Meadow

This is a lot more than Kore bargained for. She’s backing out, halfway into the shadows, when the mare’s eyes blaze to life, a hungry inferno where once there had been only embers. The Arabian freezes in place; her ears fly back at the stranger’s weak pleas, as if blown towards her by a fierce gale. Kore opens her mouth to speak, finds no words there, then closes it. What is there to say? What can she say, at a moment like this?

The mare speaks again. Kore takes a couple of steps closer, ears flickering with uncertainty, and casts her gaze over the scene. There’s a lot of blood, more than she remembers seeing during her lessons with Demeter, a fertility goddess and midwife in her own right. She wishes now that she’d paid more attention. The bay had always been more interested in flora over fauna, the various healing herbs and where and when to find them, what not to eat, what to have in small quantities, what mixed well with what and what should be taken alone. The mare falls silent, and Kore paces in place, champing her teeth. She can’t just leave her here, not like this, but what can she, a stupid, ignorant village girl, even do?

What would Demeter do?

She takes a deep breath, in through the nose and out through the mouth. This helps, some, to still the frantic pace of her heart, letting her pry her eyes from the carnage in the center of the clearing to the little green shoots dotting along its edges. There - a flash of red, edging around the base of a tree trunk, surrounded by rippled, spade-shaped leaves. Raspberries. She remembered her dam using them, over and over, for difficult or dangerous births; the leaves were the prize, a nutritious supplement as well as an excellent astringent. Kore strides with purpose towards them, skirting a wide, careful distance around the pair, and bends down to snatch a stem in her teeth and yank it up and out of the earth.

In her haste, she forgets that raspberries grow on branches ringed with thorns, and grunts as the sharp points nick her tongue, tasting her own blood’s metallic tang. Kore traces her steps, now, careful to remain in the girl’s line of sight, and paces slowly closer, whickering low to announce her approach and keeping near her head. She drops the branches with a rustle of shifting leaves, pressing onto the thorny stem with the blunt edge of her hoof and bending to rip the fronds free. When she’s finished, and the leaves gather in a small pile near the chestnut’s mouth, Kore kicks the stem aside, blowing a soft, warm breath over the stranger’s face to rouse her.

“Come,” she coaxes, channelling the same soothing voice she’d heard Demeter use hundreds of times. “Eat these. They’ll help.” Kore pulls back, waiting until she takes a few mouthfuls, then winds around to press her nose to the narrow point of her withers, pushing forward to ease her up.

“Stand. I know you’re tired, but you must get up. Your baby needs to drink its first milk, and soon,” she murmurs, her words gentle but insistent. She doesn’t want to tell the girl - she seems frightened enough, and closer to giving up than she wants to admit - but if her foal doesn’t, it won’t be able to gather the strength it needs to flee from whatever unseen evil pursues them through the trees. Her eyes dart, briefly, to the spaces between the trunks, wondering what lurks beyond - what monsters might come to collect their due, or what angels might appear to protect them, cloaked in obsidian and ringed with piercing gold.

Kore’s no angel; the past two years have made that painfully obvious to her, no matter how much she tried to shut it out and ignore it. But she likes to think that there is good somewhere, still, inside her battered heart, and if she can touch something, for once, and leave it better than how she found it, there may be hope for her yet.