She remembers too well what it is to be hunted.
She remembers with an aching clarity the way the hellhounds had chuffed and bayed. They had been horrible, insidious things, living in the periphery of her vision, in shadows, always seen in the corner of the eye and nowhere else. It left her with a jitterbug heartbeat and a tendency to spin on her heels.
They’d felled her once when she had done the impossible. Like Lot’s wife, she had looked back, but rather than looking back at a city burning she’d been looking back at a woman.
(Truth be told, a city burning would have been cleaner.)
But rather than turn into a pillar of salt the hounds had noted the weakness and she had fallen. But they hadn’t killed her. She still doesn’t know.
She doesn’t like to think about these things.
There is much she doesn’t like to think about, from the particular horrors of His lair to the particular perfection of Spyndle’s neck. There is much she cannot bear to think of.
There is a brand burned on her hip beneath the lightning she wears, His mark, and she does not think of that, either.
A stallion, says the girl, and once more déjà vu strokes its fingers down Cordis’s spine. She knows what it is to not name them.
(“Naming things gives them power,” she’d once said to Spyndle when Spyndle had implored her to speak His name and she had refused. It was one of many things she refused her.)
More things roll out, confessions, and maybe Cordis should feel empathy for the girl – like knows like, after all – but instead she feels a queasy sort of disgust.
You’re so weak, she wants to tell the girl, but she would not be speaking to the girl, she would be speaking to the silver mare she once was, the one who was chased with a brand burnt hot on her hip.
The lightning sinks into her skin as if absorbed. Her skin is still now, though it still glints in the sunlight like a sword. She steps closer. She could almost touch her.
“I’ll protect you from him,” she says. And that’s true enough. If the stallion came forth Cordis could strike him dead where he stood.
(She’s done it before.)
“What’s your name?”
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)