taming the darkness.

The horse has now learned....

Joan's nostrils flare. She controls herself. She does not make a sound. Sonne's handful of ice has already half-melted. Its dripping tip draws a gleaming line down her sternum; the cold makes the muscles of her belly jump before she can stop them. Firelight glints in the black eyes of the beaked mask, gleeful and dancing, and from behind it comes a mocking coo. She knows Sonne can feel pain. She thinks of that fact and grinds her teeth.

The ice dallies above her pubic mound, just below where her tattooed belly crests in a soft rise of flesh, frigid water dripping into the coarse, dark curls. Her hands fist in the furs beneath her. Up again to trace circles around her nipple until it's peaked and aching, and then to the other, until both breasts hurt with it, then Sonne's other hand, dry and warm, soothing one then the other. Sweet little murmurs from behind the mask, which Joan knows not to trust.

Sonne lowers her head and adjusts the mask, sucking one nipple past her sharp teeth. Joan's grip tightens on the fur. She grunts. The ice is tracing lines along her thighs. She wonders if Sonne will try to put it inside her, or to slip her cold fingers into her sex; she hates her bitterly; she spreads her legs. She grabs Sonne by the hair at her nape and feels the answering scrape of her teeth before she draws back and Joan is once again looking up into the mask, mouthless, expressionless, but somehow, silently, cruelly grinning.

How sweet it is, that simple opening of the hand. The dagger drops to the floor and is seized at once by Sonne’s servant, firelight caught in the shining flint blade. She does not smile as the invisible spirit-grasp raises the weapon and fastens it to her belt, but behind her three dagger-shaped wounds blossoms the warmth of satisfaction. Whip in hand, she rests her knuckles on the weapon’s handle: smooth wood still sweltering with the rage of Joan’s grip. It will make a fine trophy to remember the bear-woman by, once she has passed on into a darker land and her body is one with the cold. Even then, Sonne thinks, she will feel the ghosts of that angered heat biting at her flesh. Such an exceptional warrior. Such a wild, horrible thing.

Sonne releases the wounds from her ochre-dripping hold. Humming gently to herself, she passes her fingers through the kneeling woman’s hair, slicking the dark strands wetly across her skull. Red on black. Marked as hers, until the day she will at last grow tired of so deficient a toy. The whip laps at the floor as she crosses the tent, picks up her medicine bag, and seats herself amidst the bundled-up reindeer furs by the fire. Pain cuts through her threefold as she reclines her battered, leaking body with tremendous effort, glad for the eagle-face that shrouds her tortured expression.

“Come here.” Slowly, Sonne stretches herself across the furs, pulling off her gloves and folding them across the handle of the whip resting by her side. One by one, she retrieves her healing-tools: the needle of fine yellow bone and a ball of sinew, powdered clay, dried yarrow and moss, long strips of animal skin, a mother-shaped amulet of polished jade. Joan’s gaze is heavy on her; the churning, restless ponderings of a cornered predator. Sonne returns the stare.

“Sew my flesh back together.” Indulgence drips from her words. She does so love a new pet. It will bring her pleasure to see the bear struggle with her mangled paw. “You’ve shown that you can maim. Now show me that you know how to think and to heal, little chieftain.” Joan’s hard eyes. Her ill-treated, crimson mouth. Her lurking presence. A shiver of greed runs along Sonne’s curving spine. She rests her naked palm upon her breasts, playing with the beads of blackest jet strung along her neck. “Undress me.”

        Sonne’s voice glides thick and sweet and coaxing, like honey. Joan is breathing hard through her nose, on her knees. She can feel blood drying in a tacky film on her face and in her hair, her mouth still full of a gritty, iron taste. Her broken wrist throbs. She has no weapon. She has been divested of her cloak and her scarred throat is bare. She is in a tent full of spirits, in the presence of a woman who, by dint of a terrible life-force, has overpowered her.

        She thinks of her father. He has been dead a long time. She left him behind her long ago, in a distant tomb in the ice, cold, dark, far from the seasonal paths of her people: buried with all that mattered to him, his ornaments, his furs, his weapons. Frozen meat and brittle bone. Unvisited. What would he do?

        You must be strong. Once, he stripped her cloak off her body and sent her staggering out of the mouth of their cave, on her knees as the wind moaned through the stone and the ice. You must survive. Another time, he chased her out of the firelight and into the winding unthinkable blackness that led into the earth. She had already learned not to cry. There is no Mother. We do not pray. We fight.

        There is no way to fight. There is only survival: like a whining animal, spear-struck and limping, struggling on, the wild, rolling eye pleading for life. She pushes herself heavily to her feet and crosses the tent to Sonne, lowering herself back to her knees, one then the other, at the side of her furs. She surveys the tools laid out for her use, then looks back at the glinting, black-bead eyes of the mask.

"You don't know how to obey." Her fingertips explore the edges of the three dagger-bites, the split bowels threatening to burst from the jagged seams. Crude work. The spiral incisions wreathed around her navel, slow-healing reminders of her first ritual, are ruined by the bear-slayer's strike. The meaning is broken. So the tales are true: carnage is what this woman-beast does best. A sigh streams from Sonne's chest as she stretches upon the furs. "You will learn." You will have to. She takes a clump of moss and presses it punishingly into the grasp of Joan's fractured hand. Let her feed the gaping, hungry wounds she caused. Once more, Sonne lies back and waits to be served. Her touch finds the furrowed claw marks slashed across her plaything's neck, tracing them idly to find salvation from the throbbing pain in her guts.