She remembered him.

Oh, she remembered.

The rapturous note of his whinnying call. The pale cream-and-ivory of his coat. The sound of her name falling from his lips, breathed as headily as if she was the air that filled him. And more than anything, the touch of his whiskered lips against her skin. These things pulled Sabriel years into the past, her memories eclipsing the time they’d been apart. The evening she’d spent with him beside the Falls, tucked into the warmth of his body and trading the scars on their hearts as no stranger should. Finding him in the Prairie after, her heart singing as their bodies wound together on its shore. Chasing Zevulun across the snow-covered ground, laughing like a child and calling out his name. These things flashed through her mind in the breadth of time his touch lasted, like a film played across the backs of her shuttered eyes.

Then they opened, and Sabriel pushed her body closer to his. Crushed herself against Zevulun’s pale coat, as if she hoped to meld it with the shadows of her own. And if she could have, she would. She would bind herself to the spotted stallion’s side irrevocably. She would share his heart, his lungs, every piece of him gladly, knowing that one of them could not exist without the other. The fear of loss that had haunted her before she’d left was gone, burned away by the certainty that she would rather crumble into pieces on Zevulun’s grave than exist pain-free in a world where he did not. The silver mare had finally come to accept the cost of love’s ephemeral joy, and surrendered herself to it wholly.

Tucking herself beneath the curved arch of the cremello’s neck, she could not wonder whether her surrender had come too late.

“Zevulun.” She murmured, her soft voice caressing the syllables of his name even as her lips found his skin. He tasted of sun and grass and the sweetness of the Prairie’s small flowers. Sabriel’s chest hitched, and she laughed through her tears at a memory from just before she’d left. She’d eaten so many of those flowers that their color had stained her lips — and a hank of the creamy male’s forelock when she’d lipped at it in careless affection. Lifting her head, the dark woman tugged it gently now, her lips twisting into a smile that could not entirely conceal her lingering fears and doubts. At any moment, Zevulun could still awaken. At any moment he could still leave her, just as she had left him those seasons ago.

“It came out,” Sabriel said lightly, her pale eyes searching his long after those words had faded to silence. Searching for the same things she felt and remembered — and watching for the moment that their absence might come.