She had guessed rightly, but she wonders after whether it would have been necessary if they had occupied a more familiar ground than an oasis amidst dunes. She was proud, yes, but not stupid. He was finely configured with proper proportions and deftly hewn muscles. Her mother had once talked of such things when she was young - what to look for, how to guide a human’s choices to better affect their progeny with the right stud. He was her precise match, if truth could be known in one’s own whimsy.

Or maybe she was just of age.

He takes her words and hears them without the cotton of his own mind interwoven. He gives her more freedom in his counter to his engagement of her debt than she had felt thusfar in her escape. Her eyes look a mite surprised, though she does not immediately take him at his word. She had been turned-out into enough paddocks to know that one might lose a bridle and find a fence. There were too many layers of captivity to convince her so easily with a few words.

"I come from a place where such a fancy notion would be thought bred from off-grain or some deficiency of mind. There are bridles like the one I wear, then stalls, then fences, then more fences, then ropes thrown from the backs of your own kin to bring you back to the beginning again." she describes only the worst, so she alters course. "But the bridle means you will race. The stall means you will be fed and tended. The pasture means you may run at will and with nothing to weigh you down but your own craving of the track again. If they had not promised to steal the track from me, I would not have regarded their choice to sell me to some naught-for-brains fat two-legged who would never have found me the right stud - if he showed me the man at all."

Perhaps, he might realize, that is why she doesn’t realize the thickness of Man on her every inch. The brushing that had her gleaming only more prettily in the crescent moon night, the buzzing down of a once not-too-thin mane, the regalia that painted and bound her in so tightly. She adjusts her mouth around the bit, already feeling the rub of discomfort in it. "They climb onto your back and if you like them well enough, and you don’t mind them getting ahead of themselves with the whip, you can share the wisdom of the ancestors - how to drink the wind and fly without wings."

She sounds like a worshiper, and perhaps that is what she is. She worships the wind, the race, and she shares this passion with not even a modicum of the propriety she had shown herself prone to despite all the fiery pomp. She has closed her eyes to imagine it, even as she sighs into the night as if she imagined a lover instead.