HER HEART WEARS WISDOM SKIN AND WIT WARMED SPLENDOR, THE ECHOES OF A WAR CRY HOLDING IT'S FOUR CHAMBERS TOGETHER.
That night Boudika danced. She, in front of her stranger-crowd. She, fire-lit and golden. Only the most dedicated of the audience might notice that her usual fury was absent, replaced with a poignant, exquisite sadness. Boudika's war-drums, tonight, had been replaced by a sobbing violin, a violin that threw its pitch this way and that like a sinking ship in tall, tall waves. There was a crescendo, somewhere, perhaps. And the golden ribbons she tied in her too-short mane—or so the manager said—were tossed to meet it, and her head rose, and fell, rose, and fell. Each time Boudika threw it back, her mind was painted with the image of it slit and bleeding red, although she could not quite say why. Perhaps it was because she wore war-paint, and none of the audience knew the nature, the morbidity, of her flashing, brazen colours.
That, to Boudika, was tragic. Tragic in a way that an unmarked grave was. To them it glimmered and shone gorgeously in the dim firelight, and the air smelled of sweet liquor and the smoke of thick, flavoured cigars. Boudika wore her people’s war-colours in a way that made her feel dirty, and forgotten. She wore her people’s war-colours in a desperate attempt to cross the sea or… even more sharply, to scorn them, to scorn everything she had ever been taught.
The violin wailed a Khashran song, one Orestes had hummed between prison bars and sang gently, gently, so gently that Boudika could barely see the glint of his shark’s teeth in the darkness of the cell that neighboured hers. And he would lean hard against the bars that separated them, so that the metal burned his flesh, and he would sing to her in his siren’s song and Boudika would lean back. At first, Orestes would gnash his teeth against the burning bars—and Boudika never flinched, wanting a warrior’s end, lusting for his teeth more than his song. But then, over a matter of weeks, the violence ebbed and became, instead, an intimacy of sorrow. Their fates would forever be entwined. And they both leaned, so hard, against the bars--feeling the warmth of forbidden flesh, knowing the closeness among those who experience a very specific, unique type of pain together. And still, he sang--he sang and sang, and it was the last thing Boudika remembered of him, as they sank in the sea before she arrived at Novus.
Listening to his song as she danced, Boudika felt the infuriating pinpricks of tears.
After the dance, Boudika left. She washed the gold from her skin and tore the ribbons from her mane, and began to haunt the streets of Denocte, as she often did when restless. The docks, at first, enticed her—but she drew away from them, toward the statue of Caligo and the glimmer of moonstones on the streets. Staring at the statue, she remembered a similar one in Oresziah’s city square. A stallion, massive and wrought of the black stone from the cliffs. The stallion had been rearing, and thrusting a trident into the stomach of a twisting beast. The beast was a Khashran in the midst of transformation, with the rear end of a horse and the front of a shark.
The Caligo statue was very different, Boudika thought, and turned away. Both images: the one of Caligo behind her and the dark one of her memory, were a far cry from the tragedy of the violin. However, her skin crawled with the feeling of being watched; with something seeing through her. Boudika had shrugged off the urge to pray more often than once, but that did not change the statue’s cold-hard stare creeping at the nape of her neck. But Boudika knew only how to shrug it away, and continue into the darkness of the Night Court. There were jugglers and street-dancers, vendors, children running painted in the streets. Dragons fluttered above her and below her, both, and occasionally she glimpsed a bright-eyed alley-cat. Nothing held her interest, however, because within her cried the sea.
There was a chasm inside her. A chasm that ached and pulled and caused her to walk circles in the city of Denocte, dark and alive with magic. Dark and enticing, seductive, safe, where there was no threat of flesh-eating horses that would emerge from the sea and wage war upon them. A war we began, Boudika remembered.
Orestes came to her again and again, in her mind, a torturous image that she could not escape. What would he think of Denocte Intrinsically, Boudika knew he would belong far better than she. He, with his raw heart and aching songs. He, with the eyes older than the land, as old as the sea. He, with that genuine laugh, sharp like a gull’s cry. And she. Sharp in a way that was not becoming. Restless as a tiger in a cage. Directionless. Alone. But what must he feel?
And the perpetual conclusion, of her tortured thoughts: he was dead. The sooner Boudika accepted that fact, the better off she would be.
A glinting knife caught her warrior’s eye. Boudika stopped mid-step; her head shot sharply in the direction of the flash, her muscled coiled to react. There was a silver mare leaning against the wall, in the darkness. Spiralling a knife. The gesture would have been threatening, if not so rhythmic, if not so mindless. Boudika approached and everything in her bristled, everything in her lusted for a fight—blood, she knew, would ease the tension of her guilt. It would clear her mind. It would restore her to violent, intense purpose.
What is a tiger hunter, her father had asked. Without the tiger?
The echo in her mind: nothing, nothing, nothing.
Boudika did not expect to recognise the mare. But she did, in a way that she recognized people she heard spoken of, and in a way that she reocgnized those who frequented Denocte's docks. Her morning runs often ended there, where she would stare forlornly at the ships and imagine passage to her home that was no longer a home. This mare, however, was different than most. She was a blade, personified--hard and silver and, somehow, seductively mysterious. The words came out before she could help herself. “You’re the captain with the gutted kelpie on her ship.” A statement, devoid of emotion. And Boudika's face was her warrior’s face. And Boudika's eyes were her demon’s eyes, glinting red in a bald face. It would not be difficult to see Boudika for what she once was; for what she would always be, no matter how-guilt ridden, how pacifistic.
"Copperhead" knew how to gut a water horse, from stem to stern. She knew how to pin their throat with a trident in such a way that it did not kill them, but pinched the blood of the jugular so that darkness overtook them, swift and inevitable. Was that not how she had captured Orestes? She knew what their hot breath felt like against her skin. She knew the lust of their songs. But she also knew their love.
Their beauty.
And thinking of it, the image of the ship in her mind, Boudika felt irritated. You have no right to display them as such hideous things. For water horses were many things; but even in their death throes they were beautiful.
SHE RISES LIKE ATHENA ON A NIGHT OF VICTORY DANCING. SHE RISES LIKE THE BLOOD MOON IN A SKY OF A THOUSAND STARS BURSTING
@Locust
