Falls

The sun rises, the sky glowing a soft, pretty blue over the lush grasses that surround the sloped ground surrounding the massive Falls. It’s pretty - sickeningly so, and RIesling knows it isn’t just the after-effects of her pregnancy speaking.

For months, she has been denying the truth - that Zevulun is gone, that they parted with her making a (genuine) threat on his life in front of their youngest child. Any hope she had of returning to the Prairie, fixing things between them…demanding that he choose her over her mother, demanding that he understand what he has done when she has given him everything, is gone. Burned up in a moment, his stupid hope and hurtful words delivering the final, fate-sealing blow to whatever relationship was still clinging pathetically to life between them.

She has been denying the reality of that final conversation in the waves off the Badlands, the salt of the spray mingling with her tears as she stood there and watched him leave. She has been denying that her hatred of him, her hatred of herself drove her to accept the attention of some nameless drifter, a pretty face gone as quickly as he’d come. And the most painful truth at all – that she is certain that by now he’s made it back to the Prairie and that her snake of a mother will have sidled up to Zevulun and made him fall at her feet.

Oh, surely she would talk a big game about not wanting to ruin things between Zevulun and Riesling, she’d play at being reluctant and so sad to finally give in to what she’s resisted for seasons. She might even hold out for a month or two, enjoy a little cat-and-mouse with the big oaf. But in the end, she will give in to him; the victim, of course, as she is always so careful to make herself out to be. The heroic one who denied her heart and feelings for oh-so-long. But Riesling knows the truth – Daire is as wicked and horrific as she has ever been, and bedding Zevulun, bearing his children and making the fool love her will just be another victory she can hold over Riesling. Another way to ruin the life of the daughter she’s always felt the need to compete against.

And Zevulun will fall for it, hook, line and sinker. That silly naive romantic, who always sees the good in everyone. With no one to cast Daire out the way Akita did for Rowan, she will be his ruin. Riesling knows it in her bones that her mother will destroy him – all because he was Rieslings first, and her own mother cannot bear to see Riesling approach anything even remotely resembling happiness.

No one said anything about the fact that she was clearly pregnant – Riesling thinks Rafe assumes the child is Zevulun’s, and she’s given some serious thought to passing the child off as such. Gris knows better at least, but she has not corrected any of the mistaken assumptions flying around the Badlands.

Finally, Riesling couldn’t take Arsinoe’s pitying glances any longer, or the silent support of her brother or the tittering laughs of his younger daughters as she swells up like a balloon and gives no sign of returning to the Prairie. They must know now that whatever happened, this is another child she will be left to raise alone. Her trip had been pleasant, but far too close to her due date, which means she’s stuck here for the spring. The slight filly at her feet won’t be fit to travel for months, after all.

Her daughter came late the previous night, so far into the moonrise it may have better been called early morning. And it was only fitting that she will wake on her first morning to something so stunning - because this new daughter is possibly the most stunning of her children. And for the first time…this daughter is hers and hers alone. Something about that fact settles a tiny bit of the hatred in her gut – Zevulun will have no hold over the stunning little black and white filly at her feet.

She hears a stirring in the grass behind her and RIesling whirls, pinning her ears at the stranger daring to approach a new mother and child. “If you wake her,” she hisses at the other equine, “I’ll happily demonstrate just how painful giving birth is.”