"Deirdre!" Siobhan called out in exasperation after the weanling filly. The girl had noticed that her mother was distracted and had taken that prime opportunity to dash off toward the distant figure of her father like a tiny, dun-striped bat out of hell.

Siobhan loved all of her children, including the two that were not of her blood that she had gathered to her side over the past year, but it was Deidre to whom she clung most desperately. As much as the red mare tried to deny it, a part of her feared every shadow and every call that rang out over the land as if fearing that this one would herald Cullen coming to claim the debt he believed he was owed. And so while Siobhan nurtured all of her children in the Inlet - Aoife, Noname, Aleksi and Deirdre - it was the little dun filly that she kept glued to her side.

Predictably, as the daughter of Bjorn, Deirdre had no time for such coddling.

The little girl took every chance she could to sneak off - with or without her siblings. And chances to sneak off to her father? Even better.

"Da!" She called out as she dashed forward, her small tail held up proudly like a little banner. She knew that she would have only a precious few moments alone with him before her mother caught up, and so she resolved to make the most of them. "Let's play chase!" She called out before she even reached him. The distance between them closed far faster than she had anticipated, and no amount of bracing herself on the slippery grass was enough to stop herself from bumping against his side at the tail end of her slide. Giggling like a wild thing, Deirdre reached out boldly to nip at his shoulder before launching off in the direction opposite of her mother in the hopes of extending playtime just a bit farther.

"You're it!" She called over her shoulder, and then focused all of her attention on running. Every time that they'd played before, her da had always managed to catch up to her. But not today. Today she would be too fast for him, she was sure of it.

---

Siobhan watched her daughter run off with her heart in her throat. It didn't matter that she was running to her father, or that they were in a wide open space that prevented someone like Cullen from sneaking up on her family, or even that multiple seasons had passed without interference from their enemies… seeing her daughter be any distance away from her made her uneasy.

It was hard enough to be without her eldest children and Ailill. Losing Deirdre would break her.

Still, she's grown comfortable enough in the Inlet (and perhaps just the slightest bit tired from taking care of so many) that she does not race after her wayward daughter and merely excuses herself from her small family to trek toward Bjorn and Dee at a walk. Watching him interact with any of the children always set her heart to fluttering harder than normal, and while she had done her absolute best to keep things as neutral between them as possible to lessen the eventual heartbreak of their parting, she couldn't deny that she missed what they had once had. Once, loving Bjorn and being loved by him had been as natural as breathing. Now, it was like there was an elephant on her chest and she couldn't draw a full breath in no matter how she tried.

She doesn't say anything as she draws nearer, only watches the two of them play with a bemused smile curling on her pale lips.