The walk back seems sweeter now without panic running through her veins like acid. Each step Isra takes echoes Marisol's, left to left and right to right. It feels like a sacred thing to her, to be a unicorn and walk to the sound of whispering feathers and steps lighter than her own. Each meter they walk is a song, a soft melody filled with lights and clarion hoof-steps, feathers and scale-glimmer.
Ahead the hill gathers, darker than the night sky, and the lights reflect off it like wishes off a sun glare. Isra thinks of dragons, floods and fates as their steps climb up, up, up. It feels like her heart is soaring too and the sadness is nothing more than a passing shower.
How can she be sad when the boy laughs and prances before them like a knight? He leads his queen as if he has saved the two mare instead of them him. Isra is happy to let him pretend, happier to watch his sides expand and contract with fresh, spring air.
“Denocte owes you a debt, Marisol.” Her voice is as soft as her heart is wild (humming in her chest like a bee). The hill seems a little brighter as they crest it, a little less like a dragon and more like a dream. Their shoulders brush together again (silk and feather, scale and flesh). Isra sighs for the contact softly enough that it might be nothing more than a weary inhale.
She wonders if Marisol notices how her heart thrums and sings like a eagle between her chest.
The colt sees his mother and with no more then a shy, chagrined look at Marisol and at Isra he's off. Watching the reunion breaks something inside Isra for there is no one to miss her like that, no one to cry. No one, she thinks, would mourn and cry for their dead queen if she simply vanished beneath rotted boards and a shroud of insects.
“If you ever need anything please come to me. I would never turn you away.”
Ever, the promise hangs, unspoken in the space between us and it dances in the dark silence. And when her eyes turn and catch on Marisol's there is a plea tangled up with the promise (so tangled it's hard to tell when one begins and another ends).
At the bottom of the hill the mother nickers lightly to Isra and with one final, longing look at Marisol (that says,
find me, find me again), she takes of down the hill. In the moonlight her hooves look both as joyful and shy as the boy's did.
But unlike the boy Isra doesn't look back, no matter how her heart sings and yells and roars at her to.
ISRA WHO CAN FEEL REGRET;
“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.”
