Kensa has been lucky to as yet never have lost a child or see one of them suffer in sickness. The possibility of her young coming to real harm has always been there but it is unreal, far away, even when Soothe was born small and frail she’d still had that willful fire burning inside her.
The coals are barely aglow in Brunhilde.
A glimpse of saffron and orange trying to shrink away becomes Brunhilde, responding to her name and stumbling towards her mother. The chestnut, with her golden tracery only peeking through her winter pelt notices first the listlessness, then the thin coat, dirty and untended. Dull eyes are bleary in the girl’s sculpted face and she stumbles forward almost blindly. Kensa weaves quickly past the trees between them, some so close that bark scrapes off of pulls bits of hair from her shoulders and barrel but she is there in a moment. All the words, ragged and rapid that had fallen from the mare’s mouth as she sought out her mother process in slow repetition in Kensa’s mind. ..wouldn’t judge...wouldn’t care...pregnant… though they made more sense than they do now that she is turning them over and over again in her head
I think I need your help. The flame child is not a soft spoken creature but the words are quiet, just for the mother who hates to hear them. This girl has never needed her help, never needed her beyond the smallest assistance with survival in her first months of life. Kensa clutches her close giving over her warmth and holding her child as she has only a few times in her life, as she has never needed to more than now. And what does she say? She doesn’t know what words to use as she clings to the weak ghost of Brunhilde, but she has to know, and if it’s the wrong thing to ask it will not be the first or the last mistake she has made as a mother, as a woman. “You didn’t want...he hurt you?” How is she supposed to ask? Kensa does not understand—not the way her daughter needs her to—but she tries, desperately, and that must be enough today.
She has not lived all these years a woman without knowing to fear a man, to watch them with two sets of eyes. One confident and fierce, the other cautious and dark like a doe on alert. Kensa has had brushes with it, this evil that has touched her girl. The Primarch wonders if she did not do enough to prepare her, to keep her safe from the monsters who would take and break and ruin.
And from whatever hateful beast had tried to smother Brunhilde there must be a child, growing small and secret in the red darkness. A child, like the one stirring inside herself, unintended. However Kensa does not need it explained to her that her grandchild is also unwanted. Drawing back she presses a cautious touch to Hildy’s cheek, pale muzzle against a dust streaked saffron cheek. “Come.” Sweet Kensa’s words have the steel behind them that only those closest to her know. She turns and side by side guides Brunhilde to a place that none still living in Hyaline know but she.
Bringing Brunhilde to the cave with its obscured entrance has only one purpose in that moment: shelter from the wind. It is warm enough, if small, more like a nook that might shelter two or perhaps three horses pressed close. It is not terribly dark, normally, though the gray skies keep sunlight out of the cracks between the rocks today. There plentiful acorns in this part of the forested mountainside, and grass grows up inside the little hideaway in the places the sun can reach. “You can stay here, not even your brothers know it’s here. We will figure out what to do.” Kensa tucks Brunhilde close again if the girl will allow it, not wanting to say too much, be too much.
@[brunhilde]
A cave like this I guess?
