Revelation
Lexa pulls back. Small drops of blood drip from her knife. If Lilith didn't know better, she would have thought Lexa was ready to drink it up, drop by drop.
“I should gut you where you stand," Lexa says to Lilith.
“You’ve already hesitated too long,” Lilith replies, still as a glacier. “You won’t do it now.”
Lexa turns to Juno, and the glance they share, though it lasts but a second, is unmistakeable. Flashes of red appear on both their faces, but Lilith dismisses the flashes as tricks of the light. She knows not to trust the devious magic of the Polis court, where the dew settles on wall-length windows in the early morning like magic crystals, where everything sparkles under the direct sun streaming in through the skylight.
Lexa steps back and slouches in her throne. “Explain,” she says.
“We don’t need to explain anything to you." There's Juno, enveloping herself in the bravado Lilith barely knew she had.
“You’ve murdered more of my people than all the other clans combined. So when I find you playing house at the edge of the capital, I need an explanation. Unless you prefer war.”
“Juno has nothing to do with this,” Lilith declares in Trigedasleng, wondering why Lexa is speaking in the old tongue instead of their own language. “She’s just a girl who needed shelter. Which I provided. I am not entirely heartless, despite what you believe.”
“Don’t dismiss as beliefs what I’ve seen with my own eyes.” Lexa pauses, then switches back to the old tongue. “Juno, is that what she called you? Now this is sport indeed.”
Lilith looks at Juno. There’s no mistaking the redness on her face this time.
---
Many minutes pass in silence. The three women carefully avoid looking at each other, afraid of giving anything away with a stray glance or obvious gesture.
The courtroom is perfectly clean, perfectly dry, as though it had been kept safe in plastic sheets while the rest of the planet burned.
“I’m still waiting for an explanation. I have all day.” Lexa steps forward, sure-footed, taking a moment to wipe her boots on the strip of cotton in front of her throne before she steps to the floor. “And, I should add, I also have tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Which you might not.”
“Cheap threats, Lexa? I would have thought that was beneath you.” Juno spits blood on the ground. The girl who once fussed over ink stains on her fingers, now sullying the speckled grey concrete without a care. “Of course that was before I learned that nothing’s beneath you.”
“Are you trying to hurt my feelings? You’ll have to do better than that."
Lilith rolls her eyes. "Can we get back to business so I don’t have to watch whatever...this...is?"
“Bored, are you?” Lexa raises her knife. "I wouldn't have thought time was any concern of yours, given your casual abdication."
"I don't judge what you do on a holiday, Lexa."
"I don't take holidays." Lexa steps forward, ever closer. "Only death could make me abandon my people.”
"Are you suggesting we’re cowards? Cause you’d have to have some nerve to tell me that,” Juno says.
“I made a choice. So did you.” Lexa approaches Juno with bright and lively eyes, challenging her without a word.
Lilith tries to ignores the scene before her, focusing on the loose thread unraveling from her hand ties. Just five more seconds…
Lexa twirls her knife for a moment. Then, without removing her eyes from Juno, she points it at Lilith again. "Her people are probably better off without her. But what of yours, Juno? You haven’t even asked me how they’re coping without you."
Lilith takes advantage of Lexa's divided attention and high kicks the knife from Lexa's hand. She knocks Lexa over and kneels over her, catching the knife as it comes down. She raises her hand to strike.
"No Lilith! Don't!" Juno shouts.
Lexa uses the moment of hesitation to retake control. She shoves Lilith off her body and smashes her into the wall. "Good thing she distracted you," she hisses. "You'd have ended the alliance."
Lexa pulls back, and then she tosses aside Lilith’s knife, just inches from Juno. Juno looks straight at Lexa. “What are you doing?”
“Machiavelli was right.” Lexa shakes her head. "It truly is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.”
Juno huffs in frustration. "More commander bullshit? Really?"
Lilith looks back and forth between the two, and doesn’t like what she sees. On the one, pure bloodlust. And on the other, well, she can’t quite figure it out.
"It would seem that introductions are in order." Lexa sits back down on her throne, jabbing her knife into the armrest. “Juno and Lilith are terrible pseudonyms, by the way. Pretentious and cliché all at once.”
There it is. Lilith slumps where she stands, carefully avoiding any eye contact. “Remember me the way I was, Juno.”
“What are you talking about?” Juno darts her eyes back and forth between Lilith and Lexa, but neither look at her.
Lexa smiles. "Clarke Griffin, this is Nia, the current and soon to be former Queen of the Ice Nation."
"Azgeda queen, this is Clarke Griffin, commander of the sky people."
Lexa smiles at the horror on the faces of the other two. "I seem to have made an impression.”