Chapter Text
POV: Corvo
Mette didn’t hold back when throwing me against a wall of stone – she never does.
Scrambling on all fours and trying to swallow the oxygen my lungs desperately fight against, she reaches down and grabs me by my hair. The long, nearly white strands dance around her fist like snakes.
My braid’s come almost undone and dirty in the haste of the chase. Blood tickles my cheek where a branch has cut my skin as I ran, my feet are shaky from the effort I put into an attempt to escape her, and my hands are bruised from climbing up here. Underneath us, a valley embraces a lake as blue as her eyes, but Mette’s gaze is nothing alike to calm. Her stare is taunting, almost mischievous, but her lips are pressed into a dissatisfied line.
“You are slow,” she states, leading me by my hair like a dog on a leash. Or no, not exactly, since the dogs used for hunts would follow her without question. If she were to use any, of course. For our little games, like these, there is no need for hounds, and in any other scenario she prefers to rely on her brute strength alone. Mette likes to test herself, and, when stumbling upon one of her limits, figuring out how to overcome it.
“I’ve got farther than any time before.” My protest is a mere rasp.
“But you didn’t get away,” she points it out with such an unpitying tone as if wanting me to apologise for being unable to run out her. Her. The favourite of the Goddess of the Hunt, the prodigy whose name will be one day in history books, the bear shifter to whom my skull wouldn’t be enough as the replacement of a cup, and so on, and so on.
“I consider getting this far a success,” I try to convince her, begging for the smallest hint of a praise I could get out of that always critical and factual mouth of hers, but to no avail. My charms don’t work on Mette, especially not in a situation like these. For her, fun and hunts – even if just for practice – are separate things, unlike to me.
With her free hand, she pulls a leaf out of my hair, then lets it fall to the ground. My gaze wanders up her arm and determine that yes, it’s still thicker than my head – I’m not a small person either, but next to her I feel like so. The heat spreading in my cheeks betrays me before I could avert my thoughts, and I can hear Mettle exhale knowingly. When I look up at her face, she’s already assumed that serious expression of hers all over again.
“I’ve got you, so don’t be proud of yourself.”
Before I could muster a response, she yanks my head back by the hair to make me look her in the eye. She’s perfectly aware of how much I enjoy this, and I know she likes it just as well.
“I may want to get caught.” Hearing my response, she rolls her eyes in feigned annoyance.
“I may want to make you regret saying it.” Mette leads me to the edge of the stone cliff we’ve ended up on.
I look down, and the lake looks back at me. Its water must be cold, not caring about spring and the illusion of warmth the beaming but useless sun creates.
Having known her since I was ten – decades, since the mortals like to cry about it – I catch the gleam of a warning in her eyes. I have time to open my mouth but not to protest: She unceremoniously pushes me off of the cliff.
Being not entirely useless against her – we’ve been trained side by side, after all – I catch her wrist. My plan was to pull myself back to the solid surface, while Mette’s was to jump off with me.
The water is biting into my flesh with its thousands of tiny, sharp teeth. As I emerge on the surface, my clothes try to pull me back down. Out of the two of us, I’ve always been the one whose limbs are frozen over all the time, so I wear multiple layers of clothing – shirts, a vest and simple pants I don’t feel sorry for if they get thorn, since our chase isn’t sparing neither fabric nor our skin.
It's not a real hunt only because there is no trophy.
It’s not a real hunt only because we aren’t enemies.
Mette, whenever in the role of the hunter, always runs after me as if I was a deer and moves through the woods as if they were her domain instead of our Goddess’s. Here, everything belongs to Her and Her alone, from the smallest leaf and quietest incest to us. We are Her hunters, Her disciples, Her devotees.
Yet, unlike in the case of Mette, in mine this choice was made by somebody other than me. What’s devotion to her and the others, a choice made in every second of their day and every beat of their hearts, to me it’s the only path allowed to walk.
An act of survival.
Slavery, because I’m not ready to trade my head in for freedom. What would that even look like? A place, where I could go back, doesn’t exist in this world. Not anymore.
Mette doesn’t know. I’ve wanted to tell her, how many times and how desperately, but the words have always ended up tangling into a knot in my throat.
Nobody else knows, but me.
Nobody can know, especially not Her. When I’m trying to sleep and disturbed dreams creep into my head, I’m seeing myself as the next sacrifice all too clearly. Sometimes I could swear the dream even had smells, it leaned into my touch so I could feel my own blood trickling down and my veins running dry.
“Don’t make that face,” Mette’s voice yanks me back to reality, out of the realm of my thoughts. The only place I have to myself completely. But how I want to let her in… “You’ve been slacking off. Now it’s time to make up for it all.” Her fist is in my hair, again, pulling me down.
“I’ve never—” My words are drowned out by the water flooding my mouth.
I see only water.
I breathe water, too.
My body wants to double over, to cough, maybe even to scream but that would require air I don’t have now. I’ve been trained long enough to not give into any of these instincts and have enough control over myself to kick Mette in the side to make her let me go. Her torso is as hard as the rock of the hills, however, she was injured a week ago while on a pursuit for beasts. I target that wound.
It's not fair combat – it’s smart.
When my head is above the surface, she’s giving me a smug look. “The prey remembered it has teeth. Finally.”
She reaches for me again, but I swim away in time to get out of her reach.
Mette doesn’t like to lose. That’s what has driven her to become the best of the best, but it’s also her greatest flaw. And maybe the only one she has. However, a warrior’s flaws are like open injuries, where you can sink your fingers into and grant yourself advantage. It’s not virtuous but I’m not a disciple of the God of Laws or the God of Righteousness, if there are such ones. I only know Her.
My knowledge of the world is limited to what I’ve scrambled together before being given to Her. I haven’t left Her woods since I was ten.
Mette studies me for a moment, then lunges after me. Another attempt to capture me, a failed one. I can slip this easily away from here because I know her tell – before she would move towards me, she sucks in air.
We play this game of catch for a while. Wearing down her patience isn’t easy; the water is unkind and my clothes stick to my limbs like a second skin, making it more difficult to move. Gritting my teeth, I hold on.
“Do you want to kill me by boring me to death?” She calls out. Instead of answering, I flash her a grin. It’s easier to laugh than to show how tired I actually am. I’m nothing alike to a shifter, so my energy compared to hers is almost laughable but this gives me an advantage: those who know that they are strong tend to repeat it to themselves too often and rely on this one quality of theirs too much.
Mette is smarter than this, of course, but isn’t prone to losing her head, if provoked long enough…
“Is it working?” My hair swims around me like an exotic plant, its fair colour nearly seems to glow in contrast with the dark depths of the lake.
“Sadly not.” Mette shakes her head slightly, then takes a deep breath – her tell – before lunging at me once again.
This time around, instead of swimming out of reach to avoid her grasp, I dive down. Her fingers close around water, and I slip past her legs.
Having gotten behind her, I pull a knife out of her belt and then emerge on the surface, pressing my chest to her strong back and the blade to her throat. I’m grabbing her shoulder, keeping myself afloat. She doesn’t have to swim, just stand on her tiptoes, so she holds both of us up. There is only one and a half head of difference between us but in such cases it counts.
“Interesting enough?” I ask in a casual way, not fitting the situation we are in. Hiding my gasps for air goes better than I thought it would. Still, I can feel a swallowed laugh vibrate through her throat, like a low growl.
I lower my knife holding hand, offering the weapon to her with its bone hilt forward.
“I’ve won, I guess,” I muse, resting my chin on Mette too. Her skin is so, so warm…
“Run your mouth less,” she answers, gritting her teeth. Sensing the shift in her mood, I brace myself.
A bad loser is a dangerous one.
Mette grabs my wrist and twists it hard enough so that I drop her knife and my muscles tense, like the overarched string of a bow, and my bones crack how pebbles do under the hooves of my horse when galloping through pathways near the mountains, on the borders of Her domain.
My thoughts are knocked out of me by the water.
She doesn’t only keep me down after she has wrestled me off of herself but kicks the back of my head hard. Once, twice, my vision falters, and the next thing I see is the lake shore where she drops me down to the ground.
Turning over on to my stomach, I cough up the water I’ve swallowed. It drips down my chin, mixing with saliva.
“You’ve cheated—"
“If this was a real fight, you’d be dead by now,” Mette states and I can’t argue with her, mainly because her boot finds its way to my ribs. I roll over in the dirt. Not only my hair but my whole appearance is tarnished now. “That trick of yours could’ve been a child’s.”
“If it works, it works, no matter the means,” I bite back with the remaining oxygen I can find in my lungs. “If you want no surprises, then go to a tournament next time.”
Mette knows this too. When I manage to raise my face up and find her gaze, I find understanding there – but without a crumb of mercy. Alike to a real fight or the wilderness itself, she doesn’t even think about going easy on me.
About holding back.
About treating me like something too precious to hurt or tear up or break apart or savage a little.
The kick to my face was almost expected.
I’m lying motionless on my back, my chest heaving in a hurry, relishing in the pain that spreads through my body like a disease. It’s a lot, tears stain my eyelashes like stolen pearls on a necklace or a row of lampions during a festival in one of the villages She has forced into Her service, just like how She’s done it to many others, including me.
Thoughts of Her still plague my mind – the awareness that these are Her woods.
The mark She has burnt into my back when I was dragged here and neither knew Her nor Her cruelty yet.
The fact that my body – flesh, blood, bones and parts I’m unable to name – belongs to Her, alone and ultimately.
Even my mind isn’t safe from Her prying, not entirely at least. Though She doesn’t know how to read minds – or haven’t found out, according to my knowledge, yet how to proceed – but that doesn’t mean She hasn’t got any means to get into the heads and minds of Her property. There are, for one, Her rituals. Slitting the throat of an animal or cutting its heart out to eat it is one thing; kidnapping children is entirely another.
Tomorrow, She’ll send some of Her disciples to gather the children offered to Her temples and some other hunters to snatch the ones whose parents are disobeying Her commands. I’ve got no doubts which part will She leave to me.
The Goddess is ought to punish me.
Though I hadn’t done anything outright rebellious nor suspicious I feel, whenever those lilac eyes rest on me, that she notices something, that’s unpleasant to Her godly gaze, every damn time.
I haven’t betrayed Her, and that’s why I’m still alive.
I haven’t defied Her, cuts from sermons on my arms.
I haven’t been faithless to Her, the memory of meat – raw and still pulsing with life – lingers in my mouth, heaving on the back of my tongue. Undeniable proof of the loyalty I’m serving Her with.
But She’s going to test me to decide if that something in me, maybe that I still remember how I ended up in Her grip, can be overlooked or my heart must be rooted out of my chest as a sacrifice – as an apology – to Her.
Tomorrow, I’ll know.
As of now, I try to keep my focus on Mette – her anger, slowly taming to embers, and her punches becoming rarer and rarer. This game, this chase of ours is starting to come to its end, I understand, as I watch her clouded frown turning into mischief.
“Now I want something else,” she muses, after having made sure with a hard glare that I won’t protest again about who won actually. Her, who else?
“Who am I to deny you?” comes my answer in a quiet voice. I make an effort not to let fade it into a whisper.
I let her yank my clothes, that wetly stick to my body, off and lean into the heat of her touch. We don’t bother to find a bush as cover or something. When we were younger and shier, we used to fumble with such precautions. Some decades and enough drunk celebrations that almost always ended up in orgies later we absolutely can’t care.
If any of the other hunters would come this way, they wouldn’t see anything they haven’t witnessed a thousand times already. I’m what they call a ran-through whore, after all, while the bear shifter is the prize they all compete for, but hardly any of them ever wins.
Generally, I’m what they have to settle for.
“You’re quite nice like this,” Mette remarks, looming over me like a shadow stretching out in a valley.
As she leans in to kiss me, I bite her lower lip. Now it isn’t only my blood staining our mouths but hers too. I earn a groan in response, and a rough grip closing in around my throat. Her grasp isn’t tough enough to block off air, yet. I sense the callouses on the skin of her palm and fingers.
“Covered in mud and branches?” I raise my eyebrows, ignoring the ache ringing in my head.
“Obedient,” she clarifies without faltering. “Blonde is your colour, undoubtedly.” As she speaks, she’s smoothing stray strands of muddy hair out of my face. My braid must have already came apart, and even if there’s something left of it, that wreck wouldn’t even suffice as a pigeon nest.
“You shouldn’t slam me into the soil that hard the next time, then,” I mutter into the next kiss we share.
Mette grins into it.
“The bear likes to chase,” comes her musing, low and alluring like the growl of a predator, “and run. Restraining it isn’t a fight I want to put up.”
It’s my turn to roll my eyes at her, ignoring a truth behind what she chooses to voice out loud, dressed up as part of our usual teasing, and what remains unsaid: the bear, a bear that was placed in her as a child with magic, isn’t as metaphorical or mythic as most tales tell about it. Shifters are a creation of witchcraft, a ritual dangerous and so horrendous that speaking of it leaves the taste of ash on your tongue. Mette could never really tell me how it happened, while I couldn’t bring myself to pry.
However, there is one thing we both know for certain. The bear in her, that fell animal, will take over one day and swallow her whole.
“Next time, I’ll ride my horse.”
I flip her over onto her back – it’s only possible because she lets me to do so.
“Only if you really wanted to escape me, Sverrir.” The name she has given me. It means troublemaker. Like anybody else, she neither knows my real one nor the nickname bestowed me upon me by my mother, but I listen to Mette’s brain child just fine – like a dog that obeys any command given in the tone it’s used to, the words not mattering.
“Bitter about not being able to run out a horse?” All it earns me is her palm getting pressed into my face and, preventing me from leaving further kisses on her collarbones, directing my head down, down, down between her thighs where I’m comfortably settled on my stomach.
“Be grateful I’m not your foe,” she hisses, with a new edge settled in her voice. I chose not to press on her fragile pride further before she’d remind me that I have no horse, as of now. “Otherwise, I’d rip your pet apart. Or, I could tear your legs out before you'd get on its back.”
Fairly speaking, if in another life she was an enemy of mine, I’d die of fright before she could get a hold of me.
Her warning looks regularly send shivers down my spine, her wielding any kind of weapon makes my stomach churn with fright and – I must’ve went crazy, because it’s my favourite sight out of all lately – when she shifts into a bear, that’s the time I’m always reminded of the metallic taste of fear.
If she were to do that with the intent to end me, I’d do the favour of not letting her hands – or, in that case, paws – get filthy and drop dead on the spot like a fly. I wonder, though, if I had time to come one last time in my pants…
“Stop talking, and make good use of that constantly running mouth of yours.”
With that, digging her fingers into my soaked hair and unravelling my muddled braids even further, she fixes my head between her thighs. On instinct, I lick her, making her tremble slightly.
I just chuckle. Seeing her impatience is a rare sight, so I savour every second of it. As I look up at her, my lips against her folds but not moving an inch, her grip tightens in my hair.
“If I go bald, it’ll be because of you.”
“If you ever stop complaining, it’ll because I’ve burnt your vocal cords out,” she plays with the thought languidly the same way her thumb caresses the top of my head.
I lick her again, teasingly. “I thought you’d cut out my tongue rather than to show a hot iron rod down my throat.”
“Why would I get rid of your parts I’d miss?”
I’d like to argue, except she runs out of her non-existent patience and pushes my face so tightly against her middle that I become unable to utter another word.
Her bush tingles my nose as I breathe. I keep my gaze intertwined with hers as I start to give her what she wants; still at a leisure pace, though, but I’m gradually working my way into her hot and slick entrance.
At one point, she closes her thighs tightly around my head. One day, she’ll break my neck like this…
“You’re such a monster,” she pants. “Hurry up, before I make you.”
I’m anything just to hear those pretty moans of yours, I’d say if I could. Her little sounds of approval feel like the caress of her calloused fingers against my aching scalp.
Mette throws her head back, giving a good view of the red of her tattoos hugging her neck, as I suck on her clitoris and half-way lower my eyelids, relishing in the pain burning my scalp. The more it hurts, the more I know she’s enjoying what I’m giving her.
“Don’t stop,” she groans in a warning, as if I would. Now, though, that she’s given me the idea…