no one mourns the wicked; any

[Cordis]

The time in His lair, she had been nothing.
Nothing because she had been a mousy brown girl then, with a different name.
(She had been Mahala, but she changed it, after, because she’d heard the name too often dripping from His lips.)
Nothing because she did not fight back. She tried to escape, once, but had been hunted down after, fox to His hounds, and Him the huntmaster, laughing that wretched laugh as she was felled.
(He punished her for her escape, of course, and she didn’t know until years later that He had set her up.)
She had been nothing, a girl on her knees, begging and crying and screaming for Him to stop.
And later, for Him to just kill her and leave her dead.
He granted neither wish, of course, made slow and torturous work of breaking her.

The time in His lair had been everything.
Had been everything because it was the catalyst to her, it was there she was made so fearful. It was there, perhaps, that she was infected with whatever dark virus grows about her now, makes her find a sort of pleasure in burning.

There is a distant sound and Cordis looks for it. She doesn’t realize it’s the woman’s thoughts, shouting out at her. The queen’s lips aren’t moving but Cordis can almost make out the words. It is strange, like most of this is strange.

The mare shifts to a raven and Cordis’s own skin itches. She might try to fly, later. Not now. Not in such a blatant facsimile. She is left with a shatter of ice and snow at her feet.
Put it back together, the queen had said, but it is so much harder to create than it is to destroy.
(She had, once. A gold woman dead at her feet, and with lightning breaking down and the river swelling, she had asked a question: will you come back for me?)
She looks at the ice at her feet, the once-raven. It has begun to melt.
She thinks, live.
She thinks, fly.
The lightning is her constant, it goes out. The raven rises. It is no longer snow, it is electricity. It is a dual creation, inadvertent, and she thinks she might keep it.

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)