These chains were cut to fit my broken bones
As real as they come, he says, and his words are true enough. Tigerlily accepts this with grace, for he cannot know, nor even begin to understand her true meaning, her reality. The only stallions she’s ever known to be real, be more than just shapes and shadows in the distance or scents on the wind, there and gone, were her brothers who’d loved and left her, the monster who still hunted her in her dreams, and Dances With Wolves, who was as inconsistent as the moon, always changing his shape, and only rarely bathing her in light and love.
He is real, and as she stands beside him, this dark coated stallion who stands a little shorter than Tigerlily (though she has yet to realise, for to her he is a monolith and a mountain, a shelter from the storm), she thinks of nothing else. Feels the warmth of him despite the dampness of their hides, feels his breath gentle upon her skin, and feels her skittish heart begin to slow and beat more steadily, a rhythm that is almost as soothing as the sound of her stranger’s deep, accented voice.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers back to him, though does not elaborate further, for her throat tightens with emotion. He wanted to worry for her… Could he really care? Could he not see the state she was in, not smell Dances on her? Tigerlily flicks her tail anxiously, and she closes her eyes and leans into him.
“I’m sorry,” she mutters again. For what? For calling him a fool, for causing him momentary pain, for not believing he was real, for doubting. She was sorry for a great many other things too, but the buckskin mare did not want to dwell upon these in this moment.
As storm above has abated, so too has the storm within. And even as he murmurs his beautiful words into her mane, softly scattering them there like stars (for each utterance is a spark of light in Tigerlily’s darkness), Tigerlily pieces herself back together. The tears are drying on her face, and her body shivers only sporadically now, no longer rattled with her sobbing.
“I don’t understand your words,” she admits – a truth they are both well aware of.
“But I think I understand what you mean by them.” And for a second time she reaches with her muzzle, this time to tenderly touch him along his cheek, his firm jaw.
“Tigerlily,” she answers him.
“My name is Tigerlily.” Silence settles upon them as her name is carried off by a gust of wind.
“And you? May I know you?” The words come out shaped in a way the mare had not intended. They had been spoken softly, but the question was not just about a name, and the longing in them ran deeper than Tigerlily had realised. With the smallest of sighs, she shifts her position, not wanting her companion to feel uncomfortable, but unsure how to convey this, or how to take her words back.
Above them, the clouds had begun to disperse. Spotting the twinkle of some distant star in the grey expanse above, Tigerlily recalls how the stallion had smiled when she’d spoken his own words, how he’d brightened, and chuckled. It had warmed her like the very sun, the sound of his mirth. And so, again she utters words borrowed from the stallion’s mouth, not knowing what she was saying, but hoping that, even despite her fumbled pronunciation, he’d understand. Understand that she was grateful to him, grateful beyond words, because he’d weathered the storm with her. The mare spoke words she didn’t understand, but just as when he had spoken before, the intimacy of the moment had a clarity to it, as charged and revealing as the lightning that had only minutes earlier illuminated the whole sky.
“Ég,” she begins, trying to recall his intonations and the way the words had slipped like velvet from his lips, short and softly sharp.
“Ég er hérna.” Her eyes are bright in her pale face as she beholds him, whispers the words back to him like they are a secret, and something
sacred.
T I G E R L I L Y
the steel is cold; it feels like home.