Cordis

[Cordis]

(He touched her, in every awful way you could imagine. He touched her, sometimes with hooves, crashing down again and again until she was a patchwork of bruises. Sometimes with teeth, raking trails down her neck, her spine, sometimes coming so deep raw nerves here exposed. Sometimes He touched her with magic – breaking her bones without ever touching her, forcing her to her knees, flaying her open with invisible whips, spilling her guts out on the stone floor, until she’d finally die and He would revive her and the cycle would begin anew. Worst was when he touched her casually, like they were lovers. Worst was when he would breathe the stories into her ear, the same stories He told her again and again, tales of those who wronged Him and what He did to them. He always smelled like smoke, like rotting meat, of everything wrong and stomach turning.) He had touched her so many times that it took her decades until she could even allow Spyndle to touch her (and even that had taken death, had taken magic, had taken her realizing how much she needed her, that they were fate, as much as anything is). He had touched her and sometimes the thoughts come to her unbidden and she is sick, her skin crawls. He had touched her and when she finally escaped and the next horse came (the wayfarer, black and lusty, taking her in filthy ways) she had been able to do what she never could to Him, and she had discovered what He had always known: that it was a pleasure to burn. (The incident had given her Ka, her silver-haired girl she’d tried to love and failed, who had left too early. She’d touched Ka, held her often enough, but Ka had been different, Ka had been her blood.) She still feels hot, the lightning sitting under her skin, begging to be used (she hadn’t used it since He had come, since He had come like a natural disaster and taken their girl away, her silver daughter who had only looked at Him with the same curiosity she’d greeted everything with). But she does not. He has not given her reason. (Part of her – that secret, dark part, the one she does not speak of, does not acknowledge – wants him to try again, wants him to justify the wasp-buzz of lighting singing under her skin, wants to set him aflame.) She hushes these thoughts, quiets them, turns her mind to his question. “My family,” she says, even if the word is sour in her mouth, “I have her. I have our children.” (our child, now) “They’re everything. I have them, and they’re everything.” 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