here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed
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Even after years spent here (here and there, really, absent wanderings as she and Spyndle came and went like tides, dancing around one another until finally they met and met again until one day they did not), she doesn’t know the land’s politics.
She knows the names, abstractly, as one knows landmarks in their city – chamber, falls, deserts. She can name the place but not their rulers, such things are unimportant to her, do not factor into the whirlwind of her mind.
So she doesn’t know what the raven foretells, when it soars overhead and lands nearby. She watches it idly, the gloss of feathers and the prone sharpness of the beak, until it is no longer a raven and instead is a mare.
Her own silver skin ripples and for a moment black feathers appear there in mimicry. The magic grows, even as her control of it does not. The feathers do not last long; they sink back into her skin as if she is liquid silver.
The raven woman says a name – Straia – and for a moment Cordis remains mute. She does not trust herself, not with memory of the boy fresh in her mind. Not with the unpredictable nature of her magic, feathers coming and going, lightning sitting under her skin like a promise.
Fly away home, she wants to say, but another part of her is curious about the mare.
“Cordis,” she offers back, a hesitancy flavoring her words. She can still feel the feathers under her skin, itching, like the magic had seen something it liked and aches to imitate it.
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
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