“Then I was right to know nothing of it,” he said, and shook his neck as though it were full summer and the flies were thick. Her lack of a home did not strike him as strange; not Dawn, then, but it was hardly rare for horses to be from nowhere. Especially lately, when strange winds seemed to be blowing all sorts of new horses to Novus.
That, to Acton, was not such a bad thing. New blood was always welcome.
He did not follow her into the water but tracked along the bank, keeping amiable pace with her. The stallion was not remotely interested in getting wet; he wasn’t yet cold enough to shiver but he didn’t think it’d take much. She was a madwoman to bear it, with the snow falling thicker now and the trees clattering like teeth in the wind.
When she drifted near again it seemed half an accident, like she was pushed by that same wind. She closed with him until she was climbing out of the water, tail and limbs dark and dripping, and the image of a beast he’d heard stories of as a child rose unbidden in his mind. Kelpie.
He wanted to laugh. A couple days of solitude and a heavy late autumn night and he was flighty as a girl.
Then she spoke again, more madness. The first he’d taken as a lark but this…for just a moment, his ears flicked back. Not long enough to hide in the tangle of his mane, just enough to show his uncertainty. “It’s not a murder if no one dies,” he answered flippantly, with a snort, and reached to nudge her cheek away.
But he is too late; already she’s slipped back into the water, doing nothing to dispel the myth in his mind.
She had all of his attention, but there was no blood: just a kelpie in the stream, or a ghost, or a madwoman.
He was mentally reprimanding himself when her question caught him, and this time he greeted her smile with an arched brow. “I’d be a piss-poor showman to so easily give up my secrets,” he said, but his grin made clear his pleasure at her interest. Maybe she wasn’t mad; he was just being foolish, here at the onset of winter with his head full of old mares’ tales -
if you don’t mind the blood.
Acton stamped a back hoof, flickering once more to uncertainty. He was too unguarded to play a role, or maybe she was just too strange – but either way, he furrowed his brow at her, even as he took a step forward, then another, so that his hooves were at the edge of the stream that chuckled and leapt below. “It’s the cold I’d rather avoid,” he said, peeling his gaze from the water that parted around her legs to her dark, dark eyes. “But there is no blood, sweetheart. How did you get here?”
At once he remembered Akeli, and her strange tale of arrival; maybe this stranger had arrived in similar fashion, some world-ending rift, some tear in the sky. Maybe she’d hit her head.
It’s a good explanation, accounting for a lot, and it settled him.
@Faida
these violent delights have violent ends
