#guess which one of these ppl is Worse: the lethal warrior who will kill you for blinking at her wrong and who talks to her pet wolves

[goose-books]

promptober day 12: stuck

He found her at the precipice. Half of their great hall was bared to the sky: the walls stopped and the floor cut off and the mountain fell away in a wicked jagged chasm, like the room had been lopped away with some divine sword, gutted and laid open to the howling winds. Charybdis picked his way across the slick marble, and those winds threw snow into his face, sharp and stinging.

Scylla stood where the floor fell away, snow swirling around her coat and frosting her pale hair. Planted like a statue at the edge of the world. If Charybdis had liked, he could have placed his hands on the small of her back and pushed her. She might have even let him. Instead he stopped just behind her and took up her pose, legs spread, one arm behind his back in parade rest, the other extended to cup a goblet of wine she held and he didn’t. If Scylla had liked, she could have spun and taken his outstretched mocking wrist and wrenched him over the edge.

The wind scraped the mountains and echoed off the cliffside. Scylla stared out at the stark landscape, white except for the black rocks jutting like bones from the snow. There was ice fringing her collar. Her stone face didn’t shift.

“It’s fucking cold,” Charybdis said, because he was.

Scylla didn’t glance back. She inclined her head to what she was watching: the narrow bridge of rock where the mountain met the great hall, and the frighteningly swift progress of a gray-gone-ice-white wolf climbing to meet them.

It was still fucking cold. Charybdis crossed his arms and waited.

“Gods aren’t cold,” Scylla said, again without looking at him — half deadpan, as if she were filling in scripted lines.

“This one is.”

She handed him the goblet. The wolf crested the mountaintop and loped across the rock bridge. Scylla dropped to her knees to meet it, and the creature tumbled headlong into her arms, nearly knocking her clean over the cliff. Charybdis suppressed a grimace. He glanced at the goblet — half-full — and wondered how hungover she was. She had been wild last night, stalking the halls, bellowing incoherent rages, kissing him with teeth, leaving beads of blood like rubies along his neck. She always went statuesque in the mornings, when she had to stop yelling because her head hurt.

“Good girl,” she was saying to the wolf, arms wrapped around its shaggy snow-crusted ruff. It had dropped something into her hand — some rock, shiny with drool, that the watchwolves only brought back if such-and-such conditions were met. “How clever you are.”

The wolf panted, tongue lolling happily out of its mouth. It smelled wet. If she made him stroke it, Charybdis was going to throw her drink over the edge of the world. He took a sip instead, which hardly helped the cold.

“It seems we’ll have supplicants soon,” Scylla said, scratching under the wolf’s chin. “There’s a ship moored in the channel.”

At this time of year, any ship in the channel would be stuck too fast to tilt an inch. Charybdis smiled. “I’ll send someone to meet them. Tell them to start their prayers.”

The drawl in his voice was enough to make Scylla look up; he’d known it would. She didn’t return his smile, but her eyes glittered. The beast licked her chin, and she tousled its ear absentmindedly.

To say he loathed her was an oversimplification. To loathe each other was to loathe themselves, which meant that both of them still did, only it felt different. To say he loved her, too, was almost irrelevant. Charybdis put his hand out, and Scylla took it, and they wrapped their fingers around one another’s wrists, and he pulled her to her feet.

Neither dropped their hand. They stood against the screaming winds at the edge of the world, a breath from the plunge, and their eyes met.

Charybdis wondered idly if she was just going to throw him. She was certainly stronger than he was; he wouldn’t have been able to stop her. Of course, he expected that if she did put him over the side, she’d leap after him within moments.

“You haven’t got to send anyone right away,” Scylla said, voice low, eyes tracing the marks she’d left up and down his neck. “To the ship.”

Charybdis snorted, already turning to tug her toward the warmth of the castle proper. “No,” he said dryly, “I rather doubt they’re going anywhere.”