love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on; spyndle

[Cordis]

(“Are you alone?” He asks the foal, but it is a hypothetical question. Of course she is alone, because her father-mother had died, gray and lifeless in the cold and she is alone, she is alone with only a memory of his fever-warmth curled around her, telling her I love you, I love you, I love you. Are you alone, He asks and she shakes from cold and says yes and it is a question she will replay in her mind a hundred times, a thousand, because she wonders, in the way we all wonder on our worst decisions, if things would have been different if she had lied, had said yes. She wonders if He, like a vampire, needed to be invited in.) (“Are you alone?” Spyndle asks, years and years ago when they were both wild things, hearts undomesticated by the beautiful chains and shackles of each other. Cordis stops running from her. Spyndle stops offering herself to the wolves for her, although there are entirely different wolves waiting for her, for both of them. Are you alone, she asks and Cordis shakes from fear and says yes and it is a question she will replay in her mind a hundred times, a thousand, because she wonders, in the way we all wonder on our best decisions, if things would have been different if she’d lied and said yes.) She cannot imagine life without either force now; they have both shaped her, for good and bad. “She wasn’t our prize,” she says, and her own words are sharpened, made dangerous by the whetstone Spyndle lays her against, because this is them, they run and fight and love and it is too much and it is never enough. “She was just ours. Not a prize, not a trophy. Just ours,” and her words are softer now, thinking of the silver girl and how much she had loved all of them (but Elecktrum most of all, in the ways twins are bound to love each other), how her laughter had sounded. If asked, she would say she would do anything for them, for her family. If asked, she would say she would do anything to never go back to His lair. Her heartbeat quickens and replays its jitterbug tune. She is not the fearful running wild thing she once was, the one windblown and terrorized, but there is enough of that woman in her bones to dry her throat and widen her eyes, because she can’t, she can’t. “He wants me,” she echoes, hollow, because she is thinking of everything He did, of the memories she can recall and the ones she knows are buried deeper, the ones she is afraid to unearth because she cannot faces them without going mad. She loves Spyndle, loves their children more than anything and she would die for them in a heartbeat but going to Him would be nowhere so pleasant as dying. c o r d i s she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake and she learned a lesson back there in the flames