If there is a memory in his voice she cannot hear it. There is only the brush of the willow at the edges of his voice like silk and the touch of smoke at the tips of his words as they curl up into the space between them as questions. She does not pause to wonder why he's asking anything of her. She is only thinking that he has. And if there is anything more to her thoughts about him it's gone the moment her skin quivers at the touch of the willow tree.
She is always thinking about endings but she doesn't tell him that when he turns to look at her with a look she's too wild to meet. Around her the grass starts to dry out until black veins are rising through the green leaves (as if her magic is eager to give away all the things Thana does not want to share). Her tail slicks though the marsh-grass until the heads of them are falling around their hocks like snow deciding to fall backwards. “Maybe.” She meant for it to come out like another whisper strained, but instead it falls from her lips like a rusty prayer-- all breathlessness and knots of wire forgotten for years.
Perhaps it's only the part of her that chaffs, and pulls, and frets at all the things she's longing for that answered him.
And when Thana lifts her gaze to look at him, to really look at him, she can see all the longing in her wild, unbroken heart looking back at her. It's shifted and strange and of a different color but it's there, like a song she's never forgotten the sound of (the howl of the wind, the roar of a beast, the dripping of sun-white water over her eyes). It's there and Thana strains towards it until their noses are closer than the roots and the dirt.
Another horse would call it an almost kiss. Thana only knows it's the way wolves pass in the woods, or the way birds share the same branch. It's understanding that needs no words and she does not pause to wonder if he understands the language of wild things in the thicket.
“I would become something new,” She can feel her own words falling back in waves of heat against the place where her lips are so close to his. The sun gathers on the tip of her horn like it's water instead of light (a halo she'll never see). Another leaf freckles with rot and death and age around her hooves (a halo of death that she'll always see).
And when she exhales the air in her lungs right into his it's with the sound of, “if I knew how.”
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