VaLkA

mare / six / chestnut pangare / yakut / 13.0 hh

A skjaldmær’s burdens were great—but weightier still was the cold stone of dread that crushed her lungs beneath it.

Though she could not have put the feeling so easily into words, Valka sensed that her world was changing. Until recently, she’d existed apart from the vast ocean of elsewhere—like a tide pool on the shore, everything beyond Tinuvel had ceased to exist. But as with the few that dotted the Bay’s beach, the waves inevitably crept back up to consume her sheltered little realm. It arrived weak and cold and trickling blood, but it came—came wearing the form of an old enemy. And even after the tide receded again, there could be no return for the chestnut mare to what was before she’d stood vigil over him, sharing the warmth of her body as she once had with Marzanna. There could be no reclaiming of the vitriol and prejudice that had once defined her—because when the waves washed away, they’d taken the hatred she felt with them, leaving Valka as smooth and worn as the sea-touched stones she tread over now. Leaving her confused and vulnerable, and—without the sharp edges of spite that had once defined her—no longer certain who she was.

Skeins of fog drifted around the Yakut as she drifted further down the Bay’s shore than she’d ever wandered before. It was reassuring, in a way, to lose herself in it. To feel—if only for a moment—that she was alone enough to surrender to the strange pull of emotions that threatened to break free of her heart’s dam. Turning towards the south, Valka watched the wind-roughened surface of the waves in silent introspection. Despite the almost-intimate hours they’d shared, she knew little of the Icelandic male who had arrived in her home bare inches from death. She did not know why he had come, who had inflicted the injuries that dotted his body, or even whether he could be trusted. And yet...yet she had made the decision to trust him regardless, at least as far as the pony-sized creature was capable of trusting anyone.

She had made the decision to turn and face her past, instead of fleeing from it as she’d done for far too long.

Perhaps this was why the gods saw fit to place the castaway child in her path. Perhaps they were testing her newfound conviction—hoping to break it as it had been broken only once before. Regardless of the reason, Valka resumed the glacial progress of her trek unaware of the grasping tendrils of fate that had beckoned her. She walked without awareness of her surroundings, her mind turned inward—and had almost tread upon the colt’s body before she realized what it was.

“Fæn!” The red woman spat, leaping back as swiftly as if she’d encountered a viper in her path. Teeth bared and ears flattened, she watched the small figure tensely—as if expecting it to leap up and attack her at any moment. But save for the subtle rise and fall of its sides, the tiny creature did not move. And Valka, small ears pitching forward curiously, could not help but to step forward to investigate. Warm breath plumed from her nostrils as she sniffed the colt—hoping to identify the scent of a mare to whom she might return this missing child. But there was nothing save the brine of the sea to mark him, and the soft black coat—damp as Solvarr’s had been in the moments after his birth—carried no distinguishing marks. It was as if he’d simply been dropped from the sky, or—or—

Valka’s dark gaze flitted towards the sea, and the waves that climbed the rocky shore. Then returned to the boy, raking over the dark coat as if hoping to force answers from it. And for the first time, she saw the familiar conformation—the wide forehead, the short and muscular neck, the deep chest. The stocky legs and sloping shoulders that revealed the heritage they shared in a distant past—though the paths of his kind had diverged so far from her own that even common ancestry had been unable to bring peace between them. She saw, but did not want to believe—because while a single Icelandic appearing in the Bay might be dismissed as coincidence, a second could not.

The gods surely mocked her—and Valka, who had reached the limits of her patience, turned to go with grim finality.

But no matter how determinedly she sought to harden her heart, the Yakutian mare could not bring herself to take the first cruel step that would consign him to his fate.