would you spend your whole life with me,

Nairne had known he had given her a gift with the illusion of her Falls, and she had held those moments close to her heart alongside her real memories of the waterfall, allowing neither to fade. Even though he had not understood her attachment, he had done it for her; and Nairne was not sure why, as he certainly hadn’t exactly seemed to like her. But the other – well, she had assumed it had been a moment of passion and nothing more, the physical urges that everyone gets at some point. Never had she thought that she would actually get pregnant – because she has never been able to do so before. As a young mare out in the wild with her parents Nairne had tried, a countless number of times, to give them grandchildren, but she had been incapable.

So she does not notice for a long time. Not until the dead of winter does it become unmistakable, the growth in her belly. Nairne is so hungry all of the time and tired as time wears on, but her heart is light and happy. Whether he meant to do so or not, the strange and solemn Woolf, but he has given her something that she thought was lost with the Falls. A family, or the start of one, with the foal she carries.

The onset of spring brings a welcome break in the cold weather, flowers and sunshine and rising temperatures, but it brings no sign of Woolf, and Nairne can sense that she is running out of time to find him. The foal will come whether she finds him or not, but she does not feel right keeping the child’s existence from him. They can always continue to look after the birth, but the mare has clear memories of how distraught her own dam was, to have the twins so far from her mate and how certain Natilyn had been that Mikhael would be saddened to have missed it, that she continues to look and look. There may be no attachment between Nairne and Woolf, but she wants her child (her only child, she knows, at her age and with the difficulty she had conceiving) to know its father.

But the time comes and she was unsuccessful.  Her water breaks and she moves to the location she’s picked out, under the shelter of two especially large trees at the border of Meadow and Forest, and she gives in to the labor. It’s long, and hard, as first births tend to be, but she struggles through and is rewarded at the end when she turns to the gold-and-mulberry creature sprawled in the moss and pine needles and she loves him immediately as he opens green eyes and turns them on her, quiet and questioning. “Ryan,” she says the name with a smile, because it feels right. “I’ll call you Ryan.”

would you be there to always hold me down?