What the hell was she even doing with her life?

Failing the Peak women had been one thing. Fleeing like a coward back to her home when she'd realized they'd tired of her something else. But now she was living within striking distance of Tyr of her own free will?

The thought alone left a bitter taste in her mouth. The man that had once dragged her to the Lagoon because he didn't have the balls to ask Faolain for his little vacation, who had willingly worked alongside Cullen - perpetuating the terrors and attacks that golden brute had wreaked upon the islands, that man who made promises he had never intended to keep about the Lagoon's behaviors and the prisoners they kept... that was a man she could not forgive.

Not even if he'd made no move to harm her since her arrival. Had not even so much as attempted to engage her in a conversation after she'd delivered Oswald to his mother and taken up her lonely vigil at the top of the mountain's peak. Nevermind that none of the women here seemed to be forced here against her will, or that he had gone out of his way to claw and drag his way into earning Faolain's freedom. Nevermind that Oswin loved him, and believed him to be good.

No, she had to ignore all of those things, because if he was still guilty for all of those things, then so was she for her own failings. Forgiving him meant that there was a possibility to forgive herself, and that was laughably ridiculous.

The sound of her own name somewhere in the lower hills startles the little dun from her morose contemplation of the sky and she jerks toward the sound in surprise. She had thought she had caught of bit of Saoirse's scent here and there in the jungle but had not yet encountered her directly. For any of her other siblings, this might have been considered a red flag, but Saoirse had always been the most independent of her siblings, often spending hours watching birds and insects and wildlife. Roi often thought this was because Siobhan had been stolen away again so shortly after finally escaping Nyimara, robbing the girls of their mother before they were even fully weaned.

The memory of those moments, of the crushing guilt when Aranck's challenge came in for her, not for her mom, but for her. Of knowing that her mother had gone in her place to defend her. Had suffered and struggled beneath Aranck and Nyimara, only to eventually come home again a ghost of herself to deliver Zvaid, their half-brother.

Roisin had been in no condition to be a big sister to her newest littles, but she tried. She tried to show them the jungle's games and to meet the vast collection of foals that lived in the Ridge at that time, but she'd been a ghost of herself even then.

"Saoirse?" She called back as she hastened down the mountain, drawn by the golden glimmer of her little sister's coat. She laughed throatily as she reached her, and did not hesitate to close the distance between them to try and draw her sister into a hug if she would allow it.

"How have you been?" She glanced at the jungle behind them, still a little surprised they had gone all this time without seeing each other despite being in the same territory. "Have you been here this whole time?"