Twin streams of blood flow down Sofia’s bared forearms and Nell is too distracted to say if they follow lines of new muscle, or skip over new calluses when they reach Sofia’s hands. Though they must, from how she looks. The wrought or overwrought look in her eyes and the fact that she is, somehow, even frailer-looking than before. The white of polished bone like something a dog licked into a more thorough form of dying.

She bleeds the same. Like a person. Maybe a part of Nell always wondered if she would, though she always knew the ways that Sofia felt different than anyone else.

Now the blood falls and now it gathers and now Sofia gathers it until it forms a long shape in her dangling left hand.

A sword.

Of course she would make a sword out of her own blood and of course she would do it trembling like a leaf that does not yet understand wind, or falling, or that it is by its own nature a disposable thing. 

“Put it down, Sofia.”

Nell tries to make her voice into a command, but she will always be a plea against this. Never mind that one moment when she was in control, kneeling in Sofia’s manor with that horrible sweet voice in her ear. When she had the upper hand.

When she was the blade and not the flesh, receiving it.

Her voice rings wetly off the walls and when it arrives, dismal and damp, Nell watches as the dainty, blood-soaked hand hanging at Sofia’s side tightens. 

And it feels like they were young. Blood-soaked in other ways, tracing old deer tracks through the woods always looking for a flash of white between the trees or for a body to come whispering out of the darkness.

Nell has always called her cold – even then, her hands chilly as they flinched up under the shirt she’d dragged on, her breeches cinched tight at the waist. Luckily none of it unnerved Sofia – the fact that Nell stole her father’s half-damp clothes off the line on her way through the muddy yard and pulled them on with her back pressed to the shed.

Peering out at the pockmarks of light that chose certain pools of muddy ground to illuminate, and little else.

Fingers cold as they pressed into and up and under the fabric of what she would, if pressed, refer to as Nell’s shirt, and not just her father’s. Though that was true the fact was the truth hardly mattered in the forest at night between two girls.

Sofia, her eyes gathering the dark like hands, with her head bowed as she pushed the gaping of the shirtaside, fingers oh-so-nimble on the buttons. The smell of the herbs that Nell’s mother used to get sweat and beer and dirt and grease out of the homespun almost unbearable.

Not to Sofia, of course, apparently, who always ended up with her nose buried in the fabric over Nell’s shoulder. She took a stretch that summer – lucky her, towering so far above her feet and clumsy about it but not with Sofia wrapped around her like a promise neither of them could keep.

“Did you know that the Palace of Versailles used to smell unbearably like shit?”

“What?” Nell understandably perplexed with the first sting of Sofia’s teeth in her neck – low, where it wouldn’t be seen.

A tongue drawn over the sore spot and then breath washing hot across the hurt as Sofia paused again to speak. She was always doing that. Saying things and thinking things especially out here, where it was no more allowed than in her father’s house but at least it was not unwelcome.

Nothing to flinch from in the woods but shadows and the cold tips of fingers, rucking Nell’s shirt up until Sofia’s wrists disappeared beneath, roaming. Tugging and plucking and worrying the bindings around Nell’s chest.

“Yes. It was back when King Louis’ court lived there, all his quail-stuffed courtiers. It was just a lot of people and a baroque fuck of a building. A poor combination, no?” Her eyes lifted in the dark, only moon shadows to pick them clear for now, though Sofia always brought expensive candles in her pockets – “more dangerous this way. more risk. But I like seeing you.”

“M-me too.”

She pressed her mouth onto its wound again and Nell had to squeeze her eyes shut. Bury a moan where they would never find the body.

“The place was full of people, which means chamber pots and sweat and shit.” Nell is not sure, but she likes the sound of bad words in Sofia’s mouth. Mostly, she likes how it quickens Sofia’s heart where they’re pressed close – the skin to skin to skin of knowing that she is childishly afraid of saying wicked things and delighted to do it here.

Nell doesn’t know but she suspects that there is a long history under the boughs of every forest like this one outside of every small and dismal town – of girls, clashing in the branch-cut moonlight to say and do and think and feel wicked things.

Just for now.

But just for now, while we have no marriage beds and nothing that starts crying in the night and nothing to hold us like iron to the shapes of our lives.

“Apparently the whole place – palace - smells of perfume even now, a full year since Louis moved his court back to Paris.”

A laugh bright as a slap in the darkness, the tree shadows casting their limbs over Sofia’s slenderness. Half the time, Nell thought about her almost as a bird. Loud, and soft and often angry. And liable to fly away.

Sofia smells good, though. Like something floral and spicy at the same time. Her mouth, too, tastes different than the boys’ in the village. Theirs are always heavy, somehow, like rye and field dust and living off the land. It’s nice, sometimes, to be wrapped up in that, but it never feels right.

It never feels like standing in the dark in a man’s clothes with Sofia’s body wrapped tight as a promise around her. Teeth making her sting and then ache and then bruise. Clever of Sofia, whose mouth tastes of foreign tea and inkwells and hot metal, to leave Nell with something that lasts and hurts and changes colour every day.

She misses the hurt when it disappears. The mouth-shape that is just a bruise to anyone else, but Nell can see the shape of a girl’s mouth in its dimensions. Somehow. Maybe this is witchcraft. Maybe this is what they mean about girl-things out in the woods, who carry the devil in their pockets.

“I like how you smell,” Nell decides to say because she’s been quiet for too long.

Always doing that out here especially when Sofia’s hands are roaming over her skin. When her teeth are tugging at the collar of Nell’s shirt and she’s afraid and she’s hoping and she’s terribly enchanted by the idea of the fabric tearing. The harsh sound of it.

She wants the candlelight and to see Sofia flush at the things Nell knows by now to do to her. At first it was so fumbling, so quiet and exploratory. At first, it was enough just to kiss out here, but all sins grow in repetition.

Now, hers is so large that it has to be eaten to disappear.

Luckily, out here, she has the perfect impression of a mouth to work with. She has her hands and how Sofia presses close, suddenly, Versailles forgotten. Breath harsh on Nell’s chin as her hands slip down to the ties of her- their – stolen breeches. Undoing with the thoughtless dexterity of a girl who knows how to sew and embroider and how to play the piano.

Her fingers slipping into hot wet and Nell moaning and the forest swallowing it whole.

“God,” she says, and means it. Finds Sofia’s mouth in the dark as she works a little space for her wrist, slipping the breeches down over Nell’s arse with her other hand and smirking about it. Probably she knows somehow that Nell used the word arse.

No candlelight, yet. They save this for Sofia because Nell does not, in some imprecise way, like to feel seen. Out here, with only touch to tell, she is perfectly herself. Breeches and shirt and boots and Sofia’s hand tracing her jaw.

“God?”

From Sofia it is a question, wry as she starts to move her fingers and Nell knows herself how to do this but still it is astonishing. It is another hand and it is there, touching and unflinching and warmed now by all its roaming up around her chest.

Her hands are free but they’ve been gripping the tree bark at her back. Now, she uses them to find Sofia’s face and tilt it upward. Even here in the dark she will be looking down at what she’s doing but she can play the piano, so there is no interruption when Nell steals her eyes away.

Finds her mouth with the pad of her thumb and leans down – has to. she is tall and limned all in muscle where Sofia is softness abutting bone – and kisses her gently and then ungently. Bruising hard as Sofia laughs into her mouth and then makes other noises in there, and then concentrates until Nell is the one speaking, unspeaking. Making the forest hold them and all their sounds so tightly.

She shivers hard as Sofia slips inside her – two fingers easy and soft and nowhere tugging at her. They steal into her like two girls might steal into the forest at night to do wicked things.

And all of Nell’s strength means nothing in the face of this. Her knees shake and Sofia moves against her, hips in time with her fingers pressing her thumb high and soft and slow and slippery. This time, God trembles on Nell’s tongue when she tries to say Him.

“God?”

Another, again. Low in Sofia’s voice that sounds crackly with the fact that they are up so late and the air is chilly. Their bodies hot. This is not a summer tryst but a repetitive thing. She fucks Nell like she knows how, and she does.

One swallow does not make a summer but what about this? What of this? What is this?

“God!” – she cries this, or tries to, as Sofia’s fingers curl and press and move and god, fuck, and the sound is stolen away between Sofia’s lips. Delicately parted so they do not take all the volume. Just enough.

Afterwards they both tremble and neither of them imagine that in another decade they will do it someplace else. That Sofia, covered in blood, will look down at what she is doing to watch the long blade of blood form in her hand. That her smile will be rictus, and utterly unfamiliar.

And Sofia, standing with her back against the wall and a sewer stench crawling into her nostrils, – was Versailles like this? was it better? was it worse? did you ever tell me anything true? – cannot quite separate the red wet thing in front of her from the soft shadowed shape in the forest.

Perhaps Sofia has forgotten all about it. Perhaps she dragged dozens of girls into the woods. Perhaps she was the witch all along, devil in her pockets.

Nell, in boots and breeches and shirt and jacket and belt and sword and pistol, feels exactly the same as she did back then. Only more confused and better with her hands and, of course, afraid.

And, of course, not for herself.

The sword takes form, to the tip. It is so obviously magic that Nell wants to blink. She wants to give them away to the men stomping through the streets above, but then witches hang. They do it mostly in innocence and even now, watching blood drip off the tip of Sofia’s summoned sword, Nell cannot convince herself that this girl wound hang any differently.

“Put it down Sofia.” She tries again, her voice low and urgent, but the girl only smiles. She does it exactly the way she used to against Nell’s mouth.

Insult to injury. Alright.

She is bleeding so much.

Nell sets her feet, reaches down toward her belt. The cold a familiar hilt of a sword that doesn’t belong to her but does, now. As much as Sofia’s blood belongs to the girl it’s falling out of.

“Fine,” she says. Drawing steel, showing her length and her breadth and wanting to cry or laugh or scream or go home about it.

Sofia, to her credit, trembles a little more. Grins a little wider. Bleeds all over her bare feet.