She is unafraid of the swim, unperturbed by what it does to salt-sweep her mane into the beginnings of dreads above the water, how the waves push and the current pulls, how she is sure she sees shadows beneath the surface where her chin meets the waterline and she huffs out great breaths to try and keep it out of her nostrils. It is uncomfortable, but she is not the sort to shy or run scared. The world had a rightness that would click into place. She had seen it in others. She imagined she would see it again - only five years old, she was perhaps learn’ed, but she was not old or wizened in the way her mother had been when such a thing had happened for her.
Her father had fallen, a new stud had risen, and her mother thrived beneath the new lordship’s reign in a way that had never happened for her father. She, of course, could not watch the transition from proud - if perhaps a little cruel - band stallion… to a wastrel she saw as a shadow on the ridges of her homeland. It had driven her out in such an expedited way that not even a nosey new stud who didn’t know what it meant to work for a mare’s good favor could have done better. She had been on her way now for two years. Here and there she had idled for a while, banding up with those herds who were not terribly interesting and those whose stallion was otherwise occupied keeping bachelors at a distance.
On and on, till the shoreline.
And then on again..
Now she looks and watches as the sea spat up a heap of earth before her and her hooves at last make landfall. She is wet, it is raining, she is worn -- but her night was restful in that way sleep comes for those so lacking of it.
And then sunshine. Sunshine cast over a glistening coat that had nothing to attribute the sheen to but her own good genes. She is a wealth of eye-candy, even doing something so simple as rising to her feet, leaving the thicket of the nearest copse and its relative safety. She is still salted, parched, but the scent of other horses and horridly packed earth leads her inward.
Ice-green eyes scan her surroundings, unwilling to be crept up on at first-- unaware of what place she was crossing into until suddenly she was upon the moderate throng. Stallions making claims, arguing, snaking mares off while others contradicted their attempts and gave the ladies of their number a better option in choice. She tilts her head at the fanfare of being swept up, canny and open-minded to learn. She whips a long tail at an itch in her hock, cautious as she stepped forward into a pocket between two or three meetings and looked back over herself towards the sea.
"Perhaps not worth the itching salt," she murmurs quietly, tone contemplative and wistful.