She had thought about the stallion and the bear a fair amount since the chase, but nothing Rieva feels is unusual for a near-death experience with another soul. Maybe she should be thinking about it more; it comes up at least once most days, but it doesn’t keep her up at night. That part — sleeping soundly — was probably due to the fact that she had found the bear dead not long after her hair-raising encounter with it. She hadn’t stopped to look closely at it; Eva had figured their chase had exhausted it for the last time, and it had succumbed to starvation at last. Either way, it was out of her hair, and she didn’t worry about it.

The part that continued to flit through her mind with enough regularity to qualify it as a habit was the stallion’s odd behavior about looking for a nursemaid. Of course, Rieva had little frame of reference, being so poorly socialized herself, but she couldn’t figure out why it seemed to bother him that she knew his reasons for being in the Bay that day. It didn’t strike her as odd that a grizzled old stallion might need a nursemaid, only that it seemed to be a secret of some sort. It interested her, and popped up in her head frequently.

She comes across one of the frantically broken branches from that day, and her pulse quickens. She remembers the way the world muted around her as adrenaline flooded her senses. She had been deaf to everything but her own rapid, frenzied breathing. Rieva finds herself following the trail of fractured and trampled undergrowth, her skin twitching with memories of terror and with cold little prickles of snowflakes as they land on her back and hips. It’s not the first snow of the season, but it’s the first one heavy enough for the swollen flakes to be felt on her skin beneath her thick ivory winter coat.

The trees thin, and Rieva finds herself on the beach, blinking in the light. The sky is overcast, but the thick clouds are light in color and diffuse the sunlight into the air until the ambient light is almost too much for her pale, sensitive eyes. She squeezes them shut, not needing to see the gouges in the sandy soil to know that they’re there. The ghostly mare stands facing the sea, eyes closed and ears tilted back toward the forest. She tries to force the memory of the stallion from her mind; she hates thinking about anyone repeatedly, to the point where she would prefer to relive the terror of the chase and pretend as though she had outrun the bear on her own. She tries, but the memories of his strange behavior after they had so narrowly avoided death together manage to creep in anyway. This angers her; it isn’t fair that she should keep thinking about him, about how it felt to talk to someone instead of to herself, when nobody would ever be thinking about her.

the sun hesitates