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Breathlessly their bodies come unclasped; limbs like the sharp catches of Petrine’s armor. She topples like a regime, the bed’s bones wailing with her weight.
The raw chill of the first month surges in around Almedha, into the gouged-out space inside her. She clutches at Petrine with a stuttering arm, begs that dauntless body to her side.
Even two decades gone, she’s never learnt the knack for Daein winters.
Petrine twists to face her, smiling like the dagger she carries at her thigh. “Can’t get enough?”
Almedha purses her kiss-bitten lips. “Stay with me.”
A perennial refrain, like the sun-glare in Goldoa, the savannas that frost never finds.
Petrine shakes her head, tossing the tangle Almedha has made of her hair.
Almedha’s eyelashes are wet. “Please?”
“For a minute,” rasps Petrine–but for all of her chagrin, she presses the brazier of her body to Almedha’s.
With a weaver’s gentle fingers, Almedha fusses with the furze of Petrine’s hair; combs it carefully to rights.
A laugh, heady–she can feel the pulse of Petrine’s chest against her own. “Leave it,” she growls, like a battle-standard speared into the earth.
“Let them all see.”
The boldness stokes a little fire inside Almedha; half-smiling, she lets her fingers slip away. Draws them down the stalwart shape of Petrine’s jaw, the rough patch where once the bone was broken.
Over the corded muscle of her neck, the fading shapes of Almedha’s sharp teeth, and then down…
Down past the clavicle, to the place where Petrine’s breast is branded, her stark inescapable stigma.
Almedha’s fingertips ghost at its edges like hoarfrost. She cannot touch it. The deep green sears.
It is as hard and venomous a thing as malachite, as Petrine’s waxing glare.
Almedha makes peace with the ebbing-away of her fingers, stroking instead at the shield of Petrine’s breastbone.
“I just…” she murmurs, through the veil of her eyelashes. “What is it like?”
Like a spear-shaft over the knee, Petrine splinters into a smile. “Not half bad,” she chokes, cloaking herself again in bright bravado, “once you’re strong enough to bite back.”
Almedha’s voice is soft as the flutter of her eyelids. “A badge of honor,” she breathes.
Petrine huffs with laughter, with all the force of a destrier. “None of that high-minded horseshit,” she says, and in her defiance she flares like the sun over Goldoa.
“It does important work for me,” says Petrine. “I don’t have to be a shrewd judge of character when my brand is out.”
“If someone’s a cunt,” she says, “they’ll tell me as soon as look at me. Then I know exactly who to crush.”
There is a conquest in it, an edge; the long, arduous forging of a spearhead.
Softly, Almedha nods; motions muted with wonder.
A badge of honor, she is certain, but is not fool enough to say it again.
When she does speak, her voice is delicate, as unyielding as silk. “You are strong.”
Petrine glories, heaves her bloody-minded body from the bed. She rakes her talons through the wreckage of her hair. “Don’t you forget it,” she crows.
She sets about dressing, then; gathering her brilliant black plate. She hums a jagged war-song as she goes.
The bed is very far from her, a nation with closed borders. Alone, raw-skinned, Almedha could be cold.
She isn’t.
She lies there like a scaled thing in the sun, and dreams the brave dark shape on Petrine’s breast. The strength that it has given her–that she has given it.
Bereft, Almedha knows only two things of her son. That his own soft pale brow is branded; and that he is, he must be strong.
He cannot be anything else.
Of this, now, Almedha is certain.