Because we'll clamber up these mountains
'til our hands begin to bleed
All the things that came before will be our guiding light
Sleia had never had the misfortune of being betrayed. Wanderers tended to depend so completely on one another for survival that self-serving actors never had much chance to sink their hooks in unnoticed, and there was very little power to be won in a modest collective that by virtue of their traditions claimed no ownership over land or beast. A healthy distrust of strangers had kept her safe since taking her leave of the group, but such good fortune almost certainly had an expiration date now that she had arrived on the Isles.
Perhaps this frightened mare would help her, incidentally, even as she fancied herself the benefactor between them.
The red mare said she was all right, an answer whose deception didn't require a polygraph to diagnose, but Sleia didn't pry. The first rule of peaceful coexistence was to keep your nose out of other people's business. The second - at least in her personal, tea-stained, heavily-annotated copy of the book - was to offer first, as a gesture of good faith.
"My name's Sleia," she replied, extending her head slightly in invitation. "I only arrived on the islands this past winter." She, too, heard the stallion's distant cry, and made no immediate indication that she'd seen the other mare flinch. Should she mention being part of the Peak? She couldn't even be certain of the source of the mare's anxiety, though it would have been easy to draw convenient conclusions. The Peak might very well be the home of some mortal enemy Sleia had never even heard of.
No, better to keep things on individual terms. She was alone, she was safe, and she wanted to help: that should be enough. Instead, she added with an optimistic and only half-joking smile, "It doesn't seem like anyone followed you here, but if you hear someone coming you might be able to duck underwater and I can just tell them I saw you running to the meadow if they ask." The water might prove a bit shallow to properly hide her for long, but Sleia was pretty creative.
She knew how to make a scene when she needed to.
sleia *
hope is a butterfly, no net its captor