Solomon's gaze followed the progress of his monochrome daughter with an inscrutable expression on his face. He still wasn't sure how he felt about the situation, but he was sure it wasn't good.

Kohelet had come to him early in the morning, positively reeking of their new neighbor. He would have been angry if it hadn't been for the tears and the pleading. In truth, Solomon hadn't necessarily intended to run the black stallion out of the Bay. If Valka was truly gone, as all the signs pointed to, then someone needed to hold the Bay. A young ally was not a bad investment to make, even though Solomon might have preferred someone more established, such as Xiomara.

He wished that he'd had a chance to speak with this stranger before Kohelet had gone in and gotten her heart entangled, but at least she hadn't gone to Paradise as Vihar had. A neighbor he could deal with far more easily than he could Rougaru across the ocean.

---

Kohelet walked ahead of her father with far more poise than she felt. She was quaking on the inside, terrified that this meeting would go badly and that her choice to be with Fell would be a point of contention between the two of them. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to live with herself if she messed up her father's position or made Fell's life harder.

She could have tried to lie to her father and claim that this child - her mind still somersaulted at the reality of what she'd done - had been an intentional ploy to gain Fell's allegiance, but she was not very adept at lying to begin with. Kohelet's dam might have been capable of such a cutthroat decision, but the black and white girl had always had a softer heart. She could no more deny she was in love with Fell (or what passed for love in the eyes of a love-stricken teenager), than she could deny herself air to breathe. It was written all over her face each time that she thought of him.

Koh wasn't even entirely sure if she was pregnant. Only that something was most certainly different and that the discomfort of the season had already begun to dissipate, leaving her to suspect that those long hours of idle exploration with the handsome young stallion had far more long-reaching consequences than she'd really thought about that day. Nerves aside, she wasn't upset. She had always imagined that she would be a mother some day, she just hadn't really expected it to happen so soon. She'd always had this thought in her head that babies waited for the right moment to come, like how some of the other momma's in the Cove managed to hold onto their pregnant bellies until the right moment to give birth.

Clearly, that didn't also apply to the beginning, but she was determined not to show her fear. Not in front of either of the two most important men in her life. She found a place fairly close to where she'd met Fell the first time and was careful to keep her gaze away from the path they'd taken to the hot spring, afraid that the flush of her face would give away more than she wanted her father to know. As the King halted beside her, she lifted her head to call for Fell, and then subsided into nervous silence to wait.

Solomon