Chapter 3
In the summer of her seventeenth year, Anya took her to a ravine, secluded in its nature, and left Titus to hawkishly preside in the seat of Polis, speaking in the Heda’s name. To Lexa, it was said— You must unattach yourself from her, extricate your skin from her skin, bleed out this tumour that rots through you— but it was no use. Costia pleaded for Lexa to write, and so she did, beneath the blindfolded, black sky, even as fat, red tears bled from her mouth. Costia did not ask for these letters out of love, but for a friendship, but foolish Lexa was blind to this difference.
She returned from the ravine having been chewed to the sinews by Anya’s hardened regimen, and with a gona’s braid lining her eighteen-year-old scalp. Her muscles, then oaky, were now bronzed and burnished, shoulders thicker in their girth and stomach ridged. The vainer side of her was pleased; knowing that though she’d die, she’d die a beautiful death, trapped in the body of a warrior rather than a child. Lexa was proud of this.
Her physique was one of the few things she could flaunt, and so she did — preferring in the weeping, humid summers a close-cropped tunic whose sleeves stopped at the shoulder, its seams white and frayed. She even forewent her shoulder-guard, as though to look older men in the eyes and say, I am not afraid. The shoulders were not where she needed guards regardless.
It was a change that rippled through the backs of her people like the black lines on her skin. That their Heda was not the exceptionally quiet, gangly child who knew her verses and hid in her ivory tower. That their Heda had the build of both a waterfall and a cliff, callused like flame-touched rock. She tread the earth with strength cordoning her calves and thighs, and her voice had thickened in its volume — it was not dented in a baritone, like her lungs had been smoked, but it had lost its thin, reedy texture and thrummed in her chest like the quiver of a spearpoint. Before, she had radiated a quiet, alienating power. Now, she was luminous and loud.
Through the summer, Costia too had changed with the grace of a rising season. Before, she had worn her hair pinned up and tunics flattening her form, but over the course of these missing months she had allowed her hair to fall in silver-sheathed curls, framing her face like a lunar wreath. Upon Lexa’s return, she had dressed herself in a long, purple gown stretching to her ankles and cutting just shy of her bust. It draped over her like a light film of liquid, accentuating the swell of her hips and the cut of her waist.
Lexa, arriving on horseback, felt near compelled to topple and grovel at the ground smeared beneath Costia’s sandalled feet. She felt oily in her worpaint and instantly shy of the sweat soaking patches from her shirt. There was a desire to hide herself too, sudden, earnest, like she was a vestal virgin and not a newly-anointed gona, to hide the newly-chiselled strength pencilled into the meat of her biceps and triceps — for she knew this was a mark of power, and that was why she had been proud, but did not know whether this was a mark of goodness. Whether this change would compel Costia or disgust her. Her heart thrummed as her procession stopped.
Lexa dismounted, fighting the urge to rub the sweat-mingled paint from her eyes, to beckon Costia and the unreadable darkness in her gaze as though to say, It’s me, Lexa, I haven’t changed, though the sentiment was a lie. Up close, Lexa found herself further astounded with Costia’s brilliance — her eyes had always been crystallised within her memory, but now they appeared widened, golden like desert-sands and striking as the sun, flaming arrows quivering in their notchings. The sorts of eyes brimmed with lashes, opened like quivering lips and glossy with dew, whose shutters Lexa yearned to thumb close and kiss, to press against their searing heat. She was struck dumb by the incline of Costia’s throat, soft and exposed like it was waiting to be impaled — felt sand trickle to her mouth at the sight of her clavicle poking through her dress, at her breasts straining through their confinements, the leaflike curve of her arm—
Lexa coughed. In her lust, it was an orange petal she found herself wiping from her mouth. She looked up, worried Costia caught the widening chasm of her apprehension, but Costia appeared oblivious, drawing Lexa into an embrace.
“You’ve grown, jewel,” was murmured in a gust against her neck. Lexa fought back a full-body shiver, blue bruising her cheek in the faintest of blushes. Lexa felt every part of her stiffen as Costia’s clay-like softness nudged into her, battling with the urge to expel her tautness in a groan. Lightning zipped beneath the sheathing of her skin.
“I like your braid,” Costia continued, oblivious to the burgeoning vine of desire cinching the battalion of Lexa’s heart. “Handsome,” she elaborated, pulling away. Her arm, which Lexa had failed to notice prior, remained locked around her bicep. Her bright eyes turned dark as a storm, and her voice jumped lower than Lexa’s own was capable of, jarring her to confusion. “You look like a proper warrior now,” Costia said, thumb streaking Lexa’s arm, nail briefly sinking into a window of skin before she withdrew.
“You are handsome too,” Lexa said, attentive to the regal bridge of Costia’s nose, the pull of her full, dark lips. She did not know what it meant when Costia did not meet her eyes, preferring for her gaze to reside in the bowels of her torso where Lexa’s tunic had ridden up. Cheeks blue, she silently thanked Costia for the notice of this error by re-adjusting its hem. “The dress fits you.”
Costia smiled. Lexa felt shame dig its claws into her gut at having appreciated the swivel of her hips. She felt, though it was Costia who had kissed the illness into her heart, that it was she who had latched onto her friend with all the persistence of a disease. Lexa wondered if Costia tired of her. Perhaps, though she stood straight and peacock-like, catching light like an oil spill, there was a weariness sitting in her bones. The thought made Lexa uncomfortable.
“As these leathers fit you,” Costia said appreciatively. Admittedly, they were very nice leathers.
Lexa said as much. “They are custom-made. Thank you.”
Something odd flickered in Costia’s eyes. “Um. Yes,” she stammered. “Yes. Would you care for a meal? We can catch up properly then.”
Lexa could not bend her knee for there were eyes on her, but if she could, she would have merged herself with the earth. Trikru meant of the soil, and if she resigned herself then to the ground Costia tread, it would have been enough. She settled for the incline of her sceptre-like neck, trickles of her worpaint bending alongside her face like craggy, black cliffsides. In a feat of bravery, she clasped Costia’s smooth, healer’s hand and pressed her lip to the ridge in her third and fourth knuckle, coloured in a scar.
She said, “Anything for you.” Horribly, she meant it.
“Have you found a suitor for yourself?” Costia asked, between sips of lemongrass tea. A drop of it caught the bow of her lip, and like a cat licking the edge of its bowl she suckled it with her tongue, leaving her mouth glistening and kiss-shaped. An eyebrow raised, bushy and unplucked, her leg sliding forward and ankle brushing by Lexa’s as if in flirtation.
Had Lexa been a summer younger, she might have choked. It felt like Costia’s long, smooth fingers had prised through the cage of her self and slicked a slimy finger down the knobs of her spine. Lexa felt translucent to her gaze, fought the urge to hide herself, wondered if her ink-black heart pounded as hard to Costia’s ears to her own. Did she see? Did she know?
“I have not.” Lexa murmured in reply, ducking from her line of sight. “I have been… preoccupied.”
“I know you have,” Costia nodded approvingly. She seemed very invested in Lexa’s training regime. It touched her to know she cared for her wellbeing. “You’re very,” she sucked in a breath, ankle innocuously brushing Lexa’s once more, parchment-smooth calf suckling Lexa’s close, as though Costia craved a closeness Lexa could not endure. She kept a straight face, however, as Lexa herself was wracked with heat, so it was clear that to Costia this interaction was innocuous. She leant back, exposing her long, dark neck to the saturated light streaming through the opened window-shutters of her cottage, clavicles bathed in rose shadow and pointed like small blades. Lexa wondered how it would feel to trace their ridges — perhaps like treading chalky rock, perhaps like traipsing the pale of a knife — and she tipped her gaze away in banishment of this shame, shame.
Hodnes laik kwelnes. Her knuckles were white.
But Costia’s teeth were toying with her lip like she was tasting a flavourful steak. It made Lexa’s eyes black with shameful hunger. Shame, shame, she pinched her thigh, To be Commander is to be alone. These thoughts were dangerous. She almost missed Costia’s next words: “You’re very… dutiful,” she said. A hand reached out, like an errant insect, and wove itself in Lexa’s hair, tugging at the reins braided across her scalp. Heat rushed to her face. Costia appeared very intent, so Lexa did not interrupt. “So, so dutiful.” Costia flicked her finger down her jaw as though it were paint slicking a canvas, and traced it from her neck to her clothed clavicle to her exposed bicep, again. She squeezed. “You owe no debt to the people who forced you to cut out the flesh of your innocence and replace it with a chip. Just as I owe no debt to the people who carved knives and scythes into my face. And yet you pay it with the weight of a hundred of these bronzen-gold towers you reside in, and you do it without complaint. But tell me— Lexa— is there truly nobody, nothing you truthfully desire?”
Costia spoke evenly, earnestly, as though they might have been discussing the weather. But her eyes — trick of the light — hardened to obsidian slits, and her hand still played with Lexa’s bicep as though it were a toy to fondle. She did not understand quite why Costia was so enamored with this newly acquired strength of hers — Costia loathed brutality and blood, the things that came with this muscle caved into her skin; post Conclave Day it had been weeks before she could look Lexa in the eyes without blanching like a frightened squirrel in a trap. She was confused.
Lexa was so taken-aback she answered honestly. “There is one,” she admitted and her heart suffocated her throat. Costia’s hand went cold around her arm.
“Describe her,” she demanded, voice thin like the ice carved into her face. She withdrew that hand.
“She is,” Lexa swallowed, “not like anything I have met before. Her beauty is unparalleled by the sweating sun above, though it beats to outshine her. Her kindness makes me light where jewellery makes me heavy, and she—” she paused. Speaking from the depths of her ruined, dying heart, weeping petals up her oesophagus even as she fought to keep a grimace from bleeding the corners of her mouth down, Lexa looked Costia in the eye. She did not speak in half-measures. “Caught by the light, she walks like divinity, and she has eyes like molten gold. I— I don’t think I’ve wanted anybody longer. That is all.”
The coldness in Costia’s face retreated into her stapled scythes. The sun caught off their edges, and Lexa yearned to touch, see if they split her skin as Costia’s apparent lack of care split her chest. “I see,” her friend said, withdrawing her ankle from Lexa’s leg. And Lexa worried Costia caught on, but Costia consoled, “I too have found somebody like who you describe.”
Lexa’s heart was a fist, its seams bleeding yellow petals that tasted like pus in her throat. “Oh,” she said softly, sadly. If it had been anyone else, Lexa would have said the glimmer in Costia’s eye was wicked.
“She is beautiful,” Costia began, voice layered and rich like spun gold, its thread holding Lexa’s throat captive. She could only watch, breathe, as pain cracked beneath her skin. Watching Costia love another, knowing she so long had loved her— it—
Lexa was being grievously unfair. She gave her body to Polis, and Polis gave her nothing. She expected nothing. (She gave her heart to Costia, and Costia gave her less.)
“She is tall,” Costia sighed, and in her bitterness Lexa envisioned a candle or perhaps a tree. “She has tawny hair, long and thick and knotted.” Like a soil, perhaps, like the ridged hide of a bark. “She has eyes that are bejewelled,” which was ridiculous for eyes were living matter and not stone, “and she has a strength that rivals that of an ox, but though it can be a violent strength, I know that in her heart she cultivates it to protect.” This was said tenderly, for which a growing urge in Lexa reared in bloodlust, wishing to rip the throat from the object of Costia’s infatuation. “And her arms,” Costia tacked on with a strange sound. Lexa blinked.
“Does she not have them…?” Lexa felt insecure.
Costia violently shook her head. “Oh, no, the opposite. I really wish she’d stop wearing shorter sleeves in summertime. It makes me want to do obscene things to her.”
“To her arms?”
Costia waved Lexa’s confusion away. “No, god, Lexa, to her— everything.” she appeared flustered. Perhaps it was simply arms that got her going. Lexa looked down at her own.
“How are they?” she asked.
“How are they, what?”
“How are her arms?” Lexa elaborated, pinching a frown in the junctures of her bicep with her grown-out nail. “Do they satisfy you?”
“Like they’ve held boulders and never once trembled. Hard.” Costia’s tongue darted out to wet her lower lip. “So hard, Lexa,” she whispered, tea cooling and forgotten, sneaky hand reaching out once more to trace the juncture of her bicep. Lexa wondered if Costia was making a comparison in her mind. “She’s toned like she’s been put through a bronzer. I think she’s got abs as well. Like Hainofa Charming from The Before. Except,” Costia added, finger trickling like a line of water down Lexa’s arm, “I don’t need saving, of course. In fact, she might just need saving from me.” she winked.
It was like all the blood in Lexa had been emptied out and her drooping veins refilled with ice. Costia looked at her with such intention and heat it was becoming steadily more difficult to keep a clear head. “What do you mean?” she asked, unintentionally sharp.
Costia didn’t blanch, but her head turned so that it seemed no longer heart-shaped but triangular. “I’m a healer,” she said obviously, and the weight cramping Lexa’s chest relaxed. She frowned. “What did you think I meant?”
That you knew, but kept quiet all the while. “Nothing.” Lexa switched tacks. “What is this—” she gritted her teeth “—coveted beauty’s name?”
Costia only smiled. “Patience, dear heart. It will be revealed to you in time.”
Lexa awoke the next morning with a ring of blood around her mouth.
Lexa was throwing knives when Costia caught her next. She was shirtless, for sweat had a habit of turning her tunics stale. The familiar twang of the blade against the board brought harmony to her. Costia stalked up to her with the same quiet, hot familiarity as the sweat bleeding down her open, rawed back.
There was an instinct to hide herself even though her chest was bound with a chaste, white cloth. The spindly tattoos running down her back like nail-scratches, the seven circles that reached just shy of the bottom of her spine; they were her mangy bloodlust and black-clotted weakness alike.
“Heja, Kostia,” Lexa turned. They were outside, the earthen smell of wildflowers tickling her sweat-sheened nose, on a field yellowing with age yet dotted with rashes of light pink and white. The sun lowered with care, like a drop of golden syrup, and the sky followed, receding into the thin horizon. Lexa’s knife stuck out from the board like a hangnail from her distance. She wondered if it had splintered the wood.
Costia didn’t reply.
It was perhaps worth noting that Costia was radiant even in the low light. Her shawl hid her hair, but at the angle from which Lexa observed her the remainder of the sunlight appeared to bleed through the skin of it, interweaving golden thread between the strands of her silver hair and off-white covering. Her eyes were large like honey-drops, and Lexa’s heart squeezed syrup up her throat.
And— Lexa was staring, she had been staring for too long— Costia walked. Costia walked and plucked the knife from where it had been stuck like it was second nature, an extension to her ligament and bone. Lexa fought off a cough. She could not picture Costia with a bow, fledged arrow stuck between her teeth, she would not—
“Here,” Costia had returned. She handed Lexa the knife blade-first as though in challenge. Her eyes were infused with that strange darkness again. “Show me how it is done.”
Lexa expelled a shaking breath. “It is no easy feat—”
“I am a year beyond you, jewel,” Costia snapped. “I do not think I am beyond gripping a swis.”
Lexa demurred. “As you wish,” and stepped away. She understood Costia was not truly angry with her; she only sought her out so late in the day if there were other grievances that took the forms of hounds and chased her into her fields. Lexa was happy to act as a sponge.
“No,” Costia interrupted. She was being inexplicably curt. Lexa could not understand it.
Her heart thumped in a volley. Thump-thump-thump, like a meat animal in a bone cage, gnawing at the bars of its enclosure. She was sick, like a blaze of gasoline had been forced down her throat. Costia’s eyes were burning, her face aflame in saturated pink-and-orange light. She stood like the candle of Polis. “No?” she asked, throat dry.
Costia was not looking her in the eyes. Costia was admiring the flat ridges of her abdomen and fighting off a swallow. Her mouth opened and her voice rolled out like her larynx had been unoiled years past, and a thickness coated Lexa’s tongue. “I want you to teach me.”
“As you desire,” she took the knife from Costia, raised her arm, the tattoos on that inclining their wings like swallows mid-flight, and poised ready to strike. “You raise your arm like this, adjust your footing, and ensure that—”
Costia cut in, “More hands-on. I’m a… touch-adjusted learner.”
This stirred the thin flame of heat in Lexa’s stomach to something thicker, threatening to rise to her skin in streaks of bruise-like blue. The human nature is a cursed thing, Lexa thought wretchedly, it covets the thing it cannot have.
“As you desire,” she repeated, plucking Costia’s wrist and twisting it into a wreath with her own. Costia’s fingers were slightly longer than hers, but Lexa’s hand had the wider girth. And— Costia’s thumb, no doubt unintentionally, touched against the stone of Lexa’s pulsepoint and it shattered into trembles that thickened the hungry heat. Lexa was ashamed.
Quite suddenly, she was irrationally angry at Costia too, the way a child was, hot rage flaring at her temples. Lexa was sick, and this woman could not grant her the courtesy of dying in honour — pure of heart and mind, despite the black blood running through her veins. She was ashamed of this thought in equal fervor, for the fault of this predicament was all Lexa, Lexa, Lexa, Costia was only a marionette to her odious, malignant mind.
She locked Costia around the knife, adjusting her grip and hovering at her ear, making doubly sure her instruction was heard. Lexa shifted her stance as well, attempting to keep the touching at a minimum — to manoeuvre her foot forward, but hips and shoulders square — but it did not help that Costia squirmed from these corrections, and so Lexa was forced to reposition her once more.
“Stay still,” she admonished. Costia let out a sound sharp as the knife she held in her hands, and she turned to Lexa with such glossy eyes she wondered if Costia had been in pain.
“I’ll just show you.” she decided, stepping back. “Then you can throw.”
Lexa held out the knife in the flat of her palm. “When you are in battle,” she said, extending herself as though her body was one continuous limb, “there is no line between flesh and weapon. You are your spear, your knife, your guard. More accurately, there is no you — the field is a carcass we scramble to preserve, whose black eyes we seek to whiten with our cries. When in battle, you and your people are one. Like water, immutable and inseparable.” Lexa moved her arm into position, tracing the lines of her bicep so Costia would understand its gradient from her torso. “When you think of water, Kostia, what do you think of?”
“I think,” Costia looked doubtful, hesitant, though her eyes were glazed with a fascination whose nature Lexa could not root out, “of serenity. Fluidity, dancing, beauty. Natblida Luna and the moon.”
Lexa hedged a nod. “Watch my feet.” as Costia’s gaze dipped, “Yes. You are correct. Water is all those things. But it is also a current that rips limb-from-sheath, tears the drum of human skin from its nerves and sinuses. Just as a knife can be used for trimming roses, it can be used for severing heads. Now, watch my feet again.” Lexa moved like a splash of quicksilver light, arcing across the field in a streak whose length and speed was impossible to mimic. She had given Costia a generous moment to blink, and then revealed her neck at the tip of her knife.
“People can be like that too,” Lexa whispered, now that they were lip-to-lip.
And— and she pulled away, but Costia’s eyes were obsidian and mouth a brownish-pink and downturned— and she did the most impossible thing. Mouth hot, she kissed Lexa, and murmured Thank you.
And then she kissed her again. It was like a balm, soothing the open wound of her mouth and sliding down her oesophagus with intent to warm her throbbing heart. Its pulsations subsided then, its meter even and its cage intact — its warmth not unpleasant, not sheathed and not like the warmth of ice upon a bruise. Lexa breathed tears, saw the underside of Costia’s tongue licking at the back of her throat, smelt stars — she was, she was, she was— what? What?
Lexa pulled away. To say she was startled was an understatement. “What did you mean by that?”
Costia’s eyes were glowing embers. Her hands were on Lexa’s abdomen, streaking their way to her hips. “You know full well what I meant by that.” there was a muted pause, the sun winking its goodbye over the horizon, purple light showering flecks of violet into Costia’s eyes and hair. When it became apparent that Lexa’s confusion was genuine, Costia’s lip downturned in upset. She placed a hand on Lexa’s heart, which a minute ago had beat so erratically but was now calm, like a horse on tranquilisers.
“I want you, Leksa.” Costia said. “I have wanted you since I watched you ride into Polis, toned like a rock. I have wanted you, somewhere, subconsciously, far before that. You broke my heart on Conclave Day. Please, do not break it again.”
If anyone’s heart is broken, it is mine, Lexa thought. And then, guiltily, Costia’s hand a warm bandage, but it is healed.
“I wouldn’t,” Lexa whispered against open lips, as Costia’s hands made swift work of her chest bandages. “I wouldn’t,” Lexa murmured, as Costia shrugged off her pants and laid her onto the ground like she was a blanket and manoeuvred herself on top. “I wouldn’t,” Lexa gasped into the open night, Costia kissing her with the fury of the sky. “I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t—”
Until she arched in the release of the heat cradled in her stomach and Costia withdrew, happy like the sun upon rebirth. “I love you.”
*
Lexa was unhappy in her dress. It cut a window across her open back, its scarred surface prickling in the low light. Each of Clarke’s lashes stood out against her eyes, flecked in wheat and gold.
“Is this I told you so?”
It was in Clarke’s nature to be wary; she had faced the tail-end of Lexa’s betrayal before, of course, and those were not easy wounds to lick. Lexa bowed her head, bruised lip twitching.
“No,” she said. “It’s Thank you.”
Clarke’s expression froze, and like a layer of her skin had been spliced open with an axe, broken into like a rash. It melted, she softened like Lexa had dug her thumbs into her, nodded in incline. Lexa wondered if it made her happy to see her humbled. Perhaps. There was no jewellery that could sit so proudly, and without weight, upon her chest as the bend of the enemy’s knee. She would happily soothe Clarke’s heart if only it would dull the ache within her own.
“Come in,” Clarke acquiesced, allowing Lexa the courtesy of entrance. She looked fuller than Lexa last saw her, cheeks rounded with appetite and rosy like the dying sky. If Lexa were a painter she would have painstakingly preserved her complexion on canvass, on marble, on ice. Alas, she only had the patchwork of memory to weave upon.
Clarke’s eyes, swollen like the sea, like the water Lexa had warned Costia of, that later cost her her head — they moved to Lexa’s hand, achingly cold. She wondered if Clarke realised Lexa bled; that Lexa bled for her, this impossibility, like ofa carcass weeping from sockets dry and fly-infested. “Sit down,” she ordered with no bite. Gesturing to the bandage wrapped around Lexa’s palm, “Let me change that for you.”
Lexa did. She was never any good at resisting the whims of Clarke, whose heart was hard and barred and barren, and which Lexa had nonetheless selfishly reached, plucked, and transplanted into her chest. She breathed. She breathed Clarke and the fumes of her funeral pyre.
(Costia’s memory still gnawed at her, a blended mixture of How dare you and This is nothing less than what you deserve. It was a cruel insult to Costia to envision her so cruel, but Lexa’s subconscious did not agree. Neither did the voices in the Flame.)
“Do you ever talk about anything other than your death?” Clarke teased, voice rough and full of humour. Lexa’s heart flurried. She finished tying her bandage and, with the slightest brush of skin, allowed Lexa’s hand to fall to the side.
Tears stung the inside of Lexa’s throat. She did not want to answer that question.
“Thank you for backing me,” she said quietly instead.
Clarke gave her a long, cool look, betraying nothing. She asserted, eyes flickering like small, icy flames in the dim of her chambers, “I did it for my people,” and something Lexa did not think she had in her broke.
There was an inflammation on her skin. It hadn’t been— it shouldn’t have been this bad.
Titus’ eyes looked like unshelled oysters. He said, darkly, plainly, “You’re going to die.”
There was nothing new in this statement. Only a gentle reassurance that tingled its fingers down Lexa’s spine. She thought of what she had said to Clarke — if I die, then it is my time — and felt a certain peace swallow her. “How long?”
His face contorted, white shadow crawling across pasty skin. “Weeks. Months, if the fates are on our side. With distance and bedrest, a year.”
Oh. Lexa picked at the hemmings of her robe. “That’s not as long as the last time,” she said quietly, childishly. And she felt like she was twelve again, coughing out red petals in the middle of the night, throat sore like someone had hung a noose around it and head pounding with a heartache so keen it threatened to cleave her skull in two.
Titus nodded grimly. “It is not.”
Since then, Lexa began dreaming of her death.
It came in fragments, like a photograph torn limb from papery limb. A cut from clavicle-to-clavicle, a knife to the chest, a spear in her spine. Lexa was immobile in her sleep save for the sweat slipping past her skin like that same blade. It was always a blade that caught her fall.
And one afternoon, she awoke. Clarke presided over her. You’re okay was said, but it was not meant.
Clarke drew her. In the drawing, Lexa looked at peace. For the first time in a long time, she felt an anger raise its wings.
To Titus: I know what must be done.
*
“And it never crossed your mind to tell me?” so fumed the Queen, hands balled at her hips and lip aquiver. Lexa, seated on her bed, raised a tired brow. The scar on her heart gave a small twinge.
“I was always going to die, Cos,” she placated. “Please. I am weary.”
“And so Titus had to be the one to tell me you were coughing flowers for a succession of years?” Costia spat. “You awful—”
“Costia!” Lexa raised her voice. “Sleep.”
Costia shook her head. “I’m going out for air.”
Lexa let her leave the tower grounds. Lexa knew she would return. After one, two, three days she was not so sure.
*
She would always remember the head. It had been eyeless, of course, for Azgeda preferred their masks eyeless; a token of gruesome respect for the taken. Her silver hair had been dragged through dirt and blood, streaked unpleasantly like the underside of a dog’s stomach. Her nose had been slanted, broken, lips one massive bruise. Lexa didn’t remember much else, only her throat closing up and heart falling through her feet. Part of her liked to believe she’d cried — perhaps screamed, even, wailed in brokenhearted anguish.
The truth was, she’d sat in silence and waited for her handmaiden to clear the head away. Once it was out of sight, she allowed herself to feel one thing alone. Relief.
And then came Clarke and took a jackhammer to her heart.
It is simple.
Clarke kissed her with only half her heart. Lexa’s own smoothed and ruptured each time she broke away, smoldering and painless. It was okay. Every phoenix lost its wings. Sometimes they didn’t grow back.
The gods do not will me to die on the battlefield, and I do not wish to stir a bloodbath on occasion of my death.
Clarke pushed her down as though intent on worshipping her. It would not be, Lexa thought, and manoeuvred her bruised lips against Clarke’s own, down her neck, down her breasts and stomach and thighs. She had no delusions of love, only carried the ache of loss. (That’s why I…)
I will die simply. Accidentally. Humiliatingly.
It was perhaps a few minutes of bliss. Perhaps a few hours. Lexa coughed forget-me-nots while Clarke slept. (That’s why you’re you.)
I will die in a manner in which Clarke will find fault in you alone, and it will incense her. And you will kill me, Titus. I am sick of nothingness.
She slept uneasily. She awoke with sunlight blinding her in the ease and blood filling up her lungs.
Do it, Titus. And then run. But do not do it with a knife.