She waits, endlessly patient, for the stallion to come forward and drink. She had assumed his thirst would be so great he would rush to the exposed water, but he hangs back, his gaze lingering unsettlingly upon her, until Rhadra turns her head away to look across the frozen pond just to pretend she can’t feel him staring. She glances sidelong at the male when she hears him move, and the two eye one another uncertainly as he steps forward to drink and she remains apart, on the bank. His adult timidity reminds her of Talya, and the suspicion she’d been bricking around her heart in the silence between them softens to malleable clay, easily pressed down and rolled to one side for use at a later time with someone she should be guarded against.
That someone is not this stallion. His voice, gentle and unassuming, confirms it, and Rhadra’s smile grows warm, encouraging. “Yes. It happens in a yearly cycle, right after autumn.” Her dark eyes skim his too-thin coat and she snorts lightly. She has been lucky on multiple levels, it seems, to have arrived a stranger to these islands at the height of summer, easily adapting to the rhythm of this place that so closely mimics her home, and to have met a soul as kind as Kestral so soon after her arrival. She seeks to be as much a balm to Iscariot as her spotted friend has been for her.
“Of course,” she replies, stepping forward again to join him at the water’s frozen edge. “I am Rhadra. Now look here,” she taps the ice near the initial hole she broke. “See how the cracks splinter away? It is easiest to break ice that is already weakened. Try there— a quick, hard jab.” The black mare pantomimes the motion, stopping short of striking the ice itself before moving again to give him room and continuing, “Ice is weakest at the edges. You might often find that others will have broken the surface before you arrive, so whatever barrier has returned is usually thin enough to melt under your breath, or shatters with a quick tap of your hoof. Sometimes, though, you have to work for it,” she concludes.
Rhadra watches him, ready to offer a gentle correction or show him again as needed, before her dark eyes wander again across the frozen surface stretching away from them, and then to the waterfall suspended eerily in its prison of ice. “Home,” she says slowly, then swings her fine head around to regard Iscariot. “Where is it you’ve come from that the sun shares its warmth so generously, year-round?” |