SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
They have spent years flitting around each other without ever meeting.
But Gospel knows who she is the moment she lays eyes on her.
Gospel lingers by the sea because it is where she is the most comfortable. There is no nostalgia in it. She does not look upon the dark corner where she brought her own children into the world with any sense of warmth or longing. She remembers the impulse to rip them out of her womb with her teeth. She remembers how desperate the pain had made her, how she would have died to get away from it. How she would have taken the children with her.
She has no maternal instinct, she so rarely tolerates her children’s company. She will wait until they are older, cleanly removed from their youth, to groom them. They are destined to be even greater than she, she knows. The boy, a serpent who makes the stars fall. And the girl, with her glimmer of her father’s power, the ability to siphon the life from others, a viper just like her mother and Gospel’s mother before her.
But she feels nothing, certainly no softness, when she looks at Clarissa and her brood. She has moved beyond even whatever jealousy had consumed her in her own youth. Still, she harbors the belief that Ghaul chose wrong and the feeling is compounded by the scene that unfolds before her.
Gospel would have sooner drowned her children in the sea than watch them play.
She skims her tongue across a fanged tooth in annoyance but does not move from the knoll on which she stands, stoic. She has nothing to say to the mare, just watches, her expression passive. She thinks only briefly of the new mare and the mare’s son, how she’d said that Clarissa had sent her and how deeply that had irritated her. But not even this is enough to prompt her to move.
@[Clarissa]