Dances was always and would always be welcome company in the Bay. Family. He belonged here, no matter if his ventures in the world pulled him away for varying lengths of time. He was as constant in Mariael, Maziel, and Zevulun’s life as their father had been. He was an uncle, their blood even if the same blood did not actually run in their veins. When Mariael saw him, saltwater dripping from his body, her heart leapt into her throat and she drew a sharp, happy gasp as her blue eyes widened and light burned bright inside them.
After the loss of her father, seeing Dances meant even more than it had before. He was the last tie Mariael had to her father aside from her siblings.
She exchanged breaths and thought, briefly, about stepping forward to rub her cheek against his neck and burry her face in his shoulder, but held herself back. It may have been acceptable behavior as a filly to cling so tightly and as emotionally as that, but Mariael was a Queen. A Queen had to be strong. So, though she wavered just briefly, Mariael drew on the strength of her home to take a crisp, brine-scented breath and lift her chin a notch higher, smiling warmly upon Dances.
His question was a complicated one… He did not know of her father’s death (disappearance, Maziel would say if she were here) but Mariael hated speaking of it. The pain and grief which became her to think of her father being gone were emotions she didn’t handle well and manifested into anger, as was her nature. But of course Dances knew Mariael since she was a little wobbly-legged filly, he knew just as Maziel did her anger was often a produce of deep insecurities festering at her insides.
“Everything is… okay.” She said, glancing up the shoreline inside her queendom. “I have regained control of the Bay. I’ve just allowed Zevu and Maziel to visit the Crossing for today, they should be back tomorrow.” She chose her sentences carefully, knowing the question was going to come and trying to prepare for it. Her blue eyes swung back to meet Dances’ gaze. Again she felt that overwhelming need to be small again, a child who could crumble into him and weep for how much she missed her father.
She drew a breath, a shaky one, and before she could stop herself the words came tumbling from her mouth. “Father is dead.” Mariael could not cry in front of anyone, it was even difficult at times to show emotion in front of Maziel. She swallowed the lump in her throat, nostrils flared as she took in a breath. Her thick, white tail flicked at her haunches. “He charged away a pack of hungry wolves in a blizzard from our cavern last winter and never returned… I found blood when the skies cleared.”
She remembered… she remembered leaving Maziel to tend Zevu (who was barely half a year old at the time) in the cavern as she charged into the fresh snow, screaming her father’s name over and over. She’d run frantically, her skin hot and lathered in sweat, her breath streams of white-steam. She’d screamed and cried and begged for him to make a noise so she might find where he was… and then she’d found the blood…
And she’d known.
|
