He’s a smooth talker. Rhadra’s ears turn outward, then angle back just a bit as he spins it like... what? She can’t quite figure out his game, only in that he’s sloughing responsibility, playing it off like he did not, in fact, tell the pale girl to stay hidden, or that Rhadra’s confrontation of him is gender-motivated and therefore dismissible. She notices that he’s not rejected her statement at all, merely twisted the lens of accountability away from himself and onto the mares. So that’s it: he’s setting it up to lay the blame for this.... misunderstanding at the hooves of the young-minded mare, or her own.
There hasn’t been the barest whisper of sound from the bushes, not that Rhadra has devoted any of her attention to where the girl disappeared, and a small part of her hopes the sweet child has run away even while she knows that isn’t likely. She widens her eyes to join the stallion in his game before she can give in to the impulse to glance or turn an ear toward the shadowy underbrush. Rhadra may not have explicitly promised the girl she wouldn’t say she’d seen her, but the implication had been there and black vanner takes promises very seriously. Especially with children.
“Or maybe,” she replies sweetly and with a smile, “I’m not as blind as some, nor as easily distracted. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re not the only observant one? That maybe the way you walk, the way you talk, gives the true nature of yourself away?” She laughs, lightly, but the brightness in her eyes has turned to shards.
She’s met a bully before. The band stallion before her last had had a nasty streak to him and made the most of it on the younger mares, for the older wouldn’t tolerate such behavior and he wasn’t experienced enough to affect the more worldly women. Still, there had been a communal sigh of relief when he was run out by their current —her former— stallion. Sure, he was terse and impatient, but he wasn’t mean, didn’t make the fillies cry just because it satisfied something in him to watch their faces drop and know he’d ground them a little deeper under his hooves. Not a one of them had ever scampered from their stallion the way the pale girl had skittered out of sight before this one or the cruel male who’d once reigned tyrannical over her home herd. |