Andarin: The Mountains: combing the white hair of the waves blown back

Asher is without hesitation; he is not like his sister except in his love that she mirrors - he is not bound by the lore they had heard as children, the stories that he is not even sure are real, and thinks that, even if they are, he wouldn’t much mind. Life is life, he thinks, as love is love - and play is play as they are children, he and the dark girl, who speak a knowable, ancient language of smiles. He wiggles happily and pounces forward on stick-thin legs (and he is supposed to be a warrior?), darting beneath the older mare’s stomach and emerging gleefully, ears pricked, on the other side. He nudges Freya with his ashen nose and then, turning, darts away, sprinting in circles around the elder pair.

“Oh,” Kairi says as the children dance and become more intelligent than the adults will ever be, “no – no,” she laughs, “I am not.”

She sips in a cold breath of air, still wary, her dark gaze lingering on the mare as her ears follow the path and plight of the children. In the touch of light that falls past the filtering trees, she looks at once haunting and terrible, weighted with her fear and their journey. Her fur, cardinal-red in places, glints like blood in wry testament to the silver-dark scars that curl across her face and run like rivers down her neck to her shoulder, leap the gap on her barrel and then continue their strange weavings across her rump. A black dorsal stripe curls across the top of her back like a mark of condemnation; and perhaps she is condemned, broken and battered as she is, with only a little, hapless, silent boy to love. But if she is without hope she is hopeful nonetheless, and, hearing the unasked question, carries on.

“I am his sister,” she says, “by right, not by blood - even though we shared a father.”

What?

“He always loved children,” she says wistfully, talking more to the winds and the earth that rise around her than to the mare, “even me - even me, who he found fallen, torn nearly to pieces by a pack of,” here is the irony, “wolves.”

She shakes her head and her face darkens again, “Asher is my charge,” she tells the dark mare, “that I took willingly after we lost Him. And Freya - did you have her willingly, too?” In the new light she seems to soften, but it is only the new mask of curiosity and the understanding that without acceptance they will not last long here, though they must; the clouded face, half-upturned to the sky, waits and wonders if the stories are true.