Her body is a study in contrasts. Half of her yearns to crash back against him, to hold him tight and pour out every one of her fears into the salt-soaked tendrils of his mane. The other half wants to strike him, to draw his blood and bruise his body until he may know outwardly how much pain she had endured inwardly. Neither wins. She stands frozen in place, her body trembling with the chaos within as she stares him down, demanding answers of him.

Lost, he says and she bristles. She had been lost without him too, but she hadn't had the luxury of running from her damn problems. Roisin demanded that she be here, and so she had. Every day. Every day she had risen, not knowing if he would come back. Fearing that he would never return, and that he would. Every day she had risen and faced what her life had become, and done so with as much of a smile as she could.

Because that was what Roisin deserved.

Her ears, already tangled in the masses of her amber mane pin tight to her poll and she withdraws a shaky step, her tail lashing across her body as she glares at him. She does not lighten as he clarifies that it was after the war, for her entire time in the Ridge had been as a part of some sort of war. The war for and against Warsaw. The allies that had turned on each other when Bjorn backed out. The war that had been the reason Sigurdr grew up without a mother to comfort him. The war that had lead to the prince and Isabel's capture and imprisonment in the Lagoon.

The war that had witnessed her kill the Lagoon stallion Adolfo.

Siobhan shudders at the memory of the stallion's skull against her hoof, the pit in her stomach at the knowledge that she was a murderer still as deep today as it had been then. She had killed for her love of this stallion and his family. Had risked her own life in the pursuit of what was right and just.

I went to the Shore, he says, and a lance of pain sears her heart. The Shore. Roisin had not lied then. Guilt flooded her face and she glanced back toward where her sleeping daughter lay; the bright girl had been so stubborn because she was right. Siobhan had been wrong. But if she was right, why hadn't Bjorn come to her then? Or Sigurdr? She missed the patched colt as if he were her own, and his loss had plagued her, but she had rightly assumed that if he wasn't with her or Nyimara, he had at least been with his father. But if she had known they were nearby this whole time, none of this would have happened. She wouldn't have cried enough tears to salt the ocean for another year if she had known he was still here. Wouldn't have allowed herself to place Bjorn into a mental grave for the sake of her own sanity and to salvage what had been left of her broken heart.

She might not have allowed Ailill to become so dear to her. Roughly she shoves this guilt back to the shelf where it has sat since they had consummated their budding feelings, and turns her ire back to the grullo stallion. For a moment she almost forgets why she had careened so recklessly away from him moments ago, away from the scent of foreign lands and her not so foreign rival. It gives her pause.

"So am I." And she was. She was sorry that so much had transpired between them.

Silence reigns for a moment as she stares at him, her heart pounding in her ears. "Are you coming back to stay then?"

Hope thudded heavily in her chest, even though she felt like she knew the answer already. He had not called a challenge to Faolain, but snuck to her in the deepest moments of the night, when hearts were at their weakest.