Zevulun looks dumbstruck, finally rendered silent when faced with this accusation. Her mother stammers out some desperate excuse, and Riesling glances between the trio, eyes narrowed in disbelief. Zevulun has a well-demonstrated taste for the damsel in distress, and Daire is a master manipulator. It wouldn’t have been hard for her mother to play at being such, weasel her way into his good graces and secure a spot here. But if they both claim that neither child is his, perhaps she should listen. Riesling has never laid claim to Zevulun’s affection, never expected devotion, so he really has no reason to lie. And Daire - well, if it was his child, she would have taken particular delight in rubbing that horror in Riesling’s face.

Always intent on ruining any good Riesling manages to carve out for herself.

They don’t get very far because Zevulun apparently recovers his voice, and demands what exactly she’s talking about. Riesling stares at him for a few long moments, in awe that this is the part he managed to focus in on when she hisses, “I didn’t exactly come back alone, Zevulun.” Still, she is unwilling to name Rafe. He is known enough on the islands that if Daire asked, someone would send her to the Badlands. And while Riesling can guess how that interaction would end, it would be rather messy and Daire could do plenty of damage before if she set her mind to it.

But of course, all he cares about is Claret and her continued presence, and Riesling rolls her eyes but resists the urge to interrupt again. It actually bothers her, that he assumes she would trample all over their daughters autonomy, make decisions for her as a mare grown the way Riesling did when she was nothing but a child. Would she give anything to keep Daire away from Claret? Yes. But she knows well that if she makes her daughter choose between the Prairie and the Badlands, the choice will be easy. Luthien is paradise, where Salem is Claret’s own personal hell.

“I won’t make Claret go where she doesn’t wish to be,” Riesling tells him dismissively. “If she wants to stay here, that’s her choice. But I will not live in any herd where Daire is.”

How to sum up a lifetime of trauma, in a way that Zevulun will understand? He has no frame of reference for where they came from - from the world Riesling grew up in, so foreign to this place. There isn’t even a way she can explain the herd, the politics, the danger, her and Rafe’s father - how everything fit together in the grand scheme of a ruling class that lorded over entire continents, played with lives of lesser equines for fun. Divided so simply into ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ with her father head of one of the long-lasting dynasties of the latter, her brother the child of two. How much harder they had to be than everyone.

How Akita should have scorned her, how she should have been lower than low in the herd, traded away to suffer at the first possible chance and yet she had been welcomed with open arms, love and support. She was treated as one of Akitas own, raised at her feet as carefully as Rafe himself. It is a debt she can never, ever repay. A loyalty she doesn’t expect Zevulun to ever understand.

Seeing Daire here - her mother by blood but not by any way that truly matters, knowing that the mother who chose her, who raised her is half a world away and she will never have a true reunion, it breaks something in her.

When she left she resigned herself to never seeing her family again - a sacrifice she was happy to make to spare the herd whatever violence was destined for them. Finding Rafe was a miracle. But having Daire in front of her? It’s a cruel twist of fate and Riesling can feel herself fighting back nausea. Everything she’d never let herself admit to wanting (her mother to see her children, see her life, meet Zevulun and see what a good, loyal leader he is) but just…wrong. A mother has appeared out of the ether, but it is the wrong one.

Zevulun insists on Diare staying, much as Riesling expected him to. But then he has the audacity to go a step further, to tell her he doesn’t want her to leave. Riesling whirls on him, neck arched and ears pinned, anger tight in every line of her body. She has never struck him before, but she finally, finally thinks this might be what sends her over.

“And I didn’t want to be cast aside like trash by the mare who birthed me, only to later be used as a weapon to hurt the one who raised me - my true mother. But we can’t always get what we want, can we?” Riesling doesn’t know how she keeps her voice under control, how she isn’t screaming her rage at the unfairness of this entire situation. Her eyes flicker back to Daire, linger for a loaded moment before she adds, “Proof enough in your insistence she must remain. I don’t want her in my life; I don’t want her near my children. And yet here she is.”