As predictable as the sun rises each morning, the second Riesling leads the three of them from the sheltered patch of trees they have made their home, Zevulun drifts to them. She’s actually impressed with how calm he appears, with how slowly he makes the trek across the field to her. Claret had kept her up to date on his movements, giggling and pointing out every time he walked listlessly past their grove again. It had been…worryingly frequent.

Perhaps Zevulun thinks this was a change of heart; that another child is a declaration of her love, a promise of affection that is foreign to her. But he didn’t push it, and so Riesling let him and his worrying nature be. It can’t hurt her chances, can it? She will never be the simpering sort, the type to preen and flirt and seek approval. She cannot even play at it convincingly, something in her so bitter and broken that not even lying can disguise the ugly truth.

Castillon slips behind her, peeking his dark head out to peer curiously up at his father. Claret, though, has no such reservations about greeting her sire and slams herself into him with a happy squeal. She’s a pretty, leggy young thing and the impact is nearly enough to knock them both over. “Missed you, Dad!” she exclaims, and Riesling rolls her golden eyes.

“A colt,” she agrees drily, her tone clearly showing just what she thinks of such a silly, obvious statement. “Castillon,” she adds, the rounded vowels slipping off her tongue easily. He perks up at his name, and she nudges at the child with her hip. “Don’t pretend at being shy,” Riesling scolds the child. “Greet your father; there’s nothing to fear from him.”

Zevulun stares at her then, something so heavy in his bright blue gaze that she shifts uncomfortably, looking away. Sometimes his continued affection, the strange insistence he has that she deserves such gentle treatment makes her want to claw at her own skin, slide out of this form and melt into the shadows where she cannot be seen. “I’m fine,” she brushes him off sharply. Riesling doesn’t like the thought he heard her at her most vulnerable, that he was witness to her pained cries and shameful begging. She cannot show any weakness, not where he is concerned.

“He was not my most difficult labor,” she adds dismissively, thinking of the very first colt she birthed here, exhausted and near-dead from tumbling in the ocean. As soon as she says it, she knows she’s revealed too much - Claret was easy, and Zevulun is aware of as much. Her ears pin back in irritation and she shifts, body squaring off and distance she desperately wants growing between them. How does she keep doing this? Slipping up, feeding him information he can use to piece her life story together, facts that make her nothing but weak in his eyes.

“I want to visit Rafe,” Riesling says abruptly. “As soon as Castillon can make the swim, the three of us will go to the Badlands.” Seeing her brother would settle her, would give her direction and purpose. And perhaps snap her back to reality - their last visit had been cut short by his duties back home and his unhappiness at being in Zevulun’s land (and there’s a history there, one that Riesling doesn’t have a full understanding of. But it goes against every fiber of her being to stay somewhere not pledged to her own blood. And she knows, as surely as she knows she would die for her children, that there will be a reckoning between the two, and some day she will have to make a choice).

“I’m not asking,” Riesling adds, tone short. “I need to see him. ”