As the warm rain pelts him, Kendry snorts seawater out of his nose. The salt leaves his nasal passages raw and he snorts again before pinching his nostrils closed, like that’ll help, until finally he blows out another long breath and shakes his head. “I am not doing that again any time soon,” he mutters, narrowing his eyes at the blue-green chaos undulating offshore. He’s lucky he didn’t swallow all that water or, worse, get sucked under the waves and drowned.
A voice hails him over the rain and Kendry swings his attention away from the ocean and toward the horse braving the storm. “Come to keep me company?” He asks with some levity as the stallion draws up, but something about his face gives Kendry a dizzying sense of deja vu and he frowns, narrowing his eyes as they size each other up. Then it clicks. The angle is all wrong, of course: now he’s looking down instead of up, but the stallion’s coat strikes an unmistakable chord in Kendry’s head (followed closely by the uncomfortably itchy sensation of being all-over covered in drying mud). His wet skin shudders unconsciously at the memory even as a grin breaks over his face, bright as the dawn.
“What do you know,” he says. “I come looking for my dam and I find you instead!” He recognizes the stallion but can’t put a name to his face, can’t remember if he and his mother ever really talked about the kind band stallion who kept them company when he was just a child. He remembers Marlena fending off the aggressive advances of an ugly spotted brute, and he remembers rolling about in the river mud with this kind male, but beyond that— it was just him and Marlena for a long time, at least until Kendry matured and ensconced himself in the Lagoon. “It’s me, Kendry,” he says, searching his memories frantically for something to call this stallion in return. “Marlena’s son.” |