we were made out of lightning; any

[Cordis]

She’d never known invincibility. To be invincible implies a thirst for life, a certain bravado, a confidence. She has none of these things. She may have stared down the hollow barrel shotguns of His eyes, she may have been vivisected and burnt and drowned and cannibalized and brought back from all those horrors, brought back whole and made new, but it did nothing to convince her of her invincibility. Rather, she simply assumed He would one day tire and she would find herself staying dead. (She’d hoped. She’d prayed.) And then she had escaped Him, had learned that inside her there is molten silver and electricity and the capacity to love that terrifies her in entirely new ways, but the love had only made her more vulnerable, because it was another place to be hurt. There is a vein of strength to her, the woman who burned the wayfaring stallion who’d violated her and left her with Ka (she wonders where the girl is now, the precocious silver-maned child she’d tried and failed to love). She is the woman who loved enough to bring the lightning down and into Spyndle’s body, to jolt her back to life, to defy Him. (She’d even tried to fight Him when he had come and taken their girl, but He had threatened the girl’s life and Cordis was not strong enough to watch their girl die before her, even if she now wishes her dead, for her own sake.) She is lost in these thoughts, the tornado of memory and pangs of regret and every wretched emotion, when the stallion comes. He is young and dark and more a moment she remembers the wayfarer, but this boy does not have the same ill intent (and besides, she knows the lightning now, would burn him before he could ever get close). She tries to smile and fails. “I’m…” she begins, but she lacks the eloquence to fill in the adjective, is not sure one exists to encompass all of it. “I’m not all right,” she says. She knows that much. “But I’m trying.” 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