He stands and watches as Bozena ventures down the beach to try to coax the boy to her. He thinks of how polite her smile was to him just now, and how while she did not recoil from his touch up on the mountain, neither had she leaned into it, nor returned it. He has a fleeting image of a black mare in a cluster of trees before his mind shies away from it, and he watches with pounding heart to see if the boy will respond more favorably to a mare than himself— and the colt does, rapidly, hauling his young body up from the sands to run to the formidable Peak mare, crying out to her in a language not Kendry’s own. The nearly universal syllables of the word make its meaning quite clear: the boy calls out to his mother. The white stallion watches as the colt attaches himself to Bozena without hesitation, and he feels glad for them even as his heart sinks and the pit of his belly grows hard and hollow. He hadn’t allowed himself to consider it too closely up on the mountain but now, confronted so baldly with the truth, he can hardly pretend it doesn’t gut him to learn she has a family.

It is a blessing, he tries to tell himself, that he hasn’t yet seen the third member, the male who has sired this boy and won the heart of a mare Kendry has been infatuated with since first sight. He feels resentment bubbling within him and for a moment allows that selfish, jealous emotion to rear its head to full height, allows the rage to roar its displeasure and blame Bozena for Kendry’s loss of both brotherhood and home— but he quells it, harshly, stuffing it down and silencing it as he forces the dark expression from his face. It was his choice to leave the Lagoon. He chose that, under the misguided assumption it would earn him favor in her eyes, and everything that came after is his responsibility, not hers. Even if he had thought, almost a year ago now, that that night in the Meadow—

It is likely his infatuated brain misread that whole interaction, wanting it so badly to be more than it was. He can’t even think of it now: images skip through his mind as his catalogue of memories flashes by and lands suddenly on the dark face of a fine-boned mare who had asked him, once, to reign as king beside her, and the way her whole body had seemed to shrink in on itself when he declined. He shakes his head and tears his gaze away from the mare and colt.

Perhaps it was not the bachelors with which Bozena’s problem lay, but with stallions in general — at least, so he can only assume, for it is becoming rapidly more clear to him with every envious twist of his heart that he knows next to nothing of who Bozena really is or what her life truly entails, only who he has built her up to be. They’ve barely spoken to one another.His eyes return again, almost unwillingly, to Bozena’s tall, capable form down the beach. He recalls the heavy musk of stallion in the Peak and understands his assumption cannot be correct. Surely Bozena would never suffer such company in her home if she despised the whole sex.

Perhaps, then, the problem lies with Kendry.

His skin prickles all over as if he stands in the heart of a blizzard and not under the warmth of a new spring sun. The ocean beside him sounds suddenly very far away. The boy is safe, he thinks vaguely, and latches onto that truth. You are no longer needed here. Kendry turns on stiff legs, his motions stilted, and walks away unseeing. He does not stop until he finds himself at the borders of the Lagoon. There he stands, motionless and without expression, until nightfall blurs the edges of everything.