Vesti’s questions were well considered and intelligent, and each time she spoke El Aran breathed a little more easily. It would be much more difficult to protect the oasis and the herd if the sorrel mare was uncooperative. With luck she would not neglect her duties as her pale son had. The thought of Orhan —someone she had been determinedly not thinking about— pushed her ears back. The black mare gave a minute shake of her head.

"Akhal-Tekes are skinny, as if they’ve had the life sucked out of them. Slender necks and heads, like snakes on hooves. Their coats gleam. Not like yours or mine when wet, but dry. Unnaturally. If I had not seen them all my life I would assume one of the Gods had played a joke and mated a horse with a taipan." Images of the Akhal-Tekes she had met on the Islands flashed through her mind as she spoke, and El Aran could not quite repress the shudder that ran through her as she remembered Zenith and the bitch who’d birthed him.

To ease her anxiety, El Aran moved forward a few steps, turned, and paced back and forth in front of Vesti as she continued, "Arabians carry their pride in their tail: they hold it high, flagged like an actual banner. Their vanity knows no bounds. Their faces are a little like mine—" she paused to turn her head to the side to give Vesti a clear look at her profile and the slight dish in her own nose "—but much more pronounced. They are a vicious culture. Mares maintain all authority, and they have great disdain for anyone who is not an Arabian. They share a mutual hate with the Akhal-Tekes, and bicker often."

She had spoken these words before, to the foals and other children growing up in the herd that seemed to grow smaller after every ambush in the desert, and to her own son when he was old enough to understand her words but still impressionable enough that he would accept whatever she said as truth. It was the only way she knew how to protect him in case the war followed her here, and now El Aran feared he would die at the hooves of her enemies due to his own natural passivity. It was not a bad thing for a horse to be passive. Not unless there was a battle to be fought. She scanned the empty horizon again before she stopped pacing and faced Vesti squarely.

El Aran had never spoken of this to anyone, not even Daenerys. Blood of my blood... the seer took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Look at me. Just a black mare, evet? Slender, built for heat, nothing special. Just another horse in the desert. Not to them, though, Vesti. To the Purebreds I am an abomination." Her gaze shifted to beyond Vesti’s copper shoulder and grew fixed, but while her eyes remained distant her voice and expression grew more passionate as she spoke on. "My mother was an Akhal-Teke and my sire was an Arabian. You can see it in my lean build and the dip in my face. They hate all mixed-breeds and call us impure while rejecting the mares and stallions who coupled together to create us. The Akhal-Tekes and Arabians may hate one another but they hate horses like me more. So much more that they joined forces and sought to destroy those who would breed with whoever they liked as well as the offspring that resulted from such a deed. I have been fighting for my life in a desert since the day I was born, and it was not the land itself that presented the greatest threat to my survival. It was others of my kind, horses who looked at some shallow, unchangeable trait in other horses and decided it was worth killing them over.”

Her eyes shifted to Vesti’s face. "My name is Aran, born to a mother who died with her sister’s name on her lips as that same sibling struck her dead for the supposed crime she had committed, born to a father who fell under the indifference of his mother. I was the member of a herd who only wanted to call a small oasis in the desert home. Aşk blessed me twice in my second year of life: once by allowing me to have survived so long and again by marking me as her seer. She comes to me at night, in my dreams, and shows me the future. My herd was skeptical until my prophecies manifested as truth, and so I was named a seer: El Aran. This, Vesti," El Aran said as she stepped closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. "This is why I fled my home. Once it became known that I had been marked as a seer, once my name spread across the sands on the wind, their efforts to eradicate my herd doubled. Bad enough, to them, that my bloodlines are mixed, but it is beyond forgiveness to call myself a seer even when it is the truth. My family, my herd, they stopped fighting for themselves and fought to preserve me. And I could not allow them to make that sacrifice. So I fled."

El Aran swung her head away from Vesit and pinned her ears. "I fight the Purebreds here, where their numbers are few and their forces scattered and their ambitions without cohesion. I did not expect them to follow me. I think some of them were already here when I arrived. But do you see now, Vesti, why we must drive them away?" The black mare’s ears came forward as she looked again at her herd mate. "I do not propose that we hunt them all down and do to them what they have subjected me and mine to. But they must not be allowed within our home. We must protect what is ours and repel the Purebreds."