It was not supposed to be, the love story that unfolded. Her first words to Spyndle had been ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ as the mare reached out to touch her, inquisitive.
(Spyndle’s last words to her had been ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ before she left, before the word shifted irreparably.)
It was not supposed to be, she told herself at every turn, as they left and found each other again. She was a lighthouse, pulling her in, begging her to wreck upon her shores. She was the lighthouse. Spyndle was the lighthouse. They were both the wrecks. They were both wreckage, loving with such terribly doomed hearts under sickle moons.
It was not supposed to be, and so one day it was not – one day, Spyndle left, took with her the last shred of her heart, and left a lover destroyed.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, the saying goes.
Yet she was not scorned. What happens is worse than fury – instead there creeps in her blackness, a darkness that she both fears and wants for. The strange liquid darkness of being alone, of a power too great for her to wield, rising to fill the vast cavities of her, the ones they have left.
What’s left is not a woman scorned, but a woman grown dark.
The bird moves again, and Cordis is glad – she’d regretted it the moment she’d done it, but it had been like an exhale, a short expanse of breath and then a bird coming to their feet.
She cannot stop watching the ravens. They move idle around their mistress. Cordis wonders if they would obey her. For a moment she thinks it, thinks come, and for a moment the ravens bulge towards her, torn.
She stops the thought, unnerved, and turns her focus back to the mare, the one whose raven she’d slain.
(Briefly, anyway.)
“I don’t know,” she says. She is honest.
She remembers a conversation then, one from long ago – a mare who took her underwater, who insisted there were powers inside her. She had ignored her then and ignores her now, but the questions rises again, niggles at her brain.
“There was a magician,” she continues, “Evrae. She said I was magic..”
A pause.
“But she was lying.”
she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake
Cordis
(and she learned a lesson back there in the flames)