What makes you so sure she was lying, the queen asks (Cordis calls her a queen because the word repeats itself in her mind – she doesn’t know rulers, but the word queen wraps itself around the mare like a living beast), and she doesn’t know the weight to the question. It’s one Cordis asks herself, sometime, as she stands dressed in lightning after running for days with nothing to sustain her, her heart like a live wire in her chest. The thought that maybe she is magic.
But a magician would have escaped sooner. A magician would not have spent years in His lair, a magician would have summoned water when He sought to burn her alive. A magician would have broken out, would have fought.
The thought that there was magic in her, an opportunity unspent, is horrible to confront.
The past should be the past, but she lives all too often in there, fool that she is.
(What she doesn’t know is He quelled the magic in her, tamped it down. She never knew the sensation of lightning in her chest until she had escaped.)
“I lived for years as nothing,” is what she says, because she does not speak of Him, she does not speak of the years being taken apart and pieced back together, a toy with burned bones, a creature made and remade a thousand times, in a thousand horrid ways.
The mare then brings a raven forth, hovering near them, tempting.
Turn it to ice, she says. Cordis stares at the raven, imagines ice growing from its skin instead of feathers, imagines snow where its eyes once were. She watches with a growing hunger and fascination as ice grows like a living thing across the bird, weighing it, dropping it--
The raven shatters at their feet.
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)
