I watched the black mare, all shadows and silence, speaking only to deliver purpose. This was not an optimistic stumble into the arms of sisterhood…not this one. She was too pensive and subdued to reflect the naieve gaiety of a mare stumbling on a sorority for the first bright time – I recalled those times fondly myself – and yet the sable lady didn’t conform to a woman browbeaten by her male keepers and forced to find sanctuary. So this, as my unrelenting mind tried and teased into logic, made her a messenger, a relative of a member here…or, and here my eyes slid across to hers with the unyielding gleam of granite, a girl on a mission. So much like myself.


I stepped closer to her dark bulk, at no pains to hide my assessment. She was too shrewd not to expect I wasn’t picking this confrontation apart, seam by seam. I paid her frankness the courtesy of my own. I dipped my eyes and then flicked them up again suddenly, watching her through scarlet lashes.
“Would you believe me if I said I lost something?” There was no drawl or much intonation in my query. In fact it was a statement, almost self-deprecating. I’d surpised myself again with my candour, I wasn’t usually so revealing. However Katriel reminded me of someone and I felt like a hundred lice were biting at me, demanding attention and I scarcely knew where to scratch first. It was distracting.



Something nagged at me, like a great cog had slid into place and now wheels were turning; the bowels of a great machine. I didn’t know this mare but gut instinct had gripped my belly like a prairie dog and the way to release it was not to outrun it, but to ease further into its jaws. I extended my return volley playfully but with the calculated slowness of a stalking cat.


“I have a feeling,” I paused and inhaled stiffly, this felt wholly unnatural, the most transparent dialogue I’d had in years. In fact the only other I could recall was something I left firmly shut away, any consideration of the death of my child threatened to disembowel me completely. As it was the event had left me with blood-poisoning and a fever that rocked my soul. Who knew the antidote. Certainly a part of me felt I should suffer; I’d been the inventor of the instrument of my child’s death. What mother could live with that fact. I’d lived. And that knowledge ate at me each time the sun set on a day I’d failed to make contact with my living child. The rest of me wanted this child to suffer for her crimes, and yet the smallest part of me, the faithful, unblemished part, cried for salvation. As if Incarnate’s murder of her twin could ever be forgotten. It stood between us, across time and space, a wall more unbreachable than any geography could provide.


I returned to the present, echoing Katriel’s own digression and acknowledging it with a rueful twist of my lips. I couldn’t remember the truncated phrase I’d just uttered, but continued regardless, like a dancer gracefully recouping a fall.


“You seek something too.” My pose was languid, my eyes sharp. The words were blunt surgical instruments, debriding a conversation neither of us were apparently going to clutter with niceties.