“Rurisk. Rurisk.”

Someone spoke my name in the dark.

“Rurisk, please. I need to talk to you. Rurisk.”

It was that mare’s voice again, the bay one with the blanket that marked her as one of my sisters. The one who’d come to live with me for a time in the Arch, and the one who’d ignited so much fury in me last time she’d come creeping up to whisper in my ear at the Lagoon. I snorted and turned my head away from her voice. My eyes stayed closed.

“Please, Rurisk. Please.”

I had never heard my name said so often in so little time before. My next exhale was slightly deeper than the last and I opened my eyes. It took a moment for me to focus on my sister, but there she was, standing between me and the pool I frequented more than any other bachelor and staring at me with her ears half-flat and her eyes so wide I could almost see the whites. She caught her breath and I made a conscious effort to lift my ears from their almost naturally pinned position as I blinked at her. It was my only invitation for her to continue, and her words came out in a rush.

“I’m sorry. I should have come out of the shadows that day and confronted him but I was just a filly, Rurisk, just a little girl and daddy was so scary— he always loved Impa best but I don’t think he even knew my name. I was so afraid. So afraid that when he was done with you he’d turn on me and if this had all happened when we were adults I would be the first to call myself a coward, but brother, please— I was too small, too weak and too young to have helped you at all. But I am still sorry. Regardless of what harm might have come to me, I should have come out of the trees and stood up for you.”

My sister’s voice broke suddenly and her last few words came out between clenched teeth. My gaze had wandered to the shadowy land behind her, but at the change in her tone I shifted my eyes back to her face and was surprised at how much pain filled her eyes. At first I thought it was pity for me, and I flattened my ears again. I did not need pity. I did not need her mewling apologies, either. They were of no use to me now, nearing a decade past when I had finally destroyed the black stallion who had had such a ridiculous hold over my life when I was younger.

But there was sense in her words. I, as a foal, had been powerless in the face of the tyrant’s fury, and I could not recall actually ever seeing my sister in the trees. She was not that much older than me. Perhaps she had been the wiser of us, to hide herself from the black stallion’s eyes. My nostrils flared at the sudden rush of memories and I focused on her face again. The agony in her expression was not pitying. It was not guilt for herself that brought her here, I did not think. Maybe it had been the first time, but there was something different in her tone now than there had been last time she had visited me.

There, under the moonlight, I reached out and pushed my nose against her cheek. I used no teeth and she did not shrink away despite the roughness of my gesture, and when I walked away to resettle myself in a cooler patch of darkness I heard her hoofsteps a half beat behind mine.

For the next few days it was not so much that I led my sister as she followed me, lingering to walk at my heels until I grew accustomed to my second shadow. I tolerated this, and soon she moved closer to begin walking with her nose close to my hip. Often I felt her breath on my haunch, and just as often I’d swat at her face with my tail to force some distance between us. But sometimes I forgot, and during those times it seemed odd when she swung her head away and the heat on my coat lessened.

She didn’t speak to me unless I stared at her and lifted my ears, something I did rarely. But each time I did, my sister spoke to me. Not at me, or over me, but in a way that included me without insulting my intelligence. That other one, the black one like us with the white on her haunches and the dead eye, she spoke to me like a child. As if lacking a voice meant I lacked an adult mind. Sometimes hearing the bay talk drove me into a rage, when I thought back to our black sister and from there to the stallion who had ruled the Forest. She kept quiet, then, and let me gouge the earth uninterrupted. The times that I was calm she told me stories. She always asked if I wanted to hear them, and waited until I met her eyes and kept my ears up before she spoke. Often this was at night, and usually when the moon was high. She told me about fairies in the Forest, and of a horse who was the moon. Sometimes we slept shoulder to shoulder.

Sometimes she cried.

I felt like she was waiting for something and expected her to leave, but here we were weeks later, grazing in the same sunny patch of grass as the afternoon lengthened toward evening. My sister was only two steps away, but each time she moved any further away to reach for another bite of grass, I followed her to keep the distance the same. She had not told me any stories the day before, but neither had she cried that night. The two seemed to go together. I kept my head down and eyes away from her face and focused on my food and thought that later I might lead her to the ocean. We could go running. Maybe she would like that.