She’d told herself much the same thing – that solitude was best.
Alone means you cannot hurt the things you love, cannot lead them into the lion’s den (oh, she hadn’t meant to, had tried to stop it, tried). Alone means there are no children once pressed close then gone. Alone means there were no rivers, no hazel, no moments passed by a hundred times until finally the line was crossed and history laughed.
Yet she is alone and still things around her fall hurt. She was alone and there was a boy set afire because something wicked in her heart demanded it be so.
And for all the stories she tells herself sometimes she aches so deeply, so acutely, for things and times gone by that she feels she might cave in, a church collapsed, the prayers that once were scattered to the winds.
“I’ve tried to be alone,” she says. A rock, an island, but somehow there are always shipwrecks upon her shore and she cannot help but pick through the wreckage.
The mare says her name - Ilka - but over it echoes another name, one far more familiar: Spyndle.
The mare is gold, then black again, a trick of the light.
“I tried to be alone,” she says, repeating herself, “but there was someone. And we weren’t alone.”
She summaries the story, speaks a bullet point - there was someone. And we weren’t alone - because nowhere in her does she have the words to articulate the story that unfolded, the missed moments and the feeling of being an unstoppable force and immovable object both, of wrecking herself for this woman and loving every moment.
It is too much to tell a stranger.
(Is she?)
“But she’s gone,” the last bullet point, the conclusion she never hoped to write but had been inevitable from the first moment that the sun hit the riverbank between them.
“She looked like you,” she says, almost pensively. She sees it now. The mare seems to shift before her eyes, seems to be increasingly gold. Her name sounds nothing like Spyndle’s but somehow it echoes in a way Cordis doesn’t understand.
Her bones tingle as magic crawls out like a parasite and gloms to the mare, but she doesn’t notice, she is too curious about why the mare is sometimes gold, why her name seems familiar when it shouldn’t.
Why suddenly, there is a river nearby where there once was not.
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)