She wasn't sure what she had done to cause him to pull away, but she watched him flinch away from her as if she'd struck him, or pressed a finger against sunburnt skin. Chagrined, although she did not know why, Róisín ducked her head down to examine the grass through which they walked for a few steps, wishing that she could take back her question and cage it between her teeth. Whoever It was, she resolved to not speak of them again if only to allow her porcelain companion some space to breathe without their memory.
Her gaze had returned inexorably to his face as she offered her next, hopefully, more benign question and so she saw his posture shift, muscles too big to be real shifting and rolling over shoulder blades longer than her head, and wondered at what it meant. Not left this island, he admitted, and she smiled warmly, reading the half-truth for what it was. "You might've seen it and not known it then," she said after a short, silent smile and tipped her muzzle northward to the jagged spine of peaks that gave the Amazon herd it's name. "It's on this island, just to the North."
At Orestes' follow up question, her gaze returned to him, slightly more sobered than it had been a moment ago. "I do," she confirmed, "although I wasn't necessarily talking about my relations. We call each other sisters in the Peak. It's a place..." she trailed off, suddenly unsure of how best to describe the Peak to someone who did not know its purpose or origins. As a girl, she might have called it a home for valkyries, or a refuge for little girls who didn't want to grow up to live in a herd, but now neither description felt right.
"It's a place where mares can go to live together, in a society that they create," she finally murmured, her face thoughtful. "The same way that some bachelors congregate in the Lagoon." She kept her voice carefully neutral as she spoke of the men's refuge, but the lack of tonality in one sentence among many made it more conspicuous than it ought to have been. Smiling faintly to hide her misstep, she elaborated on her relationship with the sisters instead, eager to avoid further talk of the Lagoon and its faults. "We get along alright, as best as one can with so many personalities and backgrounds in one place. The sisters and I wanted to be a force for good in the world," Rói said more softly, letting her gaze drift momentarily toward the Commons and then beyond. "But we haven't done anything worth noting."
Unless you counted their Prime Minister slipping into bed with the Lagoon's General and suddenly losing all sense of what she stood for.
Shying away from that thought, she turned back to Orestes again, expression brightening as she turned her attention to other matters. "But I do have sister-sisters too. Probably more of them than I do Peak sisters at this point," she chuckled, the sound genuine and warm this time. Her mother had a habit of attracting all manner of orphaned and abandoned children and it was rare for her to ever be raising just one child at a time. "My mother tends to attract anyone who needs a little motherly affection in their life, even if they don't quite realize it yet."
Not to mention the fact that her father was hardly a celibate stallion, nor particularly discriminate in who he coupled with if the army of tiny Nyimara's were any indication.
"Knowing her, she'd reach right up to your forelock and straighten that stray curl by way of greeting," Rói offered warmly, twisting her head back to peer upward at him. "She's taller than me, so she could probably reach." And then, perhaps because her mother had been the only constant in her life, to the point that it never occurred to her that others were not the same, she offered another innocent question in an attempt to connect with the handsome swan beside her. "What was your mom like?"