"What's my name?" He queries, his hand snaking its way down her body.
"Alpha King," She breathes, her voice becoming slightly hitched, "Caliban."
+ + +
IN THE IDES OF WINTER, when death reaps all that has been sown, Kore is chosen as an Althieme, on...
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DEATH COMES IN THE SHAPE OF A MAN
on winter's crest. It is not the first time he has donned a guise, worn gilded garments and a king's emblem, and it will not be his last. In a year's time, when the night is as black as pitch and a hovel's grounds glow, he will cross the snow-plated plains of Eridanul to stand at its edge once again, wearing another skin belonging to another man. Tonight, however, he wears the face of a marquis.
'-KORE.'
There is a voice that barely scathes the winter's winds, lost and lilting, unheard by the girls who play outside a hovel's grounds, their skins raw with the bitter touch of winter and eyes cast to the shadows of the forest. They are ignorant to those who will come on this night and all that they bring, ignorant to all that they will take.
'I cannot see you,' The youngest Kyteler, Iomeda, looks to the copses of trees and the shadows they keep, to her sister who hides within them. 'What if I hit you?'
Kore smiles, not at the tremble in Iomeda's words or the quiver of reluctance that she is sure dances across the blade of her sister's dagger. For it is there, her back pressed flush against the bark body of an oak tree and the shade of the night encompassing her, she feels most alive. 'You couldn't, even if you tried.'
And it is true, the oak is too thick to be fully pierced by the shoddy blade of their family's dagger and Iomeda is still learning to hunt.
A silence follows, long and hanging, and a part of Kore relishes in it, looking to the canopy of leaves that sighs against the night's gale. Winter has taken the life from the forest and she is sure it isn't the only life it has taken tonight. She does not mind winter, not as much as her sisters who had often spent most of their childhood wintertimes curled beside the hovel's hearth to take all the warmth it had to offer. Childhood, Kore's mind mulls over the word, the memories of her parents and how they had left, how a bow had found a home in her hands before the spine of a book, how her earliest recollection came from the whispered warnings of the nearby town, telling both youth and travellers alike of the witches and their hovel. And when she is sure more memories will follow, there is a shrill cry and the splintering of wood from behind her.
