Kestrel/ Celeste [part 2]
Strange, how it was that they met again.
Seven years after the great Gythian war, the queen and her knight, occupying the same chamber.
Celeste watched as Kestrel cleaned her bow with the sort of unsullied love at the heart of the true archer. It was, perhaps, a superficial sort of observation, for Kestrel cleaned them as she would every other part of her armor, her face stone cold and her motions perfunctory. The callous roughness with which she treated her gear was too particular to constitute so commonly used an expression.
And yet it was what Celeste thought. She sprawled on a bed beside the crackling hearth, watching as the flames sparked against Kestrel's eyes like the darkest coals. Perhaps she should think it strange that Kestrel be close to nude, with nothing but a silk cloth draped over the most intimate space of her being, as she cleaned a weapon dyed in the blood of hundreds. She did not.
Kestrel, thoughtless, thinking, felt a smirk rise from her depths at the intimation of Celeste's gaze, one she did, with the exceptional ability for which the shadow of her name was infamous, suppress.
Sometimes it was easier to let go. Certainly she did when they tussled in bed together, though it was hard to admit, Celeste being in truth a better wrestler between the two of them (Kestrel with better aim, in the interior sense). From the very tip of her bow Kestrel watched the flicker of Celeste's body, shivering in firelight like iron forged in fire. It was simple, to adjust the makeshift mirror down, to the arc of her ankle where there lied the scar of an unknown past, up, to the pale navel on which Kestrel had spread her palm, proprietorially, to keep what she knew would soon dissolve beneath the grotesque corpses of her assigned targets.
On the steel of her bow, Celeste was plain, humans. Kestrel remembered the first time she had laid eyes on the princess, when she had been first assigned to kill one of the noblemen at her coming-of-age ceremony. She had watched, from the bough of a great oak miles above the world, her gloved hand wielding a power tantamount to god's, as Celeste exited onto the balcony to the adulation of the whole of Gythia. From a distance, she seemed untouchable, her voice echoing against the cracked tiles of the great cathedral behind her, out against the ascendent bell towers from which guards gazed, dumbfounded by so divine and exquisite a creature. Kestrel had not forgotten her task- only, as she later released the arrow which would find its way into the chest of the scraggly noble, the sunburst cape that had run down Celeste's shoulders flashed through her mind.
Something dangerous and unfamiliar and infinitely intriguing had coursed through her.
She savored it. Glutted herself on it, until the war started, until it ended.
Good things, in Kestrel's experience, rarely came true. Perhaps she should think it strange that Celeste sleep by her side every night now, given the long years she had dreamed for it. She did not.