Fortunately, Xafira isn’t made to wait long. She walks for a few minutes at most before she’s approached - and the scent is familiar enough from the border with the Badlands that she can place him as the leader here. She stops walking and lets him come the rest of the way to her, gaze casting over him as she assesses her new stallion.

For a long time, Xafira thought her father was the oddest looking thing on these islands. Between his bright bay coat and the stripes, broken up by stark white, he’s hard to miss and certainly stands out in a crowd. She’s only glad none of them seem to have wound up with the stripes. But this stallion? This stallion easily has him beat. Xafira thinks perhaps she’s never seen anyone look quite so mashed together.
She doesn’t have terribly long to consider his looks (or the way he practically towers over her) before he’s in her space. Her ears pin in annoyance and it takes a lot of self control not to reach out and bite him for the intrusion. She doesn’t back up, though, unwilling to give him even an inch. A voice inside her head (that sounds suspiciously like all of her sisters as one) cautions patience. She doesn’t need to be kicked out before she’s even managed to obtain a place in the Desert.

He speaks, and she snorts in amusement. She does have places to be. Specifically, wherever the hell he is. Being found just made life easier.

“I was looking for you,” Xafira tells him shortly. Perhaps if she were one of the others - more interested in romance, like Eloisa, or in getting her way like Arsinoe, she would have turned the statement into a flirt. But Xafira is her mothers daughter, and ultimately only knows how to be utterly straightforward.

He’d looked her over, that she hadn’t missed. But he didn’t linger and Xafira does not let herself doubt; she isn’t the prettiest of them (too stocky, too dirt-colored rather than a fetching rich red, not enough white to break up the mousy brown of her coat, not long-legged and fine boned) but she has other skills - skills that led to her being the one sent to Asmodeus.

“The Badlands are under new rule,” Xafira answers him honestly. “And I’ve little desire to hide in the Hills. My sister told me Helios is a boring pushover; that just leaves you.” This is mostly true - she would have been fine in the Hills, if that was where she was needed. But Arsinoe had sent her here. “Assuming you aren’t a waste of a leader and entirely incompetent, I’d like to remain in the Desert; better you than the stallion who took my home, or cowering behind Evrain.”