Meadow

As the plumes of the stranger's breath melted into the stars, Sylvi blinked and turned her head to look up at him in mild surprise. Perhaps it made some kind of sense that the only kind of men she encountered in the middle of the night fell into two categories: miscreants and scholars. Sylvi had had her fill of the former; it was only right that she was owed the latter.

She could find no adequate response in her sleep-deprived brain, so she stood, mute, breathing in the sounds and smells of the night, and of him. Though the sky was cloudless as far as the eye could see, a few flakes of snow materialized from the gloom and drifted before her eyes, as if the stars themselves had tumbled from their perch: evidently blown in from some late-autumn snowstorm miles away. In spite of her distaste for the stuff, Sylvi's lips turned upward in a small smile. The snow had always made her think of her mother, and she imagined Ylva's ghost now: screaming silently at her to get away from this strange man.

Sylvi did no such thing, not even when the stallion's side gently brushed against hers and her stomach flipped. She considered his question for a long moment, letting her gaze fall to the ground, to her hooves, and his. His were so much larger, and it fascinated her.

"I wish I knew. They spoke to me often when I was a child, but now they're silent." She peeked at the stallion from the corner of her eye. "Care to unload your worries onto a stranger?"