Disclaimer:Not mine; Tamora Pierce's.

Dedication: For Kally, following a request for a fic featuring Rikash Moonsword. This was very hard to write! Happy Birthday, my friend!

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Oh tell me of your woes;
Sing me of your troubles, oh pretty one,
Of your glorious stories
Of heroes and love, oh sweet one,
And all that is good;
And I will tell you of my death.

The Beauty with the Beast.

He had dined on little boy tonight. The kid had been a little on the plump side (too much fat and not enough meat) but still tasty enough. He was still picking skin shreds out of his teeth with his tongue.

Rikash Moonsword sighed into the night, his appetite- for once- satiated. Metal clicked as he resettled his great wings; his claws peeled at the branch rhythmically.

Oh, the humans would have been sighing about how beautiful tonight was if it hadn't been for that massacre. The moon was full, the stars were out, and it was just warm enough, but the ground around the village of Greenshot was shining like oil in the moonlight. It wasn't oil, but blood; hot, sweet sticky blood and piles of steaming guts.

Thinking of the way the villagers had tried to fight against the bandits made Rikash laugh. They had been pathetic really. They were like little weeds in the path of a storm; however hard they held their ground and clung to their life, the great storm would still sweep them away. Nothing had prepared them for such butchery. As they died they could see the Stormwings settle down to wait for their own great feast to begin.

Even now, hours later, the buzz of adrenaline still warmed Rikash. He couldn't help it; the sight of wounds and the smell of death excited him as naturally as mating aroused the human youths. He remembered before he had metal wings, feeling the same height of giddy excitement when he was just about to enter war. How long ago that was now.

The Riders had turned up, of course. But by the time they had, there was not a body left that could be identified. They- the fast-moving army the Queen was so proud of- were as useless as the villagers' weapons of rake and kitchen knife.

There had been a certain pride in that, Rikash had to admit. He had seen it too on the faces of his fellow Stormwings as they cawed loudly and defiantly to the air. They had done well and they had feasted until they could eat no more. Now they were settled down in the nearby woods to rest for the night, their bellies too full to fly elsewhere.

Rikash was slightly further out from the rest of the flock. He liked his solitude and he wouldn't sleep easy in his midst of his fellows. Backstabbers, all of them; as nefarious as common human thieves, and as immoral as muck.

Suddenly there was a rustling in the undergrowth. Rikash tensed and strained to see. He cursed his eyes; they were wonderful for seeing long distances- but only in the daylight. Come nightfall, they were as useless as human eyes.

He must have been upwind because the creature came right up close to him. Fortunately the thing entered a shaft of moonlight that was creeping through the thick overhead canopy. Rikash grinned.

It was a woman, a human woman. And not just any human woman, either: that pesky horse-mistress of the Riders. Daine's friend.

Rikash stayed quite still- if he moved, she would hear the clacking of his feathers- and watched her. She looked quite cross; in fact, he thought he saw tears on her cheeks but he couldn't be sure with his eyes. She was stomping through the undergrowth, apparently trying to kill off as much of it as she could with just her riding boots.

Grinning wickedly, Rikash drawled, 'Am I interrupting anything?'

The woman visibly jumped and yelped a little. She twisted, trying to see him in the trees and cursed under her breath. It was some foreign tongue; Rikash could not understand it, though he filed the term away for later use.

She had spotted him.

'Damn you,' she hissed, her fists clenching.

Rikash pretended like she hadn't replied. 'No? Well, you are interrupting me.'

She laughed bitterly, folding her arms over her chest. Rikash wondered if she realised what that did to her figure; a figure that was certainly improved by all her riding and shooting.

'What do you have to do that's so important?' she said. 'Smell foul?'

'Very witty.'

'Don't make me laugh.' The woman wiped at her cheeks rather fiercely, confirming Rikash's suspicions that she'd been indulging in womanly weeping.

'What are you doing here anyway?' Rikash demanded. 'Shouldn't you be playing with ponies?' She ignored him. 'You are their horse mistress, aren't you?'

'The name is Onua.'

'Very well then, Onua. Shouldn't you be playing with your ponies?'

'Those ponies have attacked your kind before, so I don't think you have any right to jest about them!'

He whistled through his teeth, an eerie sound. 'Calm down.'

'Don't tell me to calm down: you just ate a village! If I had my bow on me, I'd put a bolt right through where your heart should be!'

'Ouch. I'm touched.'

'Well you shouldn't be.'

'You still haven't answered my question, you know.' Rikash shifted back and forth on his branch, twitching his claws. He despised the way his pathetic legs ached after standing for too long; they really weren't designed to hold a half-metal body free from the ground for lengthy periods. Already they were going numb.

Onua fixed him with an icy glare, although the effect was rather lost in the dim lighting. 'Are you expecting me to have a conversation with you? Especially after-- after that!' She flung her arm in the general direction of the haunted village.

'I would actually classify this as being a conversation already.'

'You're despicable.'

'Naturally, my dear. You're intolerably charming yourself.'

Onua hesitated, and then let out a long, weary sigh. 'I don't believe this,' she muttered, under her breath. 'I'm here because I'm trying to get away from all the nightmares you monsters have created.'

'That's very judgemental of you.'

'What, are you going to teach me morals now?' She spat the words out.

'No, I wouldn't dream of such a thing.'

Onua looked at him suspiciously. 'Do Stormwings dream?'

'I – we – remember.'

'Remember? Remember what?'

Rikash scowled. 'What is this- death by questions? Leave me be, pony-woman.'

'Well that's rich coming from you! You who was pestering me with questions!'

Rikash sighed and drawled, 'We remember things from other lives. Not all of us have always been this way.'

'Oh.'

'Yes: oh.'

Onua sighed too, and her shoulders shook a little. She hung her head, allowing her gaze to fall from its watchful scrutiny of him. 'I know you're not wholly to blame,' she muttered. 'But it's just hard to remember it's purely your nature when- that happens. Those are the people I- we- work and kill for. I knew a little girl there; we'd found her a foster family after hers had died of pox.'

Rikash shifted his weight again and the ancient tree groaned beneath him. He hated it when women got sentimental, it was one thing he'd never learnt to cope with, not even after all these years.

'What are you doing with the Riders anyway?' he asked abruptly. 'I thought Daine said you usually stayed at the palace, prettying up your war ponies.'

Onua glared at him again. 'We were on the summer trainee camp. We were the closest Riders to Greenshot.

'Speak to Daine often then, do you? Have nice little chit-chats about family, friends and lovers?'

'Oh, all the time, sweetheart.' He grinned, his sharp feral teeth covered with grime and caked blood. 'She gets a certain kind of perverse joy out of it.' Onua didn't look convinced so he added, 'You ask her next time you see her.'

Onua snorted. 'I will.'

His grin softened and he returned to his pruning of the branch's bark. 'How is she, anyway?'

Onua blinked but she quickly realised his question was sincere. 'Suffering with unicorn fever.'

Rikash was surprised. It was unlike her to catch such a thing! She was usually so insufferably sensible for a girl-child her age! (Although he sometimes blamed that on her paternal blood.) Suddenly he remembered that this unicorn fever was almost always fatal in humans. If he'd had a heart, it would have skipped a beat then; if he'd had blood, it would have run cold.

As it was, he simply mumbled, 'I hope she recovers.'

'So do I.' Onua's voice was still harsh and, momentarily, Rikash felt a pang of old human sympathy for her.

'Do you not have a lover to look after you?' he asked softly, the tone incongruous with the clicking of his teeth and the bones in his braids.

She looked surprised, as well she might. It was not everyone that discovered the intellectual side of the Stormwings. 'No,' Onua replied. 'Not at the moment. I got rid of the last one when he started presenting me with yellow diamonds.'

Rikash snorted, a disgusting sound from a Stormwing. 'What, did he think that because you shovelled horse muck you wouldn't know how cheap and nasty they were?'

'That wasn't the point,' Onua growled through gritted teeth. 'I'm not wanting great wealth and glory, but I wasn't ready for marriage and he was getting far too serious for comfort.'

'Don't you want little children?' he teased. 'Pink little piggies with runny noses and beady eyes and plump little limbs? Adorable little creatures.'

'No, I don't. I have my horses and I have my friends.'

Rikash shrugged. 'Fair enough, but you're a strange woman.'

'It's obviously due to all that contact with the ponies,' she said and, despite herself, she smiled a little.

'Ah, love!' sighed Rikash sarcastically. If it hadn't been for the razor-sharp edges of his feathers he would have thrown a wingtip to his breast then.

'What would you know of love, even that for other living animals?' The scorn was back in full force.

Ah, thought Rikash, I- typically- know more than you realise, sweetheart.

'Well?' demanded Onua. 'See- I'm right. You have no comprehension of great emotions such as love and hate and guilt.'

He looked away from her, back out to the steaming, silent village, cast eerily by the moonlight. He didn't want to see her reaction. 'I had a son, once.'

She was surprised; he could hear it in her voice, smell it on her. 'I didn't know you had a mate.'

She said it as a question, but he wasn't going to give her an answer. Let her think as she would; he was tired of this game now.

'I suppose you creatures will never cease to surprise me.'

He bared his teeth again in another of his wicked, dirty grins. 'Oh tell me of your woes,' he quoted from a very old Tortallan bard's song, 'Sing me of your troubles, oh pretty one; of your glorious stories- of heroes and love, oh sweet one, and all that is good, and I will tell you of my death.'

She gave him a look that would have sent any young human into peals of laughter. 'Yes, exactly.'

'I was mocking you.' Rikash rolled his eyes. 'Hadn't you better be going? It must be long past your bedtime, mortal.'

'That's a very poor excuse to try and get rid of me. I thought you wanted my company.'

'If you remember, it was you that interrupted me.'

Onua shook her head. 'I don't know how Daine can put up with you.'

'I don't know how she can put up with that mage,' he grumbled under his breath.

'What was that?'

'Nothing.' He smiled- sarcastically sweet.

Onua pulled a face at him. Abruptly a breeze whisked through the night, disturbing the leaves. The K'miri woman wrinkled her nose, fighting the urge to clamp a hand across her lower face. 'Eurgh, the wind's shifted.'

'Well you don't smell much sweeter yourself,' Rikash complained.

'I'm going. I'd wish you goodnight, but I don't like the way you enjoy yourselves.'

'You ought to try our shape one day, sweetheart. You'd find it's hugely uplifting. I'll even give you one of my feathers.'

Onua started to walk away, and did put a hand over her nose now. 'I'd curse you to the Black God and back again if you weren't so damned immortal already.'

'Give my kisses to Daine, pony-woman!'

Onua ignored him, shaking her head as she left the cover of the trees. Squinting, Rikash could just see her figure walk across the fields, away from the desecrated village. Out of the woods, her moving shadow was easier for his humanoid eyes to spot but once she entered the Rider's camp she was lost to him.

He sat motionless and thought about their conversation for a few minutes. It had stirred up old memories, as his chats with these human women often did. Sentimental creatures, all of them. Still, she had been lively.

With a "hrrmph" Rikash Moonsword settled back his wings- their clicking, clacking noise making a mouse down on the ground protest- and closed his eyes, ready for his night's sleep. The mouse called out again, not happy with the Stormwing's presence.

'Oh, shut it, Squeaky,' he snapped, and presently fell asleep.

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