Common

They arrived in the dark of night, just like the fugitives they were.

Moonlight softened the shadows along the beach into silhouettes, though it was scarcely enough to see by. Heaving themselves out of the surf, the two horses stumbled over bones of driftwood and slid on cascades of loose stone before they finally surrendered. At that point, they leaned into each other like a pair of drunken sailors attempting to prop one another upright. Their sides heaved, water first streaming and then trickling down their coats.

The rasp of her twin’s breathing filled Rook’s ear, and she rested her muzzle comfortingly in the hollow behind his front leg.

“Well — we made it, at least,” the taupe-brown mare said bracingly. The words were barely audible over the sea’s endless sighs, but she knew that her brother would hear her. Jester had always heard her — even the words she did not speak. Like the ones that hung unspoken between them now, heavier than the salty air. They were a reminder that no matter how confidently she tried to move forward, they’d just left behind everything they’d ever known.

Well, almost everything.

“Barely,” Jester quipped, his tone light with the humor that served as his armor. “Minus this morning’s all-you-can-eat buffet, and with a few years shaved off our collective lifespans from fear.” He turned his neck, and Rook saw the shadowed half of his face, with something like regret in the dark brown eye that regarded her. “Are you su—”

The young mare shoved her body sideways into his, forcing the air from his lungs in a strangled woosh.

“I’m sure that if you ask me that question again, little brother, I will cheerfully pull out your tail a single hair at a time.” The warmth of laughter suffused her voice, dulling the harsh edge of her words. It softened even more when she continued, eyes dropping to the earth as her vulnerability showed. “Yes, I’m certain, you silly thing. I’ve never been more certain of anything.”

They were silent for a time after, dozing where they stood tangled together on the beach. Gradually, the sky lightened from near-black to gray, and Jester’s head lifted to greet the impending dawn.

“Well since it seems you’re stuck with me, Sparrow,” he began, pausing to tug gently at her forelock. “We may as well go see what this place has in store for us. Hopefully breakfast, for one. I know how cranky you can get when your stomach is empty.”

Rook rolled her eyes in response, “accidentally” striking his pastern with an errant hoof as she stretched. Her pale brother took the abuse with a grunt, sidestepping away from her before she got it in her head to go after his tail like she’d threatened. Moving forward slowly while the ache of their overexerted bodies eased, they began to tread inland. And just as gradually, the stony beach yielded to bare earth, then grew a carpet of grass. But they did not stop to eat yet, for all that Jester had dramatized his sibling’s irritable nature.

His stomach was too restless with worry. And Rook — judging by the way she kept glancing at him askance — sought a different sort of comfort than food. Jester sighed.

“Spit it out, little sis. Before it eats a hole through your tongue.”

“Big sis,” she corrected obstinately. “I was born first, so you’re the little one.”

“I’m also a good head taller than you, Sparrow, so it stands to reason pretty easily that you’re my little sister.”

“Well besides being younger, you’ve also got the smaller brain, so I guess I should excuse you for not understanding what ‘little’ means in this context.”

“Context, shmontext. Remember the way mom—” the pale stallion’s speech lapsed for a moment, his strides stopping abruptly. As if the force of his pain was a wall he’d walked into face-first. Closing his eyes, Jester inhaled deeply, then continued. “She used to call streams ‘little rivers’. And it wasn’t because they were young. It was because they were small.”

Rook stopped too, reaching subconsciously for her twin in his moment of pain. Her chest tightened, and she abandoned the familiar threads of their old argument.

“Oh, Heart,” she spoke in a strangled voice. “What are we going to do?”

But Jester — without an answer to that question — only stood there in stillness and silence.

JESTER & ROOK
this is not where our story ends