Try as I might, I cannot hide my flinch as he drives his hoof into the dirt. At first, I am not certain what caused this reaction - disgust, disappointment, or irritation - and so I step back, slender ears tipping apprehensively against my mane as my gaze searches his.

"I think you put your people first," I murmured softly, "as is your duty." As he had when he had aligned us all beneath Nyimara, when I'd waited like a quiet obedient dove at his side as he made arrangements. He had taken his own pride (and thereby my own), and set it aside to ensure the safety of our people. To give us all the opportunity to rise from the ashes of who we had once been and ascend to who we would be now.

My confusion only grows as he continues speaking and I lapse into watchful silence as he tries desperately to make me understand that I had jumped too early, too certainly into this conversation. Again, I had misread his intentions and caused him more heartbreak, rather than assuaging him of it as I had intended. I had naively assumed that he would understand that my distance was an effort to make the transition easier for him, for the herd. That by disappearing before I was ever truly gone, I would make the severance of our bonds less traumatic.

Instead, it would seem I had only just opened his eyes to the truth that had been painfully obvious to me for months.

"You haven't failed me," I answer in a small voice, a shiver rippling through my body. He, who had endured so much to try and protect our daughter; he, who had gathered us all together again, anchoring our family far and wide so that we could be together again; he, who had never offered a cross word to me. He had not failed me, but I him.

"And I don't-" I cut myself off, eyes wild as I debated what would be least harmful... If I admitted that I didn't want to leave, would it not make it harder for him to send me away? But if I claimed to want to go, I would be misrepresenting the truth. I didn't want to leave any more than I wanted to live without seeing Aminah be a big sister, or Nashira find her own true husband.

In the end, I could not lie to the other half of my heart.

Not after he'd admitted that he'd looked for me this past fall, when I'd hidden myself away, not certain I could bear the shame of who I was and what I'd become.

"I do not wish to go, but I am not... worthy of being your Mira. I am only letting you down. I have shackled you to monogamy despite it being against your nature, and against our ways. For what? For me to waste our new beginning mourning our past?" My words turned to bitter ash on my tongue, flecked with the familiar acid of self-hatred. "Surely you cannot look me in the eye and say that a mare such as Nyimara would not be more of a match for you? More of a Mira to our people?"

Sigurdr's words chased themselves in my mind, warning me of Nyimara's nature. But I had seen the glint of admiration in my Husband's eyes in those first meetings, and knew the jealousy that Aldebaran's courting of the silver-maned queen would cause. Even if Nyimara was not one for whom his heart called, surely among the mares there had to be others.