Falls

Could she find a single creature amidst the crowd of unfamiliar faces?

Kvothe didn’t know - but driven by desperation to a strange sort of courage, she had to try.

If not for the fear she harbored for her unborn child’s safety, the red woman might have sunk to the ground and wept. Though she wanted nothing more desperately than to forget what she had seen, the Friesian mare knew that it would never leave her. Superimposed over the mountainous scenery before her was an image of Brunhild’s limbs churning over the small body. She could even smell the blood that had spattered the grey mare’s darker limbs, and hear the whimpering sound of the child’s final breaths. Trembling violently, Kvothe abandoned the sanctuary she’d claimed beneath a haphazardly-leaning spruce and fled further inland. Inertia was too difficult, as if she feared that the full burden of her thoughts and fears might catch her while she rested. So long as she ran, the chestnut was able to focus on one purpose, on a single name that represented a breath of air to the drowning:

Tyr. She had to find Tyr.

The soft hum of the falls provided a welcome beacon to guide Kvothe through the grey predawn - showing her the way even when her vision found nothing save shadows. In her panic, she did not even pause to think that the chimeric stallion might not live in the place where he had taken her beneath him. And even if she had, what other thread of hope did she have to pursue? She might have fled anywhere on the islands, but she could not count on another to protect the existence of the fragile scrap of life within her. Any one of Ironclad’s allies would only hand her back over to the paling King. His enemies were a greater prospect, but she could not rely on their hatred of the Inlet’s ruler to spare the child he might have sought to harm.

Breath rasping in her laboring lungs, Kvothe finally emerged from the forest that surrounded the Peak and into the familiar clearing she’d once searched for the golden figure of her daughter. And though she felt a gentle ache at the thought of her daughter who had been left behind on Tinuvel, the red woman’s thoughts turned quickly to the foal who had yet to be born. As if attuned to both his mother’s distress and the direction of her mind’s wanderings, the child gave a vigorous kick, causing Kvothe to grunt and recoil from the pain. Distantly, she was aware that the cramping she’d been troubled by for the past few days had resumed, and even increased in intensity. Inhaling a deep breath, the chestnut Friesian focused on calming the rhythm of her heart, and hoped that would likewise calm the other reactions of her body.

Surrounded by strangers in a strange land, she did not know what might come of her - or her child - if she was to give birth to him here. Only the protection of a stallion and the numbers of a herd could guarantee his safety - and she feared that those she’d come to rely on in the Inlet had forsaken her.

Why else would she have come here, to rely again on the kindness of a man who was still little more than a stranger?