[open] shaking like a leaf on any god-given night; any

[Cordis]

She watches him move, the architecture of him. Familiar and not, blood several times removed, but if she glimpses it from the corner of her eye she can see her, and oh, how it twists her. He says her name and the word is flat in his mouth and it means nothing to him, and nor should it, because surely he knows nothing of the history that haunts his bloodline.
God, she hopes he doesn’t. It is not his burden to bear.
He muses on, and the first name means nothing to her, but then –
Glassheart.
She remembers the mare. Glassheart had known. She had looked at her, inside of her, and for a moment Corids thought her Spyndle reborn and hope had clawed a hole in her chest and she had felt so many things and oh –
But Glassheart had left, too. And had not come back.

“Yes,” she says, and the word hurts a little, “I met Glassheart, once.”
The uncomplicated answer.
The complicated answer - I met her and she was herself and then she was someone else and then I was sick and she never came back and then I was well again.
It goes on. She doesn’t.
“Is that your mother?”
He’s closer, now. Leaning towards her. A conflict flares within her – part of her wants to burn him for it, because she is not a touchable thing, yet another part wants to allow it, because his skin is – must be – born from skins she once knew, and she is perhaps so desperate that she will take this crumb, this morsel of memory, and swallow it down.
She swallows, and his skin touches her, unburnt.

I’ll touch you all and make damn sure

Cordis

that no one touches me