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Chapter Text

They met in the cherub-shaped flowers scattered like beads of blood outside their Capitol; red blood, that was, filthy and mongrel, touching the veins of the petals and poisoning their skin. So said their Heda . It was whipped into the scarred back of their culture to accept what their Heda said with little question. Anya said so, albeit in littler words.

She had been sent into the outskirts as a form of punishment for giving Moira a red crown in the teeth. She had it coming. Black blood, the cruel chant rang in her ears, black blood, poisoned blood. Moira was descended from a long line of devil-worshippers who hung a crucifix symbol on their walls. The girl was built with the sinew of a knot, so Moira did not petrify her as she did the other children. Besides. She’d been bounced on Indra’s lap to the lullaby of Jus drein, jus daun. Blood must have blood, red or otherwise.

It was not fair. Anya said she could not return until last light, when the skies blushed purple and the voices in the woods grew shrill. Anya knew the snake of fear that coiled tight around her spine when standing in the leaves. It was cruel. Indra said she couldn’t fear the woods, for she was Trikru, which meant that her limbs were of the same mold as the boughs above her, and her blood ran in a forked current through the earth. Most of the time she was not afraid. But in the night, the trees curved like the knobs pushing against a vertebrate, and the Paunae howled with hunger, her skin pinched like a leather from the cold, and there were mongrel-blood petals at her feet.

She dragged a hesitant heel across the spine of the one closest to her, pressing it neck-first into the mud. It brought an ember of satisfaction to her stomach to watch it sink. 

Indra said they must respect all life. Indra’s comment applied only to the life of leaves — she’d taught her how to slit a grown man’s throat in her sixth year. Indra said, in hushed tones, that the trees were their people — perhaps more so than their neighbour clans (the name Azgeda went unsaid) could be. It was all very well for Indra to say this, born of torn, lacerated skin and a stable-bed. 

This girl was born with black melting down her face like wax.

Natblida, she was dubbed. They named her after the Macedonian general, Alexander the Great. The other children mocked her for it — Hogeda hail Heda Lexa! — though she could not fault them. If her mind were softer, if her knives were duller, perhaps she’d slink into mockery as well. But. It was cold and the dogs were loud. Anya said that fear was good. It meant she was thinking with her head. But Heda said fear was a weakness, and Lexa was to be Heda one day , so she squared her shoulders and said with misty breath —

“I am not afraid.”

Indra said the only mongrels that feared liars were liars themselves. 

“I am not afraid.”

She stuttered. This late, Moira was likely bent over a bowl of warm soup, holding hands with her mother and brother in a strange, heretic practice — the practice of the Mountain Men — and chanting lyrical verses beginning with ‘dear God’ and ending with ‘ amen’. Moira would bow her neck in a long, smooth column, and light would fall in a veil to bring gold flecks in her hair, and she would be solemn, horse-faced, praying for absolution for her wickedness. Black blood, poison blood . Lexa scowled at the memory. It wasn’t just, that Moira now had meat between her teeth while Lexa’s chattered.

A voice sounded behind her. “My mama used to say that anyone who has to convince themselves of something isn’t really convinced at all.” 

Lexa spun on her heel, eyes sharp and stance pointed. “Your mama is a liar,” she bit, ignoring the wetness on her cheeks. It framed her face like worpaint , lashes thick and glossy and brow lacerated like torn tissue. 

The intruder — a girl, a small girl dressed in Azgeda garb, the lines of a scythe cutting from her temple to her chin. There was a fire that lay dormant, like a rabid cur, in the deep swell of her iris. Her shock-white locks were pinned in a lazy bun that sat not like a crown upon her scalp, but like a hooded piece of flesh. Her face was swollen with half-mirth.

“And you’re crying,” she said, to Lexa’s stilted sobs. “You look like a raccoon.”

Lexa summoned haughtiness into her spine. “Raccoons are scavengers. I am a warrior. You insult your Heda.”

The girl squinted at her, puzzled. “There is already a Heda.”

“And her spirit will reside in my skin one day.”

She was regarded with apprehension for a moment, their gazes caught in a wave of untimely pride that had Lexa’s shoulders roll back. Her swis was sheathed in royal black, its grip still sweaty from the afternoon. If she got close enough, she could perform an upwards kodon, and the girl would bleed like the petals on the floor. 

There was something carnivorous in the thought. Let the flames of hunger envelop you, Indra told her, and breathe them in until your lungs are accustomed to the smoke.

The girl picked up the cherub-shaped petal, and raised it to her lips, close enough to smell. Lexa wondered if it smelt of cranberries or rust or a mangy dog’s hide. Heda said that was how the peasant blood smelt.

“So you are a natblida?”

But, a younger Lexa had said, with wide, worried eyes, in Pramheda’s time there were many people who lay in soil with burnt lungs.

And Indra’s scarred lip only twisted. Victory stands on the back of sacrifice, young Heda. Burn your lungs to save your heart.

“I am what I am.” Lexa stoutly said. “Just as you cannot help your insolent nature, I cannot help my poison blood.”

The girl blew on the petal. It stalked through the breeze as though it had legs, then fell to the ground. Lexa breathed the fumes of irritation, allowed its sweat to soak her skin. She was of her ninth year, the compass needles in her eyes magnets to her weakness, who smiled, of her tenth year, a dimple freckling her left cheek.

“At peace. I mean no harm.” she said. “I have never met a natblida before.”

“Because you’re kom Azgeda.” Lexa said, scowling at the scythe sizzling in twisted sideburn down her cheek. “ There are no natblidae in Azgeda.”

“You speak ill of my people,” the girl said, raising a hand. “ Ai laik Costia, and you must be Trikru.” her eyes flickered downwards like a flame. “Your stance. Did gona Indra teach you that? She is much favoured by Heda, I hear.”

The wind whistled sharply over the tops of the trees. And yet the sky was not yet dark, and the moon still hid its face behind a veil. There was the chorus of a beating drum somewhere in the distance. It took Lexa a moment to realise it was coming from within, where her heart was locked in a cage. Anya told her, as an aside, that the best defence was a good offence, so Lexa bared her glass-cutting teeth:

“You know nothing.”

“So you say,” Costia stepped forth, eyes glittering amber like the sap that melted down treebark in spring, and Lexa recalled how earlier she’d noted the slight swell to her face — a swell that belied more than its heart shape; there was a bruise, pinecone-sized, at the corner of her mouth. “Your eyes are green. They glisten like jewels but they are of the earth. You have hair dark, like bark, and I would bet it is knotty and rough to the touch. Yes,” Costia breathed, and there was a warm clench in her stomach, unlike anything she’d ever felt before. “Yes, you are the natblida of the Trikru. Is your name Lea? Lenorah?”

Lexa breathed. Lexa breathed until her lungs were swollen and sticky with blackness, and remnants of her frustration were wiped like the radiation scourge of their earth. Lexa was calm. (Lexa was torn between these entities, moored upon another isle entirely, reaching blindly from afar.)

“ Ai laik Leksa,” she said into the cold air. She gripped Costia’s hand and shook it, taking note that it was cold. 

“Leksa,” Costia tasted her name. “I think we could be friends.”

*

“ You’re the one who burnt three-hundred of my warriors alive.”

The Skaikru was a head shorter than her, with twisted, blonde tresses frizzing the column of her face. She was striking, like an arrow in the eye. Eyes like the pale wax of the moon, a soft nub for a nose, and a mouth that seemed inclined towards upset. She was hunched, in learned submission, at Lexa’s foot, which ought to have appeased her — but the low flame in her eyes tugged upon a long-dormant instinct instead.

In her hands, Lexa mindlessly gripped a knife, toying the teeth of her blade across her index finger, her third, then catching it on her thumb. Black ink swelled like a bruise where she’d nicked herself, wide and spherical like a dilated pupil. She flicked it away like one would flick dust. It was cold. She thought of Costia. 

The girl stood her ground. Clarke. Klark.

“You’re the one that sent them there to kill us.”

Lexa paused her dwelling, swiped the blade into its scabbard. The hiss of pain had long since left her skin, which knitted a seam across the opening she’d made. She blinked, slowly, watched Clarke’s teeth scurry and find solace in capturing the flesh of her lower lip. But she would not marry herself to the floor. (This did not bother Lexa as it once might have done. When you are in your twelfth year, hands shiny and black with blood, things tend to cease to bother you as they once might have done.)

Lexa let the subject lie like a sleeping cur. Allowed it to get fat. In time, she would pierce through its soft underbelly, gouge its insides, leave a red moustache around her mouth. In time. Blood must have blood. Indra met her eyes across the room.

She stood, the scent of mud and straw thick and heavy against her nose. “Do you have an answer for me, Clarke of the sky people?”

Clarke swallowed a thickness in her throat. Her warm gaze flickered to where Lexa had gripped the knife, to where leather clung to the metal of her legs, itching to reposition themselves in the clench of a gona’ s stance. Patience. The virtue that painfully clamped at her nape. Lexa reasoned, Clarke would not die by her hand — today. But she let her stew in a little fear of her own making.

“I’ve come to make an offer.”

Lexa bristled, insulted. “This is not a negotiation.”

Clarke breathed. Lexa tested the waters, inching forwards, watching with heated satisfaction how Clarke’s keen, curious eyes tore at the garment of her body, cool like a scalpel, clinical as a sniper. The sort of white-hot flame that felt cold to first touch. Black paint wept down Lexa’s face.

Clarke said, “I can help you beat the Mountain Men.”

She had a good face for the game they called ‘ poker’. But Lexa sensed the sniffle of a lie, the stalking untruth hiding behind the bite-marks on the edges of her lip. She had a ring of bruise around her eyes — Lexa deduced Clarke’d most likely been pondering her statement’s weight since dawn. 

She decided she didn’t believe her. She decided she didn’t disbelieve her, also.

Lexa said, “Go on.”

“Hundreds of your people are trapped inside Mount Weather. Kept in cages.” Clarke’s tongue swiped at her lower lip, but the liquid fire in her eyes did not yield. That was… interesting, Lexa decided, for the scarring that creviced her heart refused for her to come up with another word. “Their blood is used as medicine.”

Lexa knew this. Part of her took offence Clarke felt the need to deliver it upon her. Part of her twitched in sharp curiosity, whittled by the meter of Clarke’s speech.

“How do you know this?”

There was a silence, thin like the air at the peak of a mountain, broken only by the regular tik-tok of Indra’s pendulum-clock. 

“Because I saw them,” and Lexa’s perception of Clarke shifted forever. The blue thing in her eyes was a glacier prised close, still and cool, with walling that didn’t chip. The blue thing in her eyes was no flame, it was a tide of fury, foam-streaked and leaping high as a jaguar. Lexa’s throat was in straits. Because I saw them. Because she had been to the Maun , and lived.

“My people are prisoners there too,” Clarke continued, “I was one of them.”

Indra’s tattoo shifted with her snarl. “Lies,” she hissed, eyes bugged-out like those of an insect. She spat at Clarke. “Nobody escapes the mountain.”

A doleful look tugged at the lip of her eye. Clarke’s face was weathered, then, like she had not seen sunlight in years. Lexa noticed her eyes had been shot through with blood, too. Then:

“I did. With Anya.”

*

“This walk is long,” Lexa whined, the pack on her back digging into her shoulder-blades like the press of a hot knife.

“This walk is necessary,” Anya snapped. “You cannot call yourself one of us and fear the foliage. Learn from the simplest roach. Adapt.”

“I cannot go on any longer,” Lexa cried — or, mimicked a close approximation of a cry, which was still enough for Anya to turn upon her with a sneer, dark eyes dancing with something another would have called cruel.

“And when you are Heda, is this what you will tell your warriors?” Anya shook her ratty braids, mussed up for she had denied Lexa the honour of sorting through the foliage on her scalp. “That you must stop because you are afraid?”

Lexa was silent for a moment. Then she said, “But I am not Heda.”

“You sound like your Azgeda friend.” came the dismissal. “You are in your tenth year — many have assumed this mantle far before you.” Anya clipped back, swatting through the undergrowth. If it had not been for the perspiration slicking Lexa’s torn shirt to the square of her back or the white flies buzzing around her eyes, she might have appreciated the green, winding for miles like the things in old people’s magazines they called Football Fields, except theirs was dotted with the acne of trees. 

“I dislike you today, Anya.” Lexa said, with the full chest of a child. “You say I will become Heda . So I say, when I am Heda, I will order my Ambassadors to drive a poisoned dagger through your heart.”

Anya hissed through bared teeth. “That’s the gratitude I get for dealing with your spoilt, insolent backside for near a decade?”

“My legs ache,” Lexa said forlornly. “ Please, Anya,” she stumbled over a rock, “allow me a moment of respite.” Breathe, she thought, allow the fumes of anger to blacken your lungs. 

Anya’s eyebrow arched, the hollow of her voice softening. “You have truly grown weary then?” she said, disappointment aching at her voice. An instinct, infantlike, reached with its grubby hand and tugged at Lexa to scoop this tumour from Anya’s voice. She batted it away. There was little use in stooping to appeasement.

“I have,” Lexa answered honestly. 

Anya pondered a moment. Lithe fingers knotted themselves around the hilt of her scabbarbed swis, and she tossed it towards Lexa, who was still as earth. It landed on the ground, point-first.

“Take off your pack.” Lexa did.

“Pick up the knife.” Lexa kept her eyes level to Anya’s own. She gripped the leather hilt in her small palm.

“ Yu want kom gonplei me, goufa? Do so kom mo than your word.” It meant — You want to fight me, child? Do so with more than your word — and Lexa knew right then that Anya, like her, was hoarse from walking even if she hid it well. She hawked up something that looked like resin in her mouth, and spat it onto the ground like it was a coin, freckled red. Anya was in her eighteenth year, teeth rotted from the sweet fruit ire yielded. Eight years younger, Lexa knew better.

Breathe. Allow your lungs to blacken. Breathe. 

Anya lunged at her with the aggression of a Pauna, and the black blood in Lexa’s veins sang, each vein and capillary tightening like a thread had been pulled. Anya slashed, pulling her longsword from her sheathe, and Lexa sidestepped.

They danced. At the back of her mind there brimmed a thought in Lexa, a watery swell that threatened a flood — the notion that this was, in a capacity, unjust. Indra said it was to be expected — Anya was of youth, and there was a magnet in the blood of the young that steered them to a fury. You must ride high, Lexa, Indra said . The road is yours to take if you will tread it.

(Because Lexa herself could never be youthful nor young, that courtesy was always denied. At birth, she was crowned in the colour of the cave, at infancy, pronounced a warrior. In time, she would absorb the soul of the Pramheda and those that came after like the bread and wine Moira took at her communions. She was a smooth surface upon whom many felt free to tread. She was a wrinkle in the fabric of time.)

Anya swiped at her stomach, goading. Lexa stepped away. Jus drein jus daun, Indra said, that is our way, and it is well and true. But remember, young Heda, to always sharpen your defence before you oil your offence. Blood must have blood, be it fast or slow, but a redblood must never nick a natblida. But Lexa was not of eighteen years, and her mind was still childlike in all the ways her body was not. Less of a sponge — the soft, foamy material Costia’d acquaintanced her with — moreso the foliage she was afraid to tread post candlelight. It was overgrown with an abundance of thought. Lexa, abashed, forgot.

She sliced at Anya as though she were slicing a block of cheese, swis flicking through the air like it was a whip, or perhaps a wire made for splitting skin. She moved like a column of water, stance thinner, smoother — Luna taught her that, Luna kom Floukru, a natblida whose blood was denser than what Costia called a ‘neutron star’ — her naked feet touched the earth, allowed their fairness to be soiled, and—

Anya caught her with a raised knee. Lexa’s stomach was concave, flattening into the walls of her pelvis, and she was on the ground with a knot in her throat that pushed up, upwards like a noose, constricting the gelatinous space around her eye. There was a dampness there. It was strange. (She didn’t— she didn’t cry. Not really. She—)

She found herself wrestled to the floor, back afire and legs raw, like she was cattle sweltering beneath the flare of the sun. She stank like a corpse. Anya wasn’t smiling. Both her hands were pressed onto the edge of her sword, holding it to the length of Lexa’s throat, effectively manoeuvring her in such a manner she found she could not move her lower half.

“You will not kill me,” Lexa took note. 

Anya’s jaw twitched. “I will not.”

“So you will make me walk again?”

There was a shift from on top of her. “You know it is for your own good, goufa.”

Lexa exhaled, her lungs pink and sweet. There was no fire, save for the tingling scent of pinecone embroidering its way up her nose, that could stifle her now. Anya was the flame that burnt the hottest of them all. She realised — anger could not come close.

But. Lexa was the Heda. 

Lexa’s legs were out of commission, but her arm worked fine. Anya’s sword was an inch away from snapping the cord of her jugular, but Lexa’s fingers were white around her knife. She inched, body writhing like that of a centipede. Anya’s jaw was rigid.

“Do not move. You only extend your punishment.”

Lexa arched. “You will not kill me. If you hurt me, we will return to Polis. You will have to carry me and you will answer to gona Indra.”

Anya’s lip puckered. She was silent. It gave Lexa those valuable grains of moment, time clasped like granules of dirt in her clenched palm. It stained. Her hand was silent.

“I will forbid Costia from your hut the next month,” rasped Anya.

“You would not dare.”

“You forget yourself.” Anya’s voice cracked like a whip, the timbre of teenage deepness rattling in the locket of her throat. Her shout rang like a broken record, dusting the sweet-tuned whistle between the trees. Lexa looked into the eyes of the sky a moment, then back into black spots of fury. “That girl,” was hissed into her face, “brings only trouble.”

“You are very prejudiced, Anya. Costia is—”

“—not one of us. You do not listen, Lexa.” Anya shook her shoulder. Her voice thinned with desperation. “We have been at war with Azgeda for thirty years. We have been at an uneasy peace for ten. Costia is—”

“Eleven years old, inept with a spear and arrow, and a refugee with the softest hands I’ve touched. She is no threat.”

Anya ground her jaw. “She is a weakness. She is a distraction. She is—”

“Did I ever tell you what Costia taught me?” Lexa cut in suddenly, still as a grave. There was nothing on her face that betrayed her. “Her father was a healer of her people. So was her mother, until they cut off her arms and sealed the stumps with molten bronze. The natblidae cut me, Costia disinfects my wound. The other children mock me, Costia soothes my ego’s bruise. I teach Costia the discipline of the sword some days. And on other days…” Lexa allowed her mouth to thin into a smile, though the side of her face was mottled black-and-brown from earthly residue and sweat, and though her tailbone hurt as though she’d been sitting on a toothy throne from first light till candlelight — Lexa tasted pride on the underside of her tongue. It tasted like earth.

“And on other days,” her eyes bloomed green, alight like lanterns lit in the streets of Polis on Ascension Day, abright like the soft, thready mirage of gold weaving through six-fingered oak leaves. Her pupils were black. “Costia teaches me how to heal. Costia tells me of the wounds she sees. Costia tells me there are only seven places that, when cut, could not be healed.”

Anya’s face turned the colour of curdled milk.

“The most obvious target is the throat,” said Lexa, jutting her chin upwards and revealing the sweat-slicked column of her neck as though giving Anya a hands-on demonstration. “but you like to talk, Anya, so I will spare you your voice. Of course, there is the heart, though cutting through the cartilage is more dexterous work than it may sound. The severance of the spinal cord causes instant paralysis, but the nape is hard to reach. The abdomen contains many of your major organs, but I’d lose my head before I’d get an inch in there. The same applies for your underarm and wrist.”

Anya didn’t move. Her grip on Lexa neither tightened nor loosened. “What are you saying?”

Lexa pressed the mouth of the knife to Anya’s inner thigh, kissing the leather with such softness that it went unnoticed — until she said: “You do not shield your legs. The femoral artery is left unguarded. I slice through it, you die.”

The leather on her thigh parted with a soft hiss. Anya jumped back as though Lexa burnt her with hot coals, her longsword forgotten in the dirt. She breathed heavily, expelling mist through her nostrils, armourless upon her feet. Lexa picked up the sword, regarded it with curiosity, and sheathed it at her hip. Her scabbard felt warm. The trees circled her like stalwart shields.

“I have your weapon,” she said, chin high as though she were combating a weight pushing onto her head. 

Anya’s voice was low. “You were going to—”

“No.” Lexa cut her off. “Not yet. Your fight is not over. Not yet.” she repeated. Anya’s eyes were cast low and hooded like the caps of a mountain, a thin veneer of shame creasing her sharp-lined brow. Lexa stepped forth, brushing off her excess of pride. She extended a hand, as Costia’s once extended to her —

“May we return? I believe I’ve seen enough.”

Anya didn’t bow nor bend to her as stalks of wheat and insects bent to the sun. Lexa would never ask that of her — she did not take joy in the toil of crushing spirits like they were scuttling invertebrates beneath her heel. Anya won their fight. Lexa, as the powerful and prosperous did, merely cheated defeat. 

Still. Beyond the scorn, there was a glint of something gleeful — dare she say proud — in how Anya looked at her. Wordlessly, she shouldered her pack again.

When Lexa attempted to follow suit — “Rest,” came the sanded command. Lexa blinked owlishly, and Anya sighed. “Drink up. Then, yong Heda, we return.”

*

The Mountain Men are turning your people into Reapers, Clarke’s eyes crackled, voice pitched low. Lexa’s fingers trembled, the cadence of her voice inciting a battle inching up her spine she was too weary to fight. Breathe.

I can turn them back. I’ve done it, she said. With Lincoln.

Now, there was no lie in her eyes. No whitening of the mouth, no hollowing of the cheek. Clarke would not divorce herself from honesty. Lexa could not tell one how she knew — just that she intuited it, sure as her heart was a black muscle clingfilmed in ink. Intuition was a dangerous scent to chase. She steeled herself, scabbard warm against her hip.

I know we can do the same for others.

Lexa believed her. Lexa’s smile was soft, like the flat knife that cut through the domestic sizzle of scrambled eggs-and-toast. There was a layer of a chuckle hidden in there, somewhere, a perfume that curled around her tongue like a malignant vine. You may have your truce.

Clarke said, with no difficulty, Thank you.

But it was not so simple. It could not be so simple, for Lexa read the warning tattooed in Indra’s eyes. To lead was to balance, to watch the scales with aching eyes in candlelight, to oil their bolts and scrub them clean, to add her weights just-so, as though it were grains of sand she managed, rather than both the blades of grass she tread, and the blades of metal that she pointed. Thinking of the smell of eighteen corpses slickened in blood, fester and rain, Lexa said, with much difficulty  — I just need one thing in return.

Clarke, of eighteen years, each for the lives another took, was innocent of Lexa’s turmoil. Tell me.

Lexa’s fingers crept up the hilt of her swis, sheathed in the scabbard, and she thought, with a stab to her ribs, of Anya again. It will not do, she thought. Bring me the one you call Finn, she said. With Anya’s voice, with Anya’s tongue unwinding the strange algorithm knotting her throat, the knot that was cherub-shaped like the cranberry-coloured petals in the mud. It was Anya’s conviction that bled through, Anya’s strength, Anya’s way — Blood must have blood — the lust for vengeance that could never dilate Lexa’s pupils or harden her teeth, for the call was a stranger to her transplanted heart. 

Our truce begins with his death.

Clarke’s slight smile dropped like a stone. A feeling Lexa had only once felt knitted together her throat. 

Lexa knew of their customs. Ritual burial stated that for his crime, Fin kom Skaikru would burn and smoke, that his raw flesh would be branded, that his arms be severed, that his legs be amputated — that he would suffer and writhe for the agony of eighteen deaths. And then, at first light, the Heda’ s blade would touch upon his throat and relieve him of his suffering. Those that made it to such a time died with a smile on their face.

It was a day later that her people, red-blooded and hungry, built Finn’s stake with great eagerness. Its spine threatened to touch the canvas of the sky and alit it would be a great beacon of orange and purple, devouring the night. She wondered if its smoke would billow so far as to touch the noses of the Mountain Men. Part of her worried for this.

Finn had the hunched look of somebody with ghosts living under his skin. There was a well of pity in Lexa that turned for him — he was not alone in his muddied hands. She saw regret in his young eyes, the eyes that had opened eighteen years ago and eclipsed the passage of eighteen deaths, but regret was too shallow a currency to pay for a debt as deep as the one he owed. Lexa knew this. Lexa carried the pains and angers of her people in her heart. Finn had to die.

Clarke disagreed.

You bleed for nothing, Lexa told her with gentleness, watching her attempt to gut herself on the tooth of Indra’s spear, her shirt weeping a crimson plea. There was a need for blood this night, but Clarke’s was not the one Lexa’s people hungered for. You cannot stop this.

Lexa thought of a poem Costia once unearthed: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright. Thought of how earnestly she’d wished to cup the golden fire that licked the hearth of her iris, to hold Costia’s wholeness close to her mouth, where to kiss her would be to cannibalise, where they would merge to form a whole. Mine. The depraved instinct rolled its fingers down her spine.

Clarke was not like this. Clarke was the opposite of what Lexa had revered — worshipped, even — she was not a forest fire that smelt of incense and pine. And yet, even now, there were ugly rashes peeling at Lexa’s throat.

Clarke said, earnest, But you can.

But Finn is guilty, Lexa stepped forth, eyes flickering to the metal seam on the underside of Clarke’s wrist. She wondered, eyes green-and-orange in candlelight, if that was what Clarke came to do. She looked to the sky gashed in mist, and thought she saw Costia’s face there. And what, if Clarke killed her there? They’d both die in the end. 

No, Clarke vehemently denied, trembling, gaze flickering to Finn like he was white powder and she was an addict overcome with withdrawal pains. He did it for me.

It was resolved. Then he dies for you.

Clarke’s lip puckered. Can I say goodbye?

Lexa nodded. Clarke embraced Finn, and walked out with her hands bloody. Finn hunched over like a wounded animal, a rabbit tied to a tree for target practice, his insides weeping onto the ground, eyes empty as the silver hole in the sky. 

He appeared content. The Trigedakru were not. They swarmed Clarke, whose eyes were blue, so blue, like the deepest waters and highest of cliffs. Her face was streaked with blood, grime, sweat and tears; Lexa wondered, offhandedly, how such a mixture would taste on her tongue.

Her people were not of a similar thought. Anger was the demon that possessed them, that scarred their mouths to yell cruel words and hurtle crueller gestures. Clarke appeared to accept this, shrivelling like a leaf in autumn’s dusk, as though it was her worth, alongside Finn’s life, that wet the soil. Lexa would not have this.

It is done.

The body would be given to the people of TonDC, murderer and murdered joined by fire. Only then could her people find their peace — the construct that burnt her neck that was once twelve, and that was now twenty — the hope that turned their chests concave and upended the contents of their stomachs onto the ground like stars falling from the sky. It was trivial. Ritualistic. Had Lexa been a different person, she might have laughed. 

Clarke attended the burning of the body with sunken, hollow eyes. Lexa respected her grief, even if she did not respect the man it was reserved for. She handed her the torch, dabbed with water gon faya, the stuff that got flames to spring up with the strength of a Pauna and crackle harshly, and decided to dip her toes in the pool of Clarke’s sorrow.

“I lost someone special to me too.”

Clarke’s eyes were blue with interest. Lexa lost herself in a riptide of memory and blurted, where she was so normally guarded, “Her name was Costia. She was captured by the ice nation, whose Queen believed she knew my secrets.” She breathed. The smoke touched her black lungs. Clarke had turned away. “Because she was mine. They tortured her, killed her, cut off her head.”

Her lips barely moved when she said, “I’m sorry.”

Lexa was cold. The hand of sympathy, a phantom notion to her armoured shoulder, did not rest well in the gallows of her stomach. It turned over. What are you sorry for? She thought. Could you have grasped Time by its leathery, wrinkled face and forced it to step back? She thought. 

“I never thought I’d get over the pain, but I did,” she said.

“How?”

Lexa breathed. The flames bit at her lungs, exhalation could not dispel her ire. She was unused to being questioned. Titus had said, in her younger years, Better to be knowingly uncomfortable than ignorantly content. So Lexa forced her hot cheeks to cool.

“By recognising it for what it is. Weakness.”

“What is? Love?” Now it was Clarke whose voice was choked by the snare of rage, even if it were clipped and cold. “So you just stopped caring about anyone? I could never do that.”

Clarke called upon her at a time of great fragility, her iron-dense bones now wax-thick. She burnt, even if she was made of stronger stuff than fire, like a lit wick. Lexa would allow her to use her like — what was it they said in Gonasleng? — a shoulder to cry on. Lexa would allow her to dry her tears and harden her heart. (Titus later said Clarke weakened Lexa — this was an untruth, Lexa’s heart was a reaper, red from Costia’s handprint. All Clarke had done was give it life.)

Then you put the people around you in danger, and the pain will never go away.

“The dead are gone, Clarke,” Lexa softly said. “The living are hungry.”

It hurt, when Clarke twisted the knife of betrayal into her spine. It hurt more than it should have. Gustus warned me about you, but I didn’t listen.

Lexa— please—

Lexa gripped that blade, her back crying soft, black tears that would solidify into worpaint, the Heda’ s crown. It was thin enough to pick her teeth with — that poison, thick as water, turning her heart to acid, her bones to Maunon -chow, her blood to something weak and diluted. That blade was translucent in her hands, and in her loss, Anya’s spirit translated itself onto her tongue. She asked a question she’d pondered the past day —

Tell me something, Clarke. When you plunged the knife into the heart of the boy you loved, did you not wish that it was mine?

(Lexa was embarrassed to be wrong. Lexa was ashamed for baring herself in such a manner, so brusque, so lewd — for offering a chunk of skin unguarded for the predator’s taking, smooth and glistening beneath Clarke’s charcoal eyes. The shame ended when Gustus’ heart stopped. She carried on.)

*

“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”

This was the rallying cry that tore itself from the earthy throat of Polis. It was the cloud that shifted day to nightscape, first light into candlelight. It was Moira who brought her the news, grubby face gleeful and silver crucifix dangling like a pendulum around her neck.

“ Heda kom Sandgedakru ste stedaunon, Leksa,” she said, voice sharp like one of Costia’s scalpels. “The Commander from the gathering of the sandspeople is dead. Does it flurry your poison heart?”

They were in Lexa’s hut; a small structure swollen with light. Costia liked to gift her candles, and Lexa liked when Costia gifted her the candles, liked how they smelt after being licked with light, liked how they gloved her skin like a stamp. Moira’s brick teeth looked orange in the light.

Lexa had been reading a scroll. It belonged to Costia — it was about a girl who scorned love, claiming it a weakness, but who ultimately failed to guard her heart from the touch of another. She thought, before that day, that she too would not have minded being opened up like a vault. Moira’s walnut-eyes crinkled cruelly.

“Are you deaf, mokswoma, or just stupid?”

Lexa stood up. “You’re trespassing, rotblida.”

“ Heda kom Sandgedakru ste stedaunon.” Moira repeated. Then snickered, twisting the rings on her fingers. “Long live Heda Leksa!”

“You lie,” said Lexa, poised and stout as a raised shield. Like a warrior in battle, she did not flinch. She stepped forth, and Moira stuttered back as though there was a buzz of contagion surrounding her.

“I do not lie!” Moira’s voice went pitchy like that of a mouse. “The Lord says it is a sin to lie! And what would you know — you have the Devil in your blood! You are a hideous misfortune child. You should have been left on the rocks and had your liver pecked out by vultures!”

Lexa’s cheeks were red-hot fury. “Get out!” she pronounced, and though her lip was curled the click of her throat quivered like an arrow in a taut-strung bow. A sickness impaled itself through her skull.

Moira stuck out her tongue. It was pink and fleshy, like a worm. Lexa pictured sticking in a hand and ripping it from the caverns of her mouth, and stomping it into the earth like she’d done to the rust-coloured petals an angry night ago. She was of twelve years and Moira’s receding footsteps and cacophonous laughter fell upon her ears like a veil.

“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”

“You must be calm, ai gona,” Costia was gentle like the mists that streaked their skies now in forlorn winter, blanketing the silver circle from their eyes. Normally, Lexa would have felt only warmth clawing in pink scratch-marks through her skin at the endearment, but that day Costia’s reassurances were cold water to her spine. “I will see you on the other side.”

“You might not,” Lexa hinted. Costia, who had been tightening the shoulder-straps of Lexa’s armour, stilled.

“You people’s customs—” Costia diverted with a swallow, looking as though Lexa had punched a brick-sized hole through her heart. “They are ridiculous. Must the others die?”

Like the sword sheathed at her hip, Lexa was steel. “They must. We all must prove our strength, as we would on the battlefield. Gona Indra says so, and so it is true.”

Costia’s lips, full and dewy normally, though now scarred in haggardness, pulled downwards in a grimace she attempted to hide. The implant of her fingerprints on Lexa’s clothed back made her skin flare like the expulsion of an ember to the sky. “And has gona Indra fought these battles?” asked Costia, voice light and steeped in challenge. “Have her hands been sullied by the blood of children at your age? I would think not.”

“Costia,” Lexa raised her chin in warning, “do not tread waters you do not understand. Stick to your medicines.”

“Do not condescend to me, jewel. I am your elder, do not forget,” Costia bit, the fruit of righteous anger darkening her noble teeth. Lexa felt forlorn. Part of her wished to envelop her friend. Part of her was afraid to acknowledge what that meant.

(She recalled the night Anya had exiled her as punishment, recalled it as a prize. She’d spent the night having clung to Costia like she wished to make the valleys beneath her skin her home. Costia lived with her father, she found out, who’d pinkened her jet-black gashes when the other children cut too hard. Costia had good taste in books, and candles, and she had expensive eyes, iris slotted in deep-gold. She recalled this with sadness tainting the corners of these memories. Time was the single thing Lexa could not buy.)

“If I die today,” Lexa said, “then I die forever. It is my duty to my people.”

“But you will not die,” Costia said tearfully. “You can not.”

Tears were a thing infectious as yawns. Later, Lexa would regain control of this horrible, pointless function, but now she bled freely from her bitten eyes, hearing the canals of Costia’s throat close up. 

“I will not die,” Lexa said, seeking Costia’s hand. There was a roar outside the tent, sweeping through the crowds like an infection, like wildfire, poisoning their hearts, their lungs. Lexa felt pity for all those gleeful. They must have been terribly bored these years. 

“I have been telling you this for years, Costia. I am Heda. Today, the Commander’s spirit shall choose me.”

“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”

There were nine of them, pincushion soldiers, holding swords twice the length of their arms and clad in leathers that slid off their short bodies, clinging to what little muscle they could find. Some were fearful. These were to be the first to go — a gona could not show fear, let alone a Heda feel it. 

Lexa knew them. Luna kom Floukru. Iria kom Sandkru. Brie kom Boudalankru. Rawing kom Podakru. Natali kom Ouskejonkru. Phoebus kom Delphikru. Atlas kom Ingraronakru. Kleo kom Trishanakru. These were the children she ate with, laughed with, played with, fought with. These were the children who lined themselves up like they would line up for a bowl of soup. These were the children who bared their necks to death.

One by one, their names were called. Each child stood forth and saluted the Fleimkipa, a ghoulish man dressed in pasty robes that hung from his skin like cartilage, with deep, sunken beetle eyes. Their names were called in order, and the crowd blushed in a roar, scrabbling with stained fingers for ballot papers, calling out their favourites in hushed tones. 

Luna was the eldest. At fifteen, she stood a head higher than the rest, skin bronzed and a mane of rusted gold sweeping from the knife-tips of her cheekbones to the hilts of her collar. Her name was the first to be called. She bowed in accordance, but her eyes were raised to the sky, ablaze with a torture to which young Lexa could not put a name.

Lexa was not the youngest of these children. No — the youngest of these were six and seven, with thumb-shaped dirt streaks around their eyes. Neither was Lexa the least afraid. In fact, as the resounding cry of ‘ LEKSA KOM TRIKRU!’ sounded and she was made to kneel, every fibre of her being trembled in protest. She rose, her knee smudged in dirt. Rain anointed her windswept braids. The skies are weeping for me, she thought bitterly.

The Fleimkipa brought the horn to his cold lips and blew thrice. Lexa’s scabbard was warm against her hip.

“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”

The first to be slain was kom Ouskejonkru, a girl with plaits the colour of sand-and-stars, with seafoam eyes that receded into the wells of her pupil, with skin the colour of Azgeda snows Lexa only knew of from Costia’s lips bleeding black. She had charged kom Ingraronakru, who had shared the soft of his bread with Lexa at lunch, and he had pushed the point of his spear through her stomach. She fell to her knees and the crowd cheered in wild, drunken ecstasy. She was nine years old. The boy was thirteen.

Lexa’s first challenger was the boy Rawing kom Podakru, whose weapon of choice was the studded arrow flecked in poison that was honey-gold. His thick fingers stuttered with a fletchling, aiming for the apple of Lexa’s throat. He was fourteen. When Lexa was seven and they’d gone cave-hunting and her tent had been soaked through, he’d lent his for cover and chosen to brave the rain. The petrichor on the bottom of her tongue tasted something like sorrow. She remembered something Heda had once said — Love is weakness — and as he shot the arrow, she caught it in the teeth of her palm. 

It scratched at her arm, leaving behind an inky welt. Lexa closed her eyes and thought of Costia, fear palpable as the mud sloshing beneath her feet. She charged kom Podakru before he had the time to blink, thought of his seesaw smile and stuck the arrow into the hollow of his neck. She felt nothing tracing the surprised run of ink, watching his pupils shrink and iris turn dove-white. With two gluttonous fingers from both hands she prised open his wound and faced the crowd, smearing kom Podakru’s lifeblood across her eyes. The people — her people — delighted in this, and a faint glow sank in Lexa’s chest.

Iria kom Sandkru was eight and wiry, wielding a swis in her left hand. She had been the Heda’s favourite, and the proud raise to her eyes was significance of this; the belief that she could wade through unchallenged. Such a belief softened her otherwise-formidable strength. 

She charged Lexa with all the foresight of a bull, swiping at her leather-crusted leg. She cut a thin gash and prompted Lexa to turn on her heel, longsword emerging from her scabbard and slashing down across the junction of her shoulder. Kom Sandkru’s mouth parted in a wordless scream alongside her stomach, forced open by the blade of Phoebus kom Delphikru’s sword. 

He looked at Lexa, his thick hair stuck to his angular, chiselled face, his eyes shallow and breaths irregular, and swung with the strength of a fourteen-year-old boy at her chest. Reflex sprang into her like a disease, and Lexa ducked, dropping to the ground with sand dirtying her eyes. She raised herself, head shielded, and aimed for an upwards kodon, which nicked him through his mail.

His eyes went dark and round like buttons as though he were surprised she could touch him, and he reared himself up like a warhorse, kicking in her stomach.

“Die,” he muttered thickly, bracing himself against her, angling his longsword to her chin. “Just — die, die already, just—” 

It took Lexa a moment to realise that it was not rain trickling down his face. 

He had a mother, she realised. He was the only one of them who did. A mother who kept him fed and clothed and changed his bedsheets and taught him their trades. Lexa thought of Costia’s sterile-scented lessons, her warm hands guiding Lexa’s mud-streaked ones, pointing out the points of a cold body, and she thought of Anya and her flared nose pushing her to the earth — and with a viciousness that sat in her like a circle in a square, she kneed kom Delphikru back and scrambled for blank-faced kom Sandkru’s swis, pushing it through the skin of his thigh. Kom Delphikru’s mouth parted with a soft hiss, forming a ‘Please’ resorted for his mother, the last woman who cared whether he lived or died.

Across the field, Luna kom Floukru’s broadsword had found the target of Kleo kom Trishanakru’s neck. It was with a surprised grunt that he fell to the earth, everything up to his calves drenched in muck, and Luna’s dark eyes, almond-shaped and wide like medallions, met Lexa’s across the field. All the remaining challengers were slain. The crowd was nearing in on them.

Lexa trembled around the grip of her longsword. Her naked scabbard was cold.

And then, Luna did the unthinkable. Luna sheathed her sword. Lexa’s hold over her own slackened. The crowd died to a murmur.

Luna bent her knee. She said, “I yield.”

“ Natrona! ” Fleimkipa Titus thundered, face puce in his outrage. “Rise and fight, in the name of Heda Nike kom Sangedakru, natblida!”

Luna’s teeth were blackened as though they were a row of cavities. Lexa remembered her best of all. She had taught her how to wield the swis, taught her how to notch an arrow, how to catch a minnow and how to rub smoke from two sticks. Lexa bent to her, voice wobbly as a tide.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispered, mouth set and black stars glittering around her eyes.

Luna only smiled. “Look at you, you in your worpaint. You’ve only ever wanted this honour. Who am I to snatch it from you with such cruelty?”

Lexa grew hot in misunderstanding. “You dishonour me by refusing to fight. Pick up your blade, kom Floukru. Put an end to this.”

Luna was hollow-cheeked. “You listen to me not. If I fight you, I will win.” she raised her head, crowned in her glorious, thick mane, dampened in rivulets of rain and blood alike, and shouted — “I YIELD! YOU HEAR THAT?”

“You yield,” Lexa repeated, tongue numb on her lips. “You yield.” her worpaint dribbled down her chin. 

“And I pray that you are merciful,” Luna sighed, “ Heda Leksa kom Trigedakru.”

“Then your faith is misplaced.”

“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”

The flame was sealed into her nape. The traitor was banished come dawn. Costia visited as Fleimkipa Titus jammed a needle into her back, inking scriptures along the trunk of her spine. Seven circles ran down the bottom — each for the natblida that had been slain, commemorated not as tombstones but as reminders on the flesh. 

“I do not know which is worse,” was murmured into the shell of Lexa’s ear, “thinking you would die at the points of those swords, or knowing you willingly drove them into the cavities of those childrens’ chests.”

Lexa turned her large, wide eyes on her, still streaked with the blood of the fallen, pupils dilated and mouth atwitch. “I am a child too, Costia. You act as though I have committed some great sin.”

“But you have, Lexa,” Costia said with a heaving chest, a hot tear rolling down her cheek. “Do not tell me the worpaint had blinded you too? Do not tell me you do not see?”

“You said I must win,” said Lexa sullenly. “And now I have won, you are unhappy.”

“I apologise,” said Costia, with more meekness than Lexa liked to allow. “I apologise. I recognise you had no choice.”

Lexa raised a hand. The needle stopped biting into her back, and she felt the power of the Heda course through her fingers, the power to control when lips sealed and when stones fell. 

“ Ai laik Heda,” she said gently, cupping Costia’s face in the heart of her palm. “I always have a choice. Luna made hers, and I made mine.”

“LONG LIVE HEDA LEKSA KOM TRIGEDAKRU! LONG LIVE HEDA LEKSA KOM TRIGEDAKRU! LONG LIVE HEDA LEKSA KOM TRIGEDAKRU!”

That night Lexa awoke with a cough. She covered her mouth, felt something come out. It was a petal, red like the fur of a mangy dog’s hide.

Chapter Text

The knot of the Trigeda-Skaikru alliance ought to have tightened with the promise of a common enemy. The Maunon, who pickled her people and drank their blood, who hollowed them to empty carcasses and forced into them a gluttony for human flesh. But the Trigedakru were born insatiably angry; it was the meat of their survival. Blood must have blood, they said, but We must have blood, they meant.

Lexa they could not touch, for Lexa was sheathed in the skin of a god, with geysers seated beneath flesh. They could not reach the Maunon yet, but Clarke they could sink their teeth into, for her anxious, mouse-like appearance gave them leave. 

She’d known Quint kom Trikru since she was fourteen and he’d gifted her a spear on her name-day. He claimed it had been fashioned from the tooth of a river-shark, with a point that could slice skin like it was parchment and snap bone like it was rotten bark. He’d taught her how to hold it, adjusted her grip by the elbow, taught her how to aim and throw until she turned dizzy and cross-eyed. He’d gifted her a barrel of honey-wine as a token of his reverence and Lexa had spent the night, to Anya’s great dismay, bounced between the company of these hardened, hulking warriors, speaking with meat between their teeth of battle and hope within their hearts of home.

She knew him. She knew his grief, she knew them all. They were a burden etched finely into her spine, ruthless, jagged marks veining her from the outside. She carried them with every silent step. Quint knew this. Quint tested her twenty years.

He said to Clarke, eyes narrowed and voice a rasp, You are the enemy. There was a fog that sat upon his shoulders. Lexa’s sheathed knife was hot against her hip.

Clarke stiffened like a stone. There was a soft petulance streaking her inhale, that of someone who did not take kindly to contradiction. Lexa couldn’t decide whether this made her childish or dangerous. 

Clarke’s blue eyes were slits. Dangerous, Lexa decided, the back of her neck aprickle. I’m sorry, was said evenly, have I done something to offend you?

Quint was harsh. Yes. You burnt my brother alive in a ring of fire.

If Clarke blanched, it did not show. She was no wilting flower. She may have been ragged as a roughspun rug, but this was not due to tetherlessness. Clarke was calloused, and Lexa yearned to swallow the blisters on her skin. She stepped forward, voice a knife picking between the yellow of Quint’s teeth, He shouldn’t have attacked my ship.

Lexa felt something dormant in her uncoil. There. There. The snarl Clarke hid behind her speech, anointed and flowery as the crown of Lexa’s head on Conclave Day. The beast with gored, lamp-red eyes that tickled the stalk of her throat. There was a catch to Clarke’s voice. 

You’re very brave under the Commander’s protection, Quint said. He looked like an animal in a cage.

Lexa had no patience for cagefights. She raised her hand. Enough.

Dealing with men like Quint was like rolling a rock up an unforgiving hill. To roll it would be to sacrifice her hands, and Lexa had no wish for pain. It had no place in her wounded heart. Quin tested the tightrope of her patience. First, he challenged her, though it was fine for he had brought her the river-shark spear. Second, he went against her command and sought out further quarrel with Clarke, though this too she could brush aside for he’d gifted her the honey-wine.

Third, his quarrel with Clarke was a blood-debt he intended to pay. Lexa would not abide the blood of allies on her hands, and he paid for this treason with a knife through the wrist. Fourth, he’d killed the woman of Clarke’s guard. And Lexa thought, Blood must have blood, even if Clarke did not understand this yet. She said, The kill is yours, Clarke, and Clarke looked at her with such wide eyes Lexa wondered if she’d ever understood her at all.

In the distance, there was a howl that brushed over the tips of Lexa’s ears, and an ash travelled from crown to toe. The trees beside her extended like lovers reaching for the sky, impaling its soft underbelly in the late light. But now they seemed more frantic, as though attempting to unroot themselves from poisonous earth. Like there was something— something—

What is that?

Lexa was still. Pauna.

And for this fifth sin of leading them into the bars of the beast’s enclosure, Lexa channelled Costia’s cold, smooth hands and her hot, coal-bright scalpel, and slashed the tether to Quint’s left leg. His honey-wine tasted sour in her mouth. He crumbled like a heap of sand, gargling blood and earthy resin onto the ground. 

Instinct, the child nursed by hardship, kicked at the back of her heel. Lexa turned to Clarke, eyes black as neutron stars, and yelled out — Run!

They found the feeding ground. In a feat of weakness, an absurdity her kin could not perform, Lexa had fallen, cut herself like bait. She told Clarke, all noble strength in mind, all festering weakness in body, to leave. It would not have been the most humiliating death a Commander suffered. 

But Clarke said — No way!

And prised Lexa from the jaws of one death, only for the teeth of another to clasp her neck like it was a chew-toy. Clarke bit her lip like it was a petal veined in pink-and-red, Lexa thought of another day she’d touched flowers into the ground, and an itch sliced its way into her mouth.

Clarke could not stomach looking at her. Lexa knew better than false hope. Distance could satiate her ache, she thought.

And then Clarke rode in, wild as a fire, hair unkempt and tangy with earth, eyes oiled like the tips of a spear, veiling a deep fearfulness that tugged at the nerves and dead-ends from behind the spool of gelatinous matter. Clarke rode in, aflame with fury that was hollow to Lexa, who was built like marrowless bone. Clarke rode in, the sunset colouring the tips of her hair pink and shadowing the full bow of her lip, her horse’s hooves athunder, turning the heads of villager and warrior alike, and said —

Can we talk in private?

She brought news of a foreign weapon. A missile, she called it. Lexa knew it from the legends, word-of-mouth claims of arms of destruction that dug a cherub-shaped hole into the earth, several corpses tall and several copses wide. Lexa allowed her eyes to fall shut, allowed the veil of imagination to fall; to picture yellow flames sizzling the flesh from her body, the chalk dust choking up her lungs, the rocks crushing like a snowfall, splintering her bone like it was a wooden seam. Lexa thought of this intensely. Clarke must have thought it too, with irreconcilable horror.

Some part of Lexa that was still twelve, that hadn’t yielded itself to the Flame, wished for Clarke to retract this information. Wished to be innocent of this knowledge. But Lexa knew it was her brunt to shoulder the day she refused to yield alongside Luna. There was now a snake-shaped fork in the road. 

They could leave. The missile would make an elephant’s footprint in the earth, and the Maunon hawks would squint from their spy-glasses, and they’d think — What’s going on? And they’d comb their mountain with thin, vitamin-deficient fingers until they rooted out the intruders by their necks. 

Or they could stay.

Clarke was of one mind. We have to start evacuating now.

Lexa was of another. She thought to herself, Forgive me, Costia, though bones had no grudges to hold and no forgivenesses to bear, and said, No.

The village died like a phoenix, smoked white ashes of raw fury in the air. They breathed, a people, a vessel, and blackness veined their lungs, felled them open like skin vaults. The hands of the people called for justice. Their fists raised in an outcry for vengeance. Jus drein jus daun. Lexa was pleased. (Clarke was unsettled.)

Clarke worried. It was endearing. It reminded Lexa of long, late nights rolling off the fingers of her memory like a spool of liquid light — late nights hidden in the amberstone lockets of Costia’s eyes, full lips downturned and eyes overcast with fear. What if, she nagged, what if, what if. This, too, was endearing until it had gotten Costia killed. Lexa sobered.

Clarke spoke of her friend, Bellamy, in hushed tones like he was a secret to keep. I might be the one who gets him killed, she said with a round, fretful face.

Lexa soothed her like she soothed a cut. Without a mind to it, her index finger smoothed the lines of her charcoal worpaint weeping down her cheek. The finger came off her skin looking as though it had been cut, and Lexa countered, poised, That’s what it means to be a leader, Klark. The truth is, we must look into the eyes of our warriors and say, ‘Go die for me’.

And those who are not warriors too, Lexa didn’t say. She frowned. It was too late to be catching sentiment. It was too early for Clarke, of the Sky People, of the sunset blush, to face such truths. Soon enough, she thought with heavy regret.

Clarke appeared bewildered by her words. If only it were that easy.

Her confusion was honeysuckle to Lexa’s parched throat, the childlike mulishness awaking a chained flutter in her heart. Hope was the thing of feather in her chest, sliced by the iron bars of her ribs. Hope was not the routine blackening of the lungs. It was the offshoots that sprouted there, wild and carnivorous, that crept up her throat like insects, that crawled beneath her flesh, and that bled off her tongue as though it were a pink snake shedding a second skin. Love is weakness, she chided with a curled fist, To be Commander is to be alone.

You could be a leader your people look to, Lexa stated. It was not flattery. It was the maljointed weakness of truth. If she had room in her body left for shame, perhaps it might have flushed her cheeks as Costia’s affections had once done. The thought sent a knitting needle to her chest. Someone they would fight and die for. 

If only, Lexa did not add. The boot of victory pressed firmly into the rawed back of sacrifice. If Clarke had not yet realised this—

I never asked for this, Clarke said in a breath. I’m just trying to keep us alive.

Clarke meant: I do what so many others twice my age refuse to do. Lexa sympathised with her. She’d learnt this lesson aged twelve, ink seeping into the crevices of her palm-lines.

You were born for this, Klark. Lexa said. Same as me. 

Even the speaker was blind to the true weight of honesty veiled behind her words.

(Maybe life should be about more than just surviving. Don’t we deserve better than that?)

Indra had taught her the meanings of flowers when Lexa was a sapling herself. She had liked to pick them from the forests and place them in Lexa’s hair, where they would chafe against her skin and spill from her unruly tresses to the ground. 

Narcissus, she’d pointed to a flower with a bright yellow suckling mouth crowned in white, tangled in an embrace with its neighbour. Happiness. Violet, the warrior’s fingers had curled around the stem with gentleness, plucking a lilac, kiss-shaped petal and allowing it to flutter to the ground. Love. Belladonna, she’d said with warning, shielding Lexa from the plant with teeth jewelling its neck and an eye at its centre, whole and unblinking like a bug. Death.

Clarke’s kiss tasted like the bruising of those childhood fields. It tasted like the incense of pollen tickling her throat, like a viny embrace had made a home in her. Like dew on a daffodil, like the pale, marish hide of a daisy, like the opium of tulip, reaching in red threads to weave addiction into her sclera. Like the tendrils of olden poetry Costia used to read, she thought of Clarke, O violet-crowned Aphrodite. Like the belladonna creeping into her pupil, devouring the milk-green of her eye. 

(Maybe we do.)

Clarke pulled away. She could not be with Lexa. That was expected. Duty was a widow to love.

(Later that night, Lexa coughed flowers blue as melancholy, as the tears threatening to unspool the colour from Clarke’s eye. They were blackened only with her blood.)

Love is weakness, Titus resided as a devil on her shoulder. To be Commander is to be alone. 

When Cage Wallace offered her the deal, Lexa grappled at it like it was a life-ring. (She had not begun drowning yet.)

*

The roars of her people spurred her like their drums. She was trained to react as a colt to battle, spear weightless like water in her hands. The people clamoured to see their Heda fight, even if she was roughspun, even if she did not quite yet possess the cordialities her predecessor had. The sand roiled beneath her feet. Indra’s mouth thinned into a whip.

She fought Lexa in an oval ditch, hollowed out like the egg-shaped inside of a nest, thinly lined by creaking, branched barriers that strained with the eagerness of the onlookers, each scrabbling to catch a glimpse. Of their newly-anointed Heda, silver rings trailing her hair and wildfire threatening to burn the paper of her eyelids . Of their gona, with skin hard as the leather of a war-drum and palms tough to shake as the jagged Blue Cliffs to climb. The people salivated as though this exercise were a five-course meal.

Lexa was sweating lightly. Aged thirteen, she’d acquired an oaky definition to her muscle she had lacked even two years prior, pale and anaemic. It was like the Flame wove sunlight into her skin as it had carved rigour into her spine, the cries of those childrens’ injustices weeping beneath the shroud of her tunic, white as the silver thing in the sky after which Luna was named. 

Lexa vaulted across the oval with a coltish mirth. She lapped the praise up on the underside of her wanting tongue, sliding to her knees to evade Indra’s even stab. Dust leapt into her eyes, though it quelled the ache sitting low in her throat. Costia would not have approved of this. (She was always thinking of Costia, and for what, to what end—)

“Heda! Heda! Heda!” Indra’s nostrils subtly flared. Lexa did not blame her. It must have been a clot to the bleed of pride to be seen on the same footing as a child, even if that child was black of blood. Lexa swung her spear in a wide arc like it was a paintbrush, a feat begotten of laziness, not sloppiness. She wondered if Indra could tell the difference between the two as she caught Lexa’s spear against her own, pummeling it to the side.

Her knees were already mired in dirt, and her blood had begun pumping. Sessions like these were, to Lexa, the equivalent of bathing in high light, or perhaps painting, if the canvas was the earth and the paints could only be obtained from holes in her skin. Lexa could play. The people wanted her to play; they thirsted for a spectacle to parch their sand-dried throats. It was this, Lexa decided, Indra’s spear wiring into the mesh of skin at her palm, or it was somebody else’s softer, weaker flesh caught at a less controlled spearpoint. The oval was a sponge for lust.

When she had been one year past ten and one inch beneath Moira, she had struggled to lift a spear this size. Costia had worried, then. It didn’t anger Lexa — little angered Lexa — but it had crept beneath the modest stalks of her ego like a malignant insect. Now — she was both glad and fearful of Costia’s distance. She had claimed a faint stomach, which Lexa knew to be a lie, for Costia had shown her more cold bodies than Anya and Indra combined. No, Costia’s reasoning was more cryptic than that. But alas, Lexa could not unspool the contents of her skull, she could not pick at her cerebral matter like it was corn or bran, and Costia’s soft lip, bejewelled in candlelight, turned stiff as stone upon further questioning.

Sitting on the throne of the skyline was the Tower, serrated like an icicle cut into by frost, its wick gleaming with an orange flame. A second sun. A second throne resided there too, fashioned from the spines of the trees she had supposedly been born of and gnarled like the veins on an old man’s hand. It bruised her. Titus said bruises helped to learn.

But — ah, Lexa had grown distracted, and wistfulness was the wound in her hand, dripping in infection to the ground. The crowd blanched harder than she did, and Lexa held the inside of her cheeks hostage beneath her teeth. She swung her spear and feinted at Indra’s neck, only to strike her in the calf.

It was a shallow cut. Indra’s eyes narrowed, the shock not strong enough to sink a gona to her knees. She struck Lexa, who blocked her woodenly, twisted, and knocked the butt of her spear against Indra’s chin with a strength ripped from the roots of the earth. She felt the soil beneath her feet, moving, shifting like the tides, sun winking against her rippling back, and she felt strong. She was not just Heda in this thread of moment. She was a gona kom Trikru, destiny snatched with the same surety as the squalls from her infant throat.

Indra didn’t fall, she stuttered. Lexa was not at the age where she could make her fall. But it was enough. She reached, with the tenacity of a ground snake, and knocked her spear from her hand. It fell to the earth with a dull thunk, and the people roared in exhilaration that did not belong to them. Lexa wondered if it would have brought them an equal excitement to have seen her fall. 

An ugly part of her wallowed in Indra’s defeat, wished to marry her back to the foot-kissed earth, to force her to choke back these sands as Lexa had done in what was not youth, but was more akin to shadow. When Lexa was goufa and natblida, when the tendrils of Heda could not touch her, let alone streak her face. Indra held no sorrow for her then. She held no sorrow for her now, only a stone respect. Lexa returned the stunted affection, and grasped sweet victory in a breath, allowed it to rot her throat, and expelled it in the day air.

Indra did not kneel, but nevertheless Lexa said, “Rise, gona,” and Indra’s eyes met with the sky. “You have fought well today.”

And, amidst the cheers building like the heat of war, amidst the cries slackened with lust lengthening their nostrils, the hunger that swept across them all, enough to make the pebbles of the earth shudder with its might — the call for blood that Lexa recognised, the call for hers, toxic, blackened, to fall onto the earth and turn it ashen and lifeless — amidst it all, she only heard the voice that didn’t speak. The yawning silence that opened a chasm in her throat, the lack of Costia that had her ack-acking on the weight of a finger, rawness dribbling from her mouth and a petal red, red like gouged flesh and a skinned fox, falling onto the ground syrupy with saliva and veined in black.

There was a tree, an oaken tree she’d climbed when seven, wilier than all the other trainees combined — they’d taunted her for this, coward, runner, though what did it matter, for they were all dead — and to this tree she’d tied a girl. This was a girl whose white flesh turned blue-and-brown, peeling from her body like the skin of a marsh-ma-llow, the gooey confectionary their scriptures talked of in The Before. Lexa beckoned her party into the gates, but she herself stayed, to unpick the decaying girl’s gummy lips, touch the only crown she’d ever wear. Her eyes were black with flies. There was a pendant with a silver cross tying her neck like a noose, and Lexa stroked it with her thumb. Unlike the rest of her, it was cold and hard. 

In a matter of days, she would be too. She looked scared. It was a paternal instinct that reached to soothe her, though it was a warrior’s instinct that drove the spearpoint through her pink heart. (Neither. It was neither neither neither, it was both the sadness and the fury of a child who was no child, who hid vaults of things in her being, whose blood was poison and whose own heart was hollow as a rotten trunk of wood.)

Lexa pressed a shaky kiss to her forehead. “ Yu gonplei ste odon,” she murmured the forgotten words. Then, she left. 

The drums sounded in Anya’s welcome. She sat on horseback like a duke, game slung across her horse’s rump like a sack of grain. Her first braid ran down proudly to her chin, red hair ablaze and surly mouth raised in an uncommon smile. Lexa’s heart thrummed at the sight.

She wore the worpaint, wore black leathers that left her arms open, wore pants that buckled at the side. Her own braids were far more intricate than Anya’s — she lacked only one, the mark of a gona she would only achieve at sixteen. The rest spliced through her hair in stunted irregularities; the blessing of the Fleimkipa, the mark of the Pramheda, the anointing of the Heda, the braid of the natblida. 

“ Heja, Anya.”

Anya dismounted. “ Heja, Heda .” Her eye twitched in acknowledgement of the procession swarming Lexa, at whose helm sat a burly, provincial man named Gustus. He spoke little.

“Did you hunt well?” Lexa enquired, gaze drawn in curiosity. Not quite so beatific as it might once have been; those blinds had been drawn long ago — Lexa’s awe faded as the blood of the boy Rawing kom Podakru sank into the famished soils, easing from his jugular into the earth. It faded with the light in the girl Natali kom Ouskejonkru’s face. It faded with the crack of Moira’s chest, with the stilling of her heart. But it did not mean a gentler curiosity did not still exist.

Anya grunted. “ Sha, Heda.”

Lexa eyed her carefully. In measured tones, she said, “The blessing of Pramheda touches you. You are welcomed in her city walls.” Quieter, for Anya’s ears alone — “I expect you will not refuse your Second dinner tonight.”

“You are not well,” were Anya’s first words. She never had time for platitudes.

“‘Good evening, Lexa’, ‘How are you, Lexa’, ‘How lovely to see you, Lexa’,”

Anya sniffed. “Mockery is not the product of a strong mind.” she eyed the plate of steak-and-vegetables Lexa offered her guardedly.

“It’s not poison,” Lexa reassured. Had she not been tired to the bone, she might have felt something akin to offence at Anya’s suspicion. As it happened, she was so, so out of breath, she worried the skin on her chest might stitch itself to her ribs. She had drawn up a chair and a soft flame, bleeding yellow stitched onto the candleholder. It was one of Costia’s candles, scented lavender, and it made her throat constrict. Surreptitiously, she wiped her mouth.

Anya sat. “You are growing fast,” she commented, picking up a knife.

“I know.”

“You must fight well now, like a real gona.”

Lexa was quiet, lowering herself into the seat opposite Anya, Her four-poster curtained her at the shoulders. “I must.”

Anya had raised the knife to her mouth and was now chewing. She swallowed, food travelling down her throat in a knot, and her dark eyes narrowed, like oil-spills in the dim light. Anya was raised a hunter; she had the nose of a bloodhound — of course she could smell the gout in Lexa’s chest.

“Something unsettles you.”

“Nothing unsettles me,” said Lexa, tight as a swallow. “I am Heda. To be Commander is—”

“To be alone? To be unafraid?” Anya keened forth, sharp as the knife she delicately held in her left hand. It traipsed between her fingers as though she was handling a stalk or a quill. “Is that what Titus has been telling you? What of Costia?”

Lexa’s cheeks were blue, bruised with blush. She thought — of Costia, her long fingers that wandered in stitches, sharp knuckles that sounded like knitting needles when cracked. Costia, and her eyes that looked like trees broken open and weeping softly, the ropy tattoos rough to the touch, stapled into her skin. Costia and her full lips and pleated, shock-white hair and heart-shaped face Lexa wished to pocket into the gaping hole within her heart where her own should have been.

Anya, hunter, smelled the bloodtrail, and a pleased look crossed her face. “Ah. So that is what has gotten the mighty Heda so riled up. A girl.”

Lexa didn’t meet her eyes. “You know what the people expect of me. I cannot go behind their backs. And Costia—” her posture slouched like the spine of a relic. “Costia would not want me.”

“With that attitude, no.” Anya said meanly. “You have been avoiding her.”

“She has been making me sick,” Lexa said truthfully. She was no fool. She knew what the petals in her throat meant.

“With what? Love?”

In answer, Lexa doubled over in a cough, thick, phlegmy petals rising from her thorax and sticking unpleasantly to the underside of her tongue. She stuck a finger into her mouth, unabashed, unashamed, and unslicked the petal from within. She held it up, its veiny, fleshy texture under scrutiny of the candlelight, orange as the sun on white paper. Anya’s eyes were medallions. She didn’t have to ask — she knew.

*

“A bounty,” Titus scoffed, his burgundy cape flapping like flabs of flesh. He kept talking with a chin raised like the palm of her classmasters, like she was not Heda and he only Fleimkipa. “You have gone against my express instruction and you place a bounty on the girl you are to forget. Hodnes laik kwelnes.”

“Hodnes laik kwelnes,” Lexa repeated, “and I am offended you would think my heart so coltish. I have no need for Klark. I need Wanheda, and you need to remember yourself, Fleimkipa.”

An array of conflicts passed through Titus’ face. He bowed curtly. “Sha, Heda.”

Hope,

Clarke’s head, her face, her heart-shaped face on whose smudged lips Lexa yearned to suckle, was covered in a sack. Her hands which had gripped the back of Lexa’s neck in lust were cordoned off like private property, her knees forced to a throne. She knelt to Lexa not of her own volition, and Lexa’s stomach churned.

 is the thing with feathers

“I'm sorry it had to be this way.” Lexa apologised. She would have sunken herself into the mires of the Sangedakru for Clarke’s forgiveness. The flowers in her chest were proof of her withdrawal. “I had to ensure Wanheda didn't fall into the hands of the Ice Queen. War is brewing, Clarke. I need you.” she uttered from the iron-crusted depths of her chest, the hollow cavity filled with concrete and stuck to her skin like an animal’s carcass, swallowed by the grind of Clarke’s jaw. She needed her. Why didn’t Clarke understand? (Clarke could never know.)

That perches

She took the gag out of Clarke’s mouth, a rag soiled with sweat, spit and grime alike. 

 in the soul.

“You bitch!!” Clarke screamed, thrashing against her bindings as though she were afire. “You wanted the Commander of Death? You’ve got her! I’ll kill you!”

(Hope was the flower in her chest with a tongue at its centre, lapping up the ashes of her blackened lungs. Hope was the scalpel turning blood onto skin and bone onto blood, peeling her flesh like it was sellotape. Hope was Clarke’s spit touching her eye, and the petal furrying her mouth. She was going to die. )

*

She was fourteen. There was a palm resting against her phlegmy chest. Breathe, she thought, tears thickening against her cheeks like worpaint. She could not look Indra in the eyes.

Titus, kneeling, had covered his bald head with a hood, chin vibrating against her chest. He looked up, eyes silver-white like the outer layer of an egg. Lexa felt one crack down her back, fingers of it slicking her tunic to her skin. Titus was gaunt.

“You will die.”

Indra gasped in fury. Lexa didn’t move.

“How long?”

Titus raised himself, limbs unfolding as though he were a piece of cartilage to bend and stretch. Fleimkipas were like that. The more superstitious of the children she’d slain at the conclave had whispered of them in tones of mingled fear and awe; Fleimkipas were raised in the shadow, born of darkness and with a blindness in the eye. Beneath their robes they sported eight, hairy limbs and their feet were cut to waxy stubs, which was why Titus limped. They were born as arachnids, and beneath the veil of night they reverted to their true forms. The flame corrupted them, the children said, veined their skin with red, like the mongrel blood peasants carried on the inside, spilling out. 

Titus was not like this. Titus was a long, gaunt face coloured in the pale of the moon. There was no space to hide eight limbs beneath his robes, and his veins were a deep green-and-purple, and Lexa knew this was the normal colour for Anya’s veins were that colour too. He was no anomaly, and therefore she was unafraid. No, the fear unfolding beneath her skin in hot flashes was—

“Years,” Titus said with gentleness, like the flower pricking at her heart. His palm, nails stubbed at the tip and enfolded in green lines, closed over her own. She shifted from him. The moon was not to touch the tides. “You have a strong body, Heda. But it will not fight off an infection like this.”

“And the cure?” Indra roughly said.

Titus’ voice shook, like his vocal cords were tightropes upholding barbells, the balls on the cleft of his chin sinking into the pale of his skin. “There is none.” Lexa’s eyes slipped shut. Titus continued, voice distant like a faraway prayer. “ Hodnes laik kwlenes. We can only look to the skies and hope for a miracle recovery. For now, I shall send for a call for the new patch of natblidae. Grace be.”

Indra’s voice was thick as the undergrowth. “You will not send for anyone. I want no word of this to leave the Tower, do you hear?”

“As Fleimkipa, it is my sacred duty—”

Indra’s hands found his tunic, and balled it in her iron grip. He shrunk like a flame batted by a wind, eyes widened like brown marshes, building a hollow in his face. Indra’s tattoos textured her skin like bark, and now raised like teeth poised to tear the meat from his ivory bone. She held him with perfect poise, reigned in by righteous anger and militant discipline alike — her loyalty to Heda knew no bounds, and it made Lexa heavy in the stomach. 

“As Fleimkipa, you have a duty to your Heda first.” Indra hissed. “All talks of weakness and illness will stay confined in these walls. I want your best Fisas to search for a cure, day and night, by light or blind — they will not rest, they will work until their hands are raw and hair is grey and feet bloated and blue, and they will thank Heda for the granted honour of servitude to her. They will work until they cure her, and if she dies upon their watch, I will take their heads — and yours — myself. Is this understood?”

“ Gona Indra,” Titus stuttered, “this is highly irregular—”

And Indra whispered into his ear what she thought Lexa couldn’t hear. “She is a girl,” she said, voice strained as though it balanced the mountain of Lexa’s hardship with its handlessness. “She is only ten-and-four, and she has rallied Podakru, Trishanakru, Ouskejonkru, Boudalankru, Sangedakru and Delphikru under the bracket of the Coalition. For the first time in a hundred years, we have a Heda kom Kongeda, and it expands its arms every day. She is only ten-and-four, and beneath her skin lives the Flame, and in the air she breathes and the words she speaks the people see a hope. We are lapsed without her fire.”

“Be that as it may,” Titus was cool, wrenching Indra’s hands away from him. He cast a long shadow in the dank room, fingers twitching like the snout or tail of a rat. “The Flame is not the only thing in her skin. There is a tumour too, and unlike a tumour, the Flame may be carved out.”

With horror, Indra whispered, “It will kill her.”

Titus bowed his head. “Victory stands on the back of sacrifice. Grace be.”

Indra slapped him across the face, the tusks of her tattoos flickering in the low light. They appeared to sink into the meat of his cheek, painting it a warlike pink, like the innards of a carcass. “I will not let it be known that a child died because her Fleimkipa was too cautious. Summon your Fisas or, with Heda’s permission, it will be your lungs that will rupture by dawn.”

“Indra,” Lexa found her voice. Until that moment, she had not been aware she had lost it, content to listen. Both Titus’ and Indra’s eyes turned to her, each lined with hope. She felt a certain sadness knowing she must eviscerate it. There was no comfort she could offer. “Placate yourself. My foolishness is not the fault of Titus. I will carry this burden as I was born to do.”

And Indra’s tattoos no longer appeared tusks, now deepest blue like tears. Her eyes dimmed in fury and wept in shadow instead, tears wetting her skin. They were small, but unseemly, and like a warrior did not stoop to soothe a scratch, she did not stoop to wipe them from her cheek. “But,” her voice cracked like— like a splinter in the skin. “But you are a child.”

“ Ai laik Heda,” Lexa softly said. “Chin up, Indra. Why are you so affected?”

Indra stepped forth, sought to conjoin her hand with Lexa’s own. Her gona’s calluses swallowed Lexa’s, fingers traipsing against fingers, knuckles touching like butterflies. Indra’s hand was warm, and she might have frozen upon brushing Lexa’s cooler skin. “Because you are cursed, Leksa,” replied Indra. “And you cannot be. Fortune has misshapen your path.”

“Breathe,” Lexa said. “You feel anger. It clouds you, so breathe. Allow its fumes to blacken your lungs.” she pulled her hand away. “I was always cursed. Open up my skin and you may see it for yourself, the true nature of my curse. But the courtesy to complain of that was never granted,” a vein of bitterness opened in her voice, the wound of childlike petulance she sought and bandaged with immediate grace, “so why should I be granted leeway to complain of this? I will live.”

“Your prognosis makes it abundantly clear that you will not,” corrected Titus.

Lexa shrugged. She amended her statement. “Then I shall not. My quarrels are with the flesh, not with time.”

“So what shall be done, Heda?” Titus avoided her eyes, robes falling like they had been drenched to the thread. “Shall we alert the people?”

“No,” Lexa said immediately. “Azgeda have been prying for weakness as of late. They must see only strength.” she thought a moment. “You will gather the Fisas and you will cut out their tongues. They will search for the tumour in my lungs, as Indra suggested, but for their failures they will not be punished, and neither will the Fleimkipa. All fault will be gone when I am gone, not them and not you, Titus.”

There appeared to be something in his throat, for Titus had difficulty swallowing. “You are wise, Heda.”

Lexa thought, You would be too, had you opened a throat when you were twelve, had you been groomed into diplomacy since you were eight, had you seen a man die when you were four, had you been torn from your mother’s hands when you were less, less, nothing, and grown knowing you were the cause of her death. Lexa said none of this aloud.

“I am tired.”

Indra coughed. “We will escort you into bed.”

(Lexa was fifteen when the trumpets sounded and Azgeda raised their banner, proclaiming they wished for war.)

*

Clarke held a blade to Lexa’s throat, and Lexa was sorry. She said so. “I never meant to turn you into this.”

There was pain and fury written in Clarke’s gaze. She was the Ship of Theseus, who outside of the sterile conditions of the Ark had gone rotten, had re-metabolised, had quenched the fire in her eyes and then relit it — and Lexa did not know at whom she looked, at what. The age-old question niggled at her again; Is the Ship of Theseus still the Ship of Theseus if each component has been replaced, slowly yet fundamentally?

The answer, Lexa found, as her neck wept, was in the brackets of yes and no. She knew, for this was a face smooth of youth and hard of calluses, like a stone in the river, not yet charred by moss. Lexa had fallen in love with the fingers whose beds were soft like petals, whose eyes were downturned like a pout that creased that brow — she had fallen in love with Costia, who had worn Clarke’s face. It ought to have relieved her, knowing these two individuals were no longer the same.

But. But it was still Clarke, and Lexa’s heart still pumped with fury, and so she pushed herself closer to the bite of the blade. End me, she was too coward to beg. End me, take me, reap me, anything but— the pain that arced through ligament of bone, that tore into her flesh like the bite of a manticore, the invisible griffon that sat atop her and dedicated itself to gouging her eyes into red circles, the eagle that gorged itself upon her liver. Lexa wanted to twist in her torture, the damp scent of sweat cloying to her nose. 

Clarke did not feel the same. Clarke was stuck in the net of a separate conflict, hands shaking not from premonition but from simple fear, as though she were treading stones in a riverbed and was only afraid to fall. Love is weakness. Not for Clarke, to whom love was the slip of a knife between the ribs. 

Lexa licked her lips, cracked and burnt and charred from the fire lit like a white-hot stove in her chest. She was going to die, but Clarke did not have to die with her.

“You’re free to go,” she said roughly. “Your mother is here. I will have you escorted to her.”

Something shifted in Clarke’s face. A ripple beneath the skin of her innocence, beneath which a shadow of something more conniving lurked, like a snake bunching the corners of her eyes. Lexa could not decide if it impressed or maddened her.

Clarke lowered the knife, still wary, though she should not have been. Lexa could have disembowelled her on the spot even with the knife to her neck. Clarke could not catch up with the hound of deep-seated childhood trauma and the pistons it had trained her reflexes to be.

“Wait.” she said. “I have a better idea.”

Black paint encircling her eyes like glittering thorns, Clarke’s eyes looked to be studded gemstones in a hilt. Her knees married to the floor, though the pride did not bleed from her spine. Her eyes, sapphire like the beads Titus wore under his cloak, plain as the shifting skies above, thick as the currents running through the woods, met Lexa’s and did not part. 

“Rise,” Lexa said. Like her place was the floor, Clarke stayed shackled. Then, only then, as though paying no deference to Lexa’s command, she rose with languidity, hair spun gold in the candle-light. There was a tusk choking Lexa’s throat.

And— later— it was Lexa who fell to her knees, iron-and-leather of her garment chafing against her skin. She raised her gaze, softened by the low light of Costia’s memory, her gifted candles scenting the room, and it fell on Clarke, overshadowed by the thorn of her throne raising a shadow to her back. Lexa’s heart thrummed from pain and anticipation, and she spoke the softly-laced words:

“I swear fealty to you, Klark kom Skaikru.” she whispered. “I vow to treat your needs as my own, and your people as my people.”

It was enough. (For now.)

Nia challenged her, as though she were a boot to Lexa’s authority. Oh, but she had driven a knife through Lexa’s heart once and mended its broken shutters, so Lexa had forgiven her. But now her motives were plainer than death. (She did wonder how that felt like, to be scooped into the arms of the ether. She hoped death was a little like falling asleep. Sue her, like a child she too was a coward to the threat of pain.)

You are challenged, hissed Nia. 

I accept your challenge. The truth of the matter was, Lexa was tired. There was an ache beneath her chest covered by the most meagre tarpaulin of her skin. Part of her, the bitter, festering part, almost hoped Nia would win — the part of her that yearned to spit in the face of the Kongeda, who said and said and said Love is weakness but who’d never proved their own strength. The part of her that yearned to martyr herself to a sword and not to flesh; Lexa was a born warrior, she must die as one. She must. The legacy flowed in her blood.

Warrior against warrior to the death, Titus droned, stiff as a board. Queen Nia of Azgeda, who do you choose to be your champion?

The snake did not bare her teeth, for snakes had none, but her tongue flicked out as though to catch Lexa’s stutter or fear. Lexa was immobile. My son Roan, she cut the syllables like a hunter would slice meat, Prince of Azgeda. As though he had not been a cageling under her and Lexa’s shared custody.

Titus turned to her. Heda, who will fight for you?

Costia’s candles smoldered the flames in her eyes. Lavender smoke touched her nose, paired with the boasting waft of decay. She could not tell if it was hers or Nia’s — if, as she settled on her knife-tipped throne, it was her back that was to be sliced open by her shields. Perhaps, Lexa thought, resting her arms delicately at the edges of her seat. She met Clarke’s eyes, which pleaded. Lexa shook her head a fraction of an inch. No. It is not time, she thought. Aloud, she said—

Ai laik Heda. Non na throu daun gon ai.

Clarke’s mouth fell open without a sound. Lexa did not notice, but her eyes were dark.

Clarke’s worry was vinegar to the wound. It was offensive to Lexa’s tongue, to the radiation eating at her chest. She wished to appease her anxiety.

Clarke, this is Aden. For Clarke was anxious for her people, not the cuts on Lexa’s skin. If Lexa fell, the conclave would be held at dawn, and Aden would muddy his happy hands as she had once done and swear fealty to Wanheda as she too had done. 

Aden is the most promising of my novitiates, Lexa explained. If I should die today, he will likely succeed me.

When Clarke appeared unappeased, Lexa prompted Aden. Tell her what will happen to Clarke’s people when you become Heda, Aden. 

Duteously, he recited the words Lexa wished him to recite. If I become Heda, I pledge my loyalty to the 13th Clan.

She sent him off, and fixed Clarke with a look. See? Nothing to worry about. 

Clarke bared her teeth. You don’t stand a chance against Roan.

Had Lexa had wings, her feathers would have ruffled with offence. Had she wanted to, she would have skewered that rat with ease. Clarke’s discontent was a usurpation to her pride. Not that she had much to salvage, the bruise in her chest bleeding slowly outward, dulling her sense of step. Still, she was compelled to defend herself. You have never seen me fight.

There was a flicker of something. It was gone, because Clarke did not love her. No, but I saw him kill three men in the time it took for the first one to hit the ground.

And still, Lexa’s spirit, sunken into the bow of her neck, inclined to soothe her, though Clarke was not the one in pain. If you’re right, then today’s the day my spirit will choose its successor, and you need to accept that.

(But it was not. Lexa hunched over the earth, entrails of her sick dribbling from her mouth, mixing with the blood-paint dripping from her eyes. But it was not. Lexa stood over Roan’s prone body, mouth smeared with blood, thinking of the girl whose crowned teeth she had reddened too, whose chest she’d punctured like an iceberg to a hull. But it was not. Lexa threw the spear, and Nia fell back, skin splitting like the clap of a war-drum. But it was not. The Queen is dead, long live the King.)

Chapter Text

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, 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 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 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 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 of a 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.