as all flesh, is proud of its wounds
She does not drop a name into the fire. She thinks of it, only briefly, dismissively; here she is half-drunken and accosting the believers, the idiots, the sheep. There are no gods here. There are only devils, and the sea. And it is not her sea.
So it is not long before she stalks off, or stumbles, and finds herself at the cliff’s edge overlooking their sea (the not-her-sea). The sea she cannot climb into like a shell, like the womb. The sea she cannot become. All she has is its salt, and this, she does not want. It flakes from her like dead skin and colors her like an old nag. In her winter coat, she seems old enough, but the summer marks her lean and black, in earlier times, a predator. Now she is thin, and tired, and her coat is half as thick and curled as it will be. The silver of her tattoos is visible but not important. She will not see him again, she has decided, and no one else will ever care enough to ask.
Saphira does not know he is there until he speaks her name. Every muscle of her body tightens, stiff. She turns, slowly, half-white eye fixing on him. She wants to turn him to salt, and she wants to run.
She spits at his feet. ”Swine.”
