran herself to exhaustion. She learned this new land’s prayers and begged their dark goddess to set her free of her old land’s curse.
But she was here again, and for the first time at Novus, Boudika felt closer to completion. Something had been retrieved upon the edge of the shore in the form of a slippery, shark-like predator; a creature that fixed her with his eyes, and tugged at her with his enchanting beauty, begging, nearer, nearer. A creature which she looked past, blindly, searching for more—and her ears filled with his words, the disappointment turning her heart to lead within her, sinking, sinking. But Boudika could not tear her gaze from the crest of waves in the distance—where was the dark head, so proud, so fierce, fighting the surf? Where was the supple, beautiful shoulder—the sheen of dark dapples, then the piercing gaze?
It did not appear.
Instead, the strange predator was moving and she was reminded of her role in his world; as prey. Boudika’s eyes fixated on the kelpie, brought abruptly into focus. The mare exhaled sharply, angrily, nostrils abruptly flaring and ears abruptly pinned. His magic reached, but not far enough, and turned the wet sand around her to a thin sheet of ice and frost. Boudika half-reared and came down atop it in a hard crash, and the ice splintered beneath her hooves—the sound, the cracking, reminded her of ribs broken the same way. Illogically—or was it logically?—she was furious at this creature, she was furious at him for being the wrong monster.
”I am,” she affirmed, proudly, and Boudika was abruptly a general’s son—she was Bondike, firm and strong, her voice whetted like a knife and as deep as a dropping stone. She did not fear this kelpie-creature, this thing of ice and salt, this thing that smiled like an eel, and she stepped closer—ankle-deep in the waves, eyes molten, her hide twitching with the bite of the cold. ”But I am looking for a friend—“ her voice broke on the word. A lie, a lie, a lie. They were not friends. They were enemies, and she was this stallion’s enemy, with his too-long mouth, his too-many teeth. ”And he is like you. He has a thousand shapes and swims in the sea and hunts like a shark. He would call himself… he would call himself…” The words were delivered with a desperate, fever pitch—and Boudika reeled them back in, furiously, shaking her head, snorting.
Hollow thing! she wanted to scream, at this stranger. But more, she wanted to face the sea and scream until her voice turned raw, her throat bled, her words became nothing but guttural approximations. How dare you! How dare you make me love the sea! How dare you make me feel at home with things that would kill me rather than lie! How dare… how dare… But this kelpie did not care for these accusations; this kelpie was hardly the same thing, as her Khashran, and the fact they were her Khashran only enraged her more.
He would call himself… And Boudika did not know, because he had a thousand shapes, a thousand lives, and she had Bound him to just one. ”—Orestes. He would call himself Orestes. And he would be grey and black and he would want to make you not alone, no matter how different, no matter how you are a thing of ice.” And more, still, she wanted to answer this stranger’s siren call—she wanted to step toward his beauty and his danger, this creature that was a dealer of death, and the only allure that kept her from doing so was the allure of another, stronger song, and it bespoke the same tragedy as a whale singing alone. It was the smell of the sea she could not shake; the clinging of salt to her skin, no matter how thoroughly she washed; it was her dreams of drowning and sinking ships; it was a stretch of volcanic beach, brutal cliffs, and the hush, hush, hush of--
Boudika, involuntarily, had stepped closer.
I MUST GO DOWN TO THE SEAS AGAIN TO THE VAGRANT GYPSY LIFE, TO THE GULL’S WAY AND THE WHALE’S WAY WHERE THE WIND’S LIKE A WHETTED KNIFE; AND ALL I ASK IS A MERRY YARN FROM A LAUGHING FELLOW-ROVER, AND A QUIET SLEEP AND A SWEET DREAM WHEN THE LONG TRICK’S OVER.
he smashes his ice to shattered bits of glass, a tinkling of distant bells, and a savage grin slips onto Amaroq’s muzzle. Here is life, in the pinning of her ears and the thrash of her hooves and the wide curve of her nostrils, and it is life he knows and is hungry for.
Oh, the keplie has been a ghost since he arrived here, summer-weak and summer-thin. He has kept to the shores, taught the harbor seals and coastal deer to fear his shadow and his shape, but survival was not the same as living. The unicorn felt numb in his bones, a fading mist, a melting flake, a thing no more real than a beast in a book.
But now it is winter, and here is a foe who has submerged herself in the waves of his sea.
At last she looks at him, and his grin hints at teeth. His tail, braided with bits of bone and shell, lashes like a tiger’s when she steps nearer, and the pride in her voice lifts his own chin, tilts his spiraling horn to pierce the clouds. A friend, she says, and he blows out a harsh breath, the cold mist of a laugh. She should know, she must know, there are no friends between their kinds - there is only to hunt, there is only to kill or to die.
Or to haunt the edges, and never quite live.
Still there is something in her voice that keeps his feet set in the surf, even as he judges the distance between them, even as the sand sucks at his feet and each wave urges him forward, tugs him back. There is an umasked desperation, a want like despair, and Amaroq knows that feeling like he knows what it is to feel hot blood feel his mouth, to taste copper and salt.
She loves him. It is clear to the kelpie, clear as tracks in the snow or judging from a wisp of stratus cloud on the horizon that snowstorm will be on them. He wants to laugh at her, then, but he is curious, too, and he falls still where he stands. Even his grin fades away, and the only movement is his mane and tail riffled by the water and the wind and the slide of light down the slight curves of his long, sharp horn.
It has been a long time since he has seen love, even just a half of it, broken to sharpness on the edges.
And he would want to make you not alone. Yes - that is what a kelpie might say to its prey. Come away to the waters and the wild, come away and be not alone, come away and join me in a bond that is greater than love and we will take life between our teeth, we will drink the depths of the sea and rejoice beneath the aurora and all the world will tremble to see us, with longing and with awe.
He wonders why she had not joined him. He wonders if Orestes had loved her, too.
“I do not know this friend of yours.” Orestes - the name lives between them now, for she has made it so, and it carries a rhythm like the sea. Amaroq’s gaze is sea-ice, cold, alien, but with something stirring underneath. When she steps nearer it sparks to life and he leans forward, the wind sighing around his horn, the water sighing around their feet.
The unicorn considers her, and he does not show his teeth. Wolf-like he tilts his skull, wolf-like he regards her, and when he speaks it is almost soft, like the caress of foam around her feet, like the ice-shards she broke on the beach are forgotten. “How badly do you want to find him?”
He does not need to say I can help you. I can make it so that you might search each sea for him, and, once found, never leave his side. She knows what he is, she has named him.
"It is not good to be alone," he says, and the way he waits then is like a wolf, too.
ON THE NIGHT OF MY DEATH, YOUR DESPAIR WAS SO LOUD, THAT I COULD HEAR IT CLAWING THROUGH THE EARTH TO FIND ME. ALL THE MEN SCREAMING, BEGGING, STILL COULD NOT DROWN OUT THE WAILING OF YOUR HANDS.
There was something about knowledge—the lack of it could drive one almost to madness, the questions of what if, what if, what if, the sheer possibility of what one does not know. But, as two-sided as a blade, the juxtaposition was just as cruel. To have knowledge, to have the answer—what if I regret it, and what if you do? The need for her to know, for the answer of her incessant, haunting question—is he alive is he alive is he alive—to reveal itself… Well, the effect was addictive, but not narcotic. No, it came with no pleasant stupor, no sedation, no elation. It was like a dependence on adrenaline—an obsessive, necessary agony simply to feel alive. The curse was that not knowing was unbearable. The curse was that knowing, too, was unbearable.
So their breaths fogged the air, each one of them unaware they breathed life back into the other, a semblance of hope—there was a delicate balance here, a strange intimacy borne of two who understood a rare, strange world. She had named him a water horse, lacking fear, and he gave her a reawakening, he made her feel alive again instead of a shadow dancer. This water horse gave her hope, as she desperately waited for the answer, the name—Orestes Orestes Orestes Orestes—clamouring inside her with the same urgency as a scream.
And the kelpie's predatory grin, the delight in which he took in her vibrancy, the way that shark-smile faded. The stillness, then, of glaciers—and it was an unknown to Boudika, who knew only the water-horses as transient, as the shape of a wave one moment, of fanged fish the next, then of horses tangled in seaweed. This stillness, violent only in its absolute, made her pulse quicken. And his words, the words she waited for—I do not know this friend of yours. They were heavy. The clamour of Orestes’ name became an anchor, and Boudika felt tugged toward the ground. Her disappointment was tremendous, insurmountable, the knowledge abruptly unbearable. He probably isn’t alive.
But still, the not knowing.
What if he is?
The kelpie regarded her with predatory intensity; his gestures not equine, no, but distinctly lupine, or even avian. The cool regard of a wolf’s stare. Dispassionate, but not uncurious. And Boudika does not shy from it. The mare takes another step forward, and then the waves kissed her forelegs—cool, tugging, tugging. Sand pulled from beneath her feet, and then returned, with each coming and going of the sea. These things are not unfamiliar to Boudika—for if he was a wolf, she was a wolf hunter. If he was the sea, she was the land.
Those things cannot exist separately.
Those things cannot exist without great and terrible intimacy.
Does the shore not wish to crash into the waves? To become one? Do the rocks of rivers not one day corrode, brought to knee by the limitless will of water’s way? Does the wolf not starve without the deer, and does the wolf hunter not know the animal as well as a lover, in his habits, his ferocity, his capability? The shape of supple shoulder, the angle of muzzle and tooth, a well-bred wolf versus a poor one? The health of a well-fed animal, the luxuriousness of the coat, the thickness of the fur… and the malnourished, brittle, sinking? These things Boudika knew, of the Khashran, and even if this kelpie was only a distant relative… she knew his habits, too. She knew how to recognise a wolf as a wolf, she knew how the recognise the famished eyes brought on by loneliness. This kelpie’s expression was not so different from Orestes, in his prison bars.
”What do you know of finding him?” Her previous ferocity had become still. Almost placid. A lake gone bad with stagnancy. The noise between them, for a moment, just the hush hush hush of the sea. Her skin was not drying. The chill was prevalent, deep, aching in her bones, a wet that felt like ice. The kelpie’s words were promise-like and Boudika did not know what they meant—how did he suggest she find him? Boudika weighed her answer.
How badly and her mind was full of sea-blue eyes, the dark dappled coat, the way she had seen him once, from very far away, running down the beach with a herd of Khashran in half-shapes. The water had just barely relinquished its embrace and it streamed from their rippling flanks as they became land forms, equines, some bounding as mysterious almost-animals, laughing with mouths slit wide, crocodilian, vicious.
And then: her recent plunge into the sea. The clinging of the salt, the prevalent scent of ocean she could not escape, she could not outrun. ”I would do anything,” Boudika at last answered, but now distrustful.
She stepped back, one foot closer toward the land, very still. Her tail swayed briefly and then, with a flash of bright copper, gave a long, lethargic, leonine flick. Her eyes, which had had so much trouble focusing on the kelpie before, now bore into him utterly.
Orestes had once said, you could never be the sea, you are all fire, copperhead—crimson eyes and copper skin and dark, deep stripes—the sea would not have you, you are a lion, you do not belong—
And she wondered, did she? The not knowing was both entirely unbearable, and entirely necessary, as though the answer in and of itself might be condemnation.
I ONCE HELD YOUR SOLDIER HEART BETWEEN MY WAR TEETH, AND SHOOK IT LIKE A DOG WITH A BONE, UNTIL IT KNEW THE FEAR OF GOOD LOVE. DO YOU REMEMBER?
e does not know her, to say where she does and does not belong.
Amaroq only knows that she is a warrior, that her eyes spark with fire but more than that with want, that somewhere within her is the same loneliness that lays in the dark of his heart like a rotten seed, scraping him hollow, eating him up. He knows that she is brave, and that she is a little bit a fool (to stand so near, to challenge him so, with her body in his waves) - but perhaps it is only that loneliness that makes her foolish, the loss and the want.
He understands that. He has watched his brethren die, for such foolishness, and has learned that to survive you must be cold.
So the kelpie does not tell her he won’t open this world to her.
But he wonders, now, how much she truly knows of him, of his kind. Amaroq knows little of the other kelpies, the inland ones and those from the southern sea. He does not know that they cannot work the change, that they are only born and never made - but he is beginning to see that she does not know his way. Or at least beginning to guess. Enough to be curious, enough that the line of his mouth turns softer, the color of his eyes more deep. Less like ice and more like the ocean below it, fathomless, almost gentle.
Nearer she comes, and further away, drifting on her own tide, only another piece of flotsam on the beach. For his part Amaroq stands motionless, though he watches her feet, watches the strength of her chest and the curve of her neck, judges the distance between them as any predator does. One lunge and his teeth could be at her throat, less than that and his horn could pierce her breast. And of course (for he is proud, and knows nothing of how well she has fought his kind) once he has her in the water there would be no hope for her. A thrashing in the surf, a clamor of gulls, white foam turned red. And then nothing. Even the waves would lap away her footprints and erase her from Novus.
But Amaroq does not lunge. He casts his gaze back to hers, crimson-dark like the inside of a throat.
Anything, she says, and he almost feels sorry for her. Enough that he shakes his head as he speaks, as if already woeful, as if they are both already gone.
“I could Make you,” he says, as the wind blows up the sea-mist in salty kisses along the arch of his neck, “I could Make you like me. And then you could search for him below every shore, in the trenches of the deep, in the corals and kelp forests. Everywhere.”
He does not say And when you find him you need never leave him. He does not ask And when you find him, will he hate you?
Instead he surprises himself - not a thing that happens often, not a thing that has happened since he left the constellations and the water he knew, each type of wind or ice a thing he could name. “And I would help you look.” It comes out rough, and low, a wave scraping against rock, and the unicorn tosses his head and the somber light glances off his spiraling horn and scatters like spray.
IN THE STORY OF PATROCLUS, NO ONE SURVIVES, NOT EVEN ACHILLES WHO WAS NEARLY A GOD. PATROCLUS RESEMBLED HIM; THEY WORE THE SAME ARMOR. ALWAYS IN THESE FRIENDSHIPS, ONE SERVES THE OTHER, ONE IS LESS THAN THE OTHER: THE HIERARCHY IS ALWAYS APPARENT, THOUGH THE LEGENDS CANNOT BE TRUSTED: THEIR SOURCE IS THE SURVIVOR, THE ONE WHO HAS BEEN ABANDONED
I could Make you.
The words struck a cord, deep and dark and monstrous, within her. She tossed her eyes back, her nostrils flared—her tail lashed the water, and sprung up a salt spray between them. A sudden clarity came to Boudika, a clarity overlaid with everything everything she had loved and lost—a life that seemed dreamlike, now, of petty wars and generals, of cadets like toy soldiers and vicious, tremendous sea-beasts, everything and nothing, the ritual ceremonies of gold-streaked horns for battle, the heated, burning lust of combat and more, more, of the ocean, always the ocean, cool where her people burned—
—in Boudika’s dreams, she never swam.
She only drowned.
It was what she dreamt for many nights in prison, awaiting her sentences, and when it came a long last… it was a relief. Even to be dragged through the streets in chains, a pariah and criminal, felt as though a heavy burden had been lifted from her. Her imprisonment had resulted in a resurrection of soul; the betrayal of her people had caused such complete and utter destruction, to survive she had been forced to become something other. To maintain her humanity, she had accepted her own monstrosity. She had been responsible for destroying something as beautiful as it was terrible, something vast and astounding.
“Our people once danced together, Copperhead,” Orestes had told her one night, quiet and calm. It was when he seemed soft, horselike, even more ordinary than her folk—and she had been drawn by the velvet baritone of his voice, to the edge of her prison cell. Their first nights together had been seething hatred, pure fury, demonic wrath. Now? Quiet. Their souls shared their fates. The heat of his skin, through the bars, was an elation and terror she had never thought to imagine. His scent, all salt-water, seaweed, fish, wafted to her—and something about it seemed homely. “The Oresziah and the Khashran, we were brothers and sisters. Our duel gods, lovers, Oresz and Khashra. Our people, one people—mine cursed by their love of the sea, yours by their love of the land, and we were driven apart.”
Those had been the words, in her mind, as they threw stones and jeered at the pair of prisoners. As they fastened their chains to the mast of the too-small sailing boat and sent them to their death by the sea. It had been no one’s doing but her own, it had seemed—every act that had driven them and been hers, her love, her pride, her conceit—
If Boudika had been alone, she would have been taken. But Orestes keened to the angry sky and when it broke and the tempest fell, when the waves became hateful torrents, he was answered by a song older than anything she had ever known, the song of the sea, the song of the storm—
Now she was here. Here. In this moment, her nostrils flaring in the same scent, the hush hush hush of waves that could offer salvation or damnation. The water horse before her was the same and entirely different—salvation or damnation. Their stances statuesque. The water at their hooves. The wheeling gulls, the chill, the strangeness entangled with familiarity—he knew, they shared the same wolfish language, he saw the feelings she could not voice. The cracking of the mast. Orestes, head barely above the water as the iron dragged, dragged, dragged, ”Don’t fight it. Don’t fight it. Don’t swim. Drown.”
The darkness, the twisting shapes, pulling her, nipping, the iron tightening, slackening, twisting, no air, no air, dark, dark, dark, cold, pressing—pressing—pressing—
Novus. The dry sun. Dancing.
And now Amaroq, her dreams and fears, materialised. His voice visceral, close, soft. Everything she had wanted but never voiced, offered, like some god’s cruel trick. It had not been possible among her Khashran—it was their souls, their bodies, that dictated their form. They came and went like the waves, but always of the waves, and Boudika had been of the land, and that was all she had ever been.
She stepped closer—closer—the closest they had been. Nearly chest to chest, close enough to smell the sharpness of the sea on the coolness of his skin, to see the way the bones and shells tangled in his mane and tail, the ocean of his eyes. There was a void in him that called to the void in her, as though an abyss and an abyss could become whole. Close enough their still danced transitioned from intimate risk to deadly.
And I would help you look.
An end to the aching loneliness. Someone who understood—and then, the knowing came back to Boudika in a rush. What if we found him? paired with, What if we don’t? Either way, there was an answer: this water-horse, this strange familiar, oh, how he tempted, how he promised her something either way, in his beauty, in the ferocity of his being.
But there was the question, too, of what it meant to drown. The fear struck her abruptly, completely, the same way it had with her head underwater. Boudika reared back, moving away with the sudden urgency of a creature on the precipice of something both great, and terrible. “I—I—I,” the emotions came to her in a rush, and it was as though she had awoken suddenly from one of her many nightmares. The emotions that came upon her, enormous and paradoxical, were too appalling, too terrific, too extraordinary, too much.
Boudika did not know how she had gotten there so quickly, but her hooves were firmly in the sand, the wind tossing her short mane. There was a wildness in her eyes, not of desperation, but of pure carnal feeling—unfiltered, wordless, belonging to a primordial world—belonging to his world.
Oh, the sea. It called.
But Boudika could not answer it—her legs began to move and suddenly, suddenly, she was running—
To where, she did not know. But the ocean sang in her ears.
WHAT WERE THE GREEK SHIPS ON FIRE COMPARED TO THIS LOSS? IN HIS TENT, ACHILLES GRIEVED WITH HIS WHOLE BEING AND THE GODS SAW HE WAS A MAN ALREADY DEAD, A VICTIM OF THE PART THAT LOVED, THE PART THAT WAS MORTAL. WHEN MY MOTHER DIPPED ME IN THE RIVER, SHE WAS INTRODUCING US.
Where he is all stillness, an iceberg rigid and unyielding above the surface of the sea, she is alive as the flame that colors her eyes. The only part of the kelpie that moves as he watches her is his mane and tail, thick and light and pale as sea-foam, drifting in the wind off of the water. But although her mane is too short and her tail too leonine to be tousled by that wind, all the rest of her is alive and in motion - rolling eyes, flaring nostrils, tale lashing like a whip. He wonders if she is ever still, if there is any rest in her.
But for all his watchfulness the kelpie does not expect her to step nearer.
Maybe it is that surprise that keeps him from action. If he had thought she would heed his words, accept his offer, he might have taken her then. Amaroq wouldn’t even have to lunge to do it; they are so close, breath to breath, skin to skin, with the water already around their ankles. It would not be so difficult to drag her the rest of the way, even as her body resisted, even if she changed her mind and fought and thrashed.
Be still, he would tell her. Be still and be reborn.
Yet he had not expected it. And now his nostrils flare as he inhales the scent of her, smoke of bonfires burned from cedar and pine, spices he has no name for, the salt-sweat of her body even in the chill of winter. He can see the pattern of each stripe on her skin, the gleam of sunlight and water on her horns, each dark lash over her crimson eye. Amaroq wants to lick the ocean spray from her skin and his tongue touches the sharp points of his predator’s teeth and still he stands motionless like a cub, a man, a fool.
He realizes then that he is waiting for her to make the choice. Amaroq does not want to make it for her - not when he already knows what her heart wants, for the way that desperation shines through her eyes. How badly, he wonders, does she want to find Orestes? To what length will her love go?
I-I-I, she stammers, and he is leaning close, he is reaching to touch his muzzle to her throat (no teeth, only lips, only breath, only wanting that touch-)
She bursts away. Quicker than a seal in the water or a hare in the field, fast as a bird on the wing she is gone for him and he is left reaching and alone. Wordless Amaroq watches her flee and though there is anger beating hard in his breast (anger born from disappointment) there is a smile laying itself upon his lips like a crack through ice.
He knows he will see her again. And the next time he does he will not return to the sea alone.
