15. Fulmen

fulmen ~inis, n.

1. lightning

“She’s cute.” Yavn von Velrayd elbows his cousin and points at the far table in pale blue and silver.

Rax Istra-Velrayd is really too tired to support his cousin’s flirtations—no sleep this week. The nightmares have been bad lately. They’ve been with him since he turned ten or so, waking him at odd hours with their violently hyper-specific nonsense, but only recently have they gotten so much worse. He strains his neck to see over the courtly crowd anyway, curious, and his heart beats one moment and stills the next. The girl in the blue-and-silver dress makes the world fade, the faces all around her smearing to blurs. His cousin’s a fool—cute isn’t enough for what she is; black hair shorn tight and clean beneath her ears, no halo on her sharp brow, and her eyes bluer than the fake noble-spire sky—as the sky must’ve been when it was real. But what really takes his breath away is how she holds herself: laser-focused and bowstring-tight, like something wild, feral.

No—he corrects himself sternly—like something hunting.

Yavn pours himself more wine. “Those are red pox pockmarks on her cheeks. Did you know forty percent of the commoner children die from it? Guess she was one of the lucky ones.”

Rax looks at him finally. “You know that off the top of your head?”

His cousin shrugs. “What can I say? I’m the type to care about my fellow man.”

Pockmarks pit her cheeks here and there, but it’s the circular tangle of flesh at her collarbone that draws Rax’s eye most—lighter, long healed, but not very old.

Rax knows scars. He knows how they bruise, scab, heal, how they look at every stage, and he knows best of all how they’re removed. Her collarbone scar is from hard-light—cauterized, forceful, angular like a blade. She wears the colors of a noble House like the rest of them but hasn’t gone to a clinic to remove her scars? She doesn’t even hide them with makeup or her dress—the collar dips low across her shoulders. She’s the only one here unsmooth, the only one staring not at someone else around her but ahead. Odd. Terrifying. Maybe that’s why looking at her feels like electrocution, like the saddle sending down its handshake too strong.

“What House—”

“Lithroi,” Yavn answers smoothly. “I think. I remember Father talking about their silver—unmistakable in the way it shines.”

Shining silver. That silver steed, the girl’s voice in it, her hands tearing the dummy apart as if she were a merciless black hole or some rabid beast… He hasn’t been able to forget that day for even a second. The sound of her ragged, triumphant voice taunting him has haunted his every ride since then and every shower afterward.

It’s her.

The way she threw everything into one lunge with complete disregard for her own safety, like she was dying, like she wanted to die… It was unnatural. It went against everything the academy taught, everything he’d lived by in the saddle. She rode wrong, and yet watching it had felt strangely right, like music arranged in a way he’d never considered before. The rider in him starts screaming to fight her. Begging. Just once. The chance to see more of her, the strange new things she would do against him, how long he could toy with her before she broke, or he broke, or they both broke together—

She looks his way, icy eyes cutting across the crowd, but doesn’t notice him. Every cell in Rax stands at attention when her gaze nears and falls like a wave when it leaves. He recovers with a wrenching effort.

“Not her, Yavn. Not in your wildest dreams.”

“But in yours, obviously,” Yavn argues, smirking. “Hey, with any luck she’ll be a rider.”

Rax snorts, the words running through his head too shaky to leave his mouth.

That’s what I’m afraid of.