When the pains came, Ava barely noticed them. This was not because she was well practiced in the art of birthing, which she was, but because she had never stopped being in pain since the day this foal was conceived. The wounds of her attack had healed, but beneath the new skin they still stung and ached. She had found that when pain refused to fade it took on a kind of numbing effect. Perhaps it was a kind of defence mechanism. Surely she would have thrown herself off a cliff by now if her mind hadn’t done something to rise above the physical struggles of her body. The memory, on the other hand, was harder to ignore. She would never forget the face that haunted her every dream, the voice that had shouted the wrong name at her, or the way his weight knocked her off balance as she struggled to hold herself up. She relived it every day. The only thing more permanent than the memory was the sour reminder growing inside her. When she had first realised that she was pregnant, Ava had felt sick to her stomach. Every time that she had conceived before had been so overwhelmingly joyous that the disappointment which washed over her was violently jarring. She had considered of how she might get rid of the foal, but the darkness of her thoughts sickened her even more than the idea of her rapist’s seed finding life inside her. No. Ava had changed in many ways since she was that happy, naïve little girl of years gone by, but she was no monster and she could not bring herself to do anything so monstrous. And so she carried on. Numb and broken though she was, she carried on. It was hard to find privacy in a land as absent of trees as the Dunes, but Ava had distanced herself from the herd enough during her pregnancy that she didn’t think they would approach her even if she dropped down in the middle of the open sands to give birth. She never ventured out of sight of the herd for fear of Sandman or predators, but the distance between her and the others might as well have been miles. The thought saddened her. She longed for company, but her pain left her wallowing in solitude and she didn’t quite know how to escape it. Moving slowly with the pain, Ava made her way over to a small cluster of rocks protruding from the sand, just big enough that she could shelter behind them unobserved when she lay down. She took note of the herd’s position near the oasis in the distance as she fell to her knees with a low groan, pressing her body into the warm sand as the contractions wracked her tiny, swollen body. Her wide, gold and white-splashed sides heaved with the effort, and her whole body was slick with sweat and coated with sand on one side by the time she was done, but eventually it was over. With one final groan she pushed the foal from her body and out onto the wet sand. Ava gasped, her emerald-green eyes snapping open with relief as she struggled to lift her head and view the product of her pain. Ava wasn’t sure whether it was the feeling of finally expelling the reminder of that day from her body, or the instincts of motherhood that she hadn’t had need to call upon in so long, but she felt a sudden wave of contentment rush over her. For that moment, she was no longer angry, no longer bitter, no longer sad. Out of all this torture there had come something beautiful. The thoughts she had had about dashing the child’s head against the rocks, or about leaving the new-born there on the ground to fade out of the world as quickly as they had come into it vanished in an instant. The foal was no longer an it or a thing – a reminder of that awful day – it was just a foal. It was her daughter. With a sigh, Ava heaved her weary body up and turned her attention to the foal. With gentle licks and nudges she cleared the filly’s airway and cleaned the bloody afterbirth from her skin. The stimulation urged the little creature into life, and with muted bleats of protest she began to squirm beneath her mother’s tongue. The burnt orange sand clung to her damp body, but as she came clean the true colour of her coat was visible beneath it. For a moment, Ava was happy. But it was just a moment. White. Her daughter’s pelt was brilliant white all over, the kind of colouring she had only seen once before. Immediately she felt her heart drop, and the smile that had begun to curl at the corners of her lips vanished in an instant. Finnian. The panic set in, and she felt the tears welling up as her daughter looked up at her with those same emerald-green eyes. She was too blinded by the shock and the terror in her mind to notice the pale gold crown that topped her daughter’s ears. For that moment, she forgot about the reason the filly was here in the first place as a sob broke free from her throat. She could think only of what was going to happen to her, not where she had come from. How could this have happened again? Had she not suffered enough the first time? Had she gone through this whole torturous ordeal only to be comforted with a reward of pain and death? Was this what she deserved? “No!” she cried weakly, stumbling backwards as her legs trembled beneath her. The word was choked and barely intelligible as she broke down into tears. No. |