They needed more sisters. It was a painfully obvious fact with no equally obvious solution that was both conscionable and efficient. Róisín knew that they could raid the herds for their young daughters and force them to stay in the Peak, but that would breed neither loyalty in the captured girls nor tolerance from the outlying herds.
Róisín knew what she needed to do, but that did not make doing it any easier. She was not the sort of creature that preferred traveling alone to unknown lands, campaigning on behalf of the Peak in order to glean new members, but she had no choice. She had taken on this mantle of responsibility, and she refused to mess this up. The Peak needed her, and she needed to believe that the Peak could become something she wanted to follow again. She just needed to figure out how.
While she puzzled out that particular problem, she kept to the common lands, patrolling not just the Peak itself but the rest of the Crossing as well. Autumn seemed to bring out the worst behavior in stallions and while Róisín did not consider herself a hero, she knew she could at least be enough of a nuisance to help someone escape if she were to happen upon something dire.
What she found was not dire in any way, but she still found herself arrested by the mare she found in the Falls pool. She was elegant in a way that Rói had never been, made up of delicate details that the dun mare had never found a need to acknowledge on any other horse, but could not escape noticing as she looked at her. Like a statue given life, the slender mare danced her way into the water and began to bathe, seemingly unaware of the attention she was drawing to herself. Or so Rói had thought.
Hello? The mare's soft voice came, as beautiful as her appearance and the Prime Minister flushed with embarrassment from her eartips down to her hooves before clearing her throat and answering back a bit awkwardly. "Hello."
Aware that she was caught and lurking like a common, rutting stallion, the dun mare stepped from her place in the trees and made her way closer until she was standing at the water's edge herself, pale hooves dipped in the lapping water. "I didn't mean to interrupt," she offered apologetically with a flick of her thick tail, painfully aware of how thick and bushy it was. "I'm Róisín, Prime Minister of the Peak to the north there," she said as she gestured to her home, and then peered at the mare to see if there was any acknowledgment of what the Peak was on her face.
"Do you know of the Peak?" It certainly felt like an awkward way to lead into a conversation, although that could have just been on Rói's end. Making friends with foals your own age that lived with you all the time turned out to be very different from making friends with peers who had no obligation to tolerate you or your bossiness.