After a moment her king continues and she grows still as she listens to his words. Siobhan was no creature of ice or fire. She burned low and slow and deep, more akin to the first truly warm spring day than she was to the depths of harsh winter or the oppressive heat of summer. She was the healer, and he the protector.

Both essential, but not the same.

She can see the pictures reeling through her mind, the images of herd broken and bloodied by the capricious nature of young, powerful stallions. She can hear the screams of grieving mothers and lost children. But they are not images painted in red in her mind. They are blue with the ice of the grave nature in which he gives them and she tries to reconcile this fierce creature he describes with the soul she's become so fond of. Her lips fall still against his coat, and an almost repressed oh of shock is lost across the powerful muscles of his back.

Still, he is not done. She can see the broken mares, left to a future that no one wanted. She follows this thread to the lives of children raised by mothers who hated them, who grew up only wanting to wreak the same vengeance on the world that had wronged them before they'd ever made a choice of their own. The ripples of such actions could carry on for generations, affecting each new child with the weight of the sins and tragedies of their ancestors.

But she had to believe that this was not a permanent state of being.

Siobhan swallows, letting the words seep into her mind, her heart. As he pulls away, she lets him, her body still in the silence between them. Her brown gaze rests on him, even as he turns his head away from her and she studies him quietly, her eyes tracing the elegant lines of his face wordlessly as she sorts through her feelings.

It was not a matter of whether or not she loved her grullo king. Her heart had already had it's say in the matter and firmly refused to budge in it's assessment. But she needed to know that she had not committed her love to a king who would ask her to stand by while he committed further atrocities in the name of his Norns. Would she someday have to cradle a foal he had forced on an unwilling mother for the sake of a few moments of pleasure? Would he lay waste to other families in the name of the ideals he had once believed in so fervently? Long moments pass in silence while she weighs her thoughts and her future.

She did not know if he was truly different from the stallion he described.

But she had faith. She believed in him and the goodness she saw when she looked up on his heart. Even if he did not, she would believe enough for the both of them.

A small smile touches half of her mouth and she murmurs softly into the space between them an answer to his question. "Perhaps."

She looks for his gaze before she continues, wanting him to feel the truth from her as surely as it radiates from her heart. "But I do not want anyone else."

Her eyes well but she blinks away the emotion that gathers there, hastening to craft the words that she hopes will explain her thoughts. "You are strong, my king, where I am soft. A sword, where I am a balm. Together, I think, we might find a new whole, a new path that we might walk together."

She can't help the question in her eyes. Is that even what he wants of her? She is not whole either. She cannot be Ysabel or Nyimara. She is no fierce Norn, and she cannot help but to wonder what he sees in her.