jezi & impa
bay & black blanketed sisters of the peak
“Take it away,” she begged, her breath hot against Impa’s ear. “I don’t want it. I’ve never wanted this.”
It was night. Only a couple of weeks ago, Impa had been confronted by a horse she had begun to suspect was made up. At her younger sister’s heels was a foal. Jezibelle herself was never more than a couple of steps away from Impa, at least when the sun was asleep. Her bay sibling refused to be seen in sunlight, but even in the waning light of the moon Impa could tell her sister was unwell. Her flesh hung on her and it was a wonder that the rust-red filly was steady on her lanky legs. The girl would grow to be tall, not that that was any great surprise given the size of her mother.
Impa turned her head to press her nose against the rough fur of her sister’s neck. Jezibelle whimpered, her words suppressed to a tight whine in her throat.
“I can’t,” Impa said. Her voice was kinder than her words. “She’ll die.”
“Let it, then,” Jezibelle said without malice.
Impa was getting used to such comments, and they no longer shocked her to hear. The black mare of the Peak maintained her silence. She closed her eyes and exhaled against her sister’s skin, feeling the heat of her own breath wash back against her muzzle. This was not how she imagined meeting her sister, barely more than bones and with a wild terror in her eyes. The closeness Jezibelle demanded did not come from sisterly affection, but of fear, and Impa did not expect it to last. She pushed aside her own reluctance to be in nearly consistent contact with another horse for her sister’s sake.
“Jezibelle,” she said, and felt another wash of relief to have a name to call her sibling by, “What happened?” Impa did not just mean where did the filly come from. That was an answer she was all too certain of the answer to, one that filled her with an anger that was nauseating and left her whole body shaking if she considered it for too long. She wanted to know what happened to their family, and why the two of them had not met until they were well past the first decades of their lives. She opened her eyes.
The filly had folded herself up at Jezibelle and Impazienza’s feet, secure beneath the presence of the two mares as she slept. I could have had this, Impa thought. And then, because her heart was a traitor, she asked, “Where is Kisei?”
Jezibelle began to shake. Impa pulled away, ashamed to have caused her sister more emotional turmoil, before she realized the bay mare was laughing. It was a hard sound, conjured from the depths of her stomach and coughed out into the world, bitter as blood on the tongue. “Jezi?” she said, her ears flicking forward and back in confusion and uncertainty.
The bay mare inhaled sharply. “Dead,” she said in a neutral voice. She could have been commenting on the cloudless, starry sky or how benign the weather had been this season. “Through his own fault, the bastard is dead.”
“What?”
But Jezibelle’s focus on anything but her current internal struggle had faded more quickly than snow melting in the face of spring, and she rocked from side to side without moving her hooves as she wept in near-silence. “Take it away,” she begged again, and moaned.
Despite the proximity of her sister and the small ball of warmth at her feet, Impa felt cold. |