Synonyms for walking: meandering, ambling, strolling. Waddling, which is what the golden mare has been reduced to over these last months. She has finally emerged from the trees that have been both her safe haven and the site of her worst nightmare. She hasn’t paid too much attention to where she’s going but she’s relieved to have wound up in the meadow. She doesn’t think her heart would have been able to take the possibility of finding the willow tree in the falls that had started her down this path.
The day is lightly overcast, still bright enough for her to see, yet so bright that the throbbing in her eyes is almost too strong. Today she doesn’t mind the pain; she feels like she deserves it. She doesn’t know what exactly she’s done, but it must have been something terrible to end up with this lot in life. She’d rebelled against the thought at first – what could anyone ever do to deserve something like this? But then she’d thought about the stallion at the source of her torment, and she’d wished that he could feel the tidal wave he’d created in her.
That’s not the only thing he’d created, she thinks wryly as she’s wrenched out of her thoughts by the sharp pain in her side. She shifts her weight gingerly as she reaches back to nose at her swollen barrel for what must be the thousandth time.
”Come on, baby, give your poor mama a break,” she murmurs.
She swallows a pained cry at the foal's next movement, the wince that crosses her face as strong as any that she’s had to make because of her eyes. This whole affair has been exceedingly painful; a couple of months ago, she suspects that an unfortunately placed kick had cracked a rib. The agony then had been like nothing she’d ever experienced, not even with her eyes, and even now she still feels a flare of discomfort if she twists the wrong way.
Even when her eyes are working, her ears still hear better than most, and she swings her head around when she hears a high-pitched giggle in the distance. She doesn’t dare try to locate the actual source of the sound, but it reminds her how she is both anticipating and dreading her own coming foal. She still isn’t sure how she feels about becoming a mother this way, and there is still a part of her (that makes her already feel like a failure) that is convinced that the child will end up like its father.
She swallows with nerves, eyes sweeping around as she always does when she thinks of him. She’s tried not to think his name because she’s realized since their encounter that the name he’d given her can’t be his real one. Thinking of the name she knows him by only makes her heart ache with longing for the friend she’d thought he was. The look in his eyes that day still haunts her, and ever since she’s been paranoid about being watched. She doesn’t know where he is and he probably wouldn’t expect her to be out of the Forest, but she can’t help but keep her guard up anyway. If he were to come for her again, it would be more than just her life at stake. |