The boy has crossed over to the mainland on his own, jumping from sandy shoal to sandy shoal as quickly as he could and then racing up the beach. Only when he is at the river’s mouth does the appaloosa child stop to look back toward Ischia. No one was chasing after him, he’d managed to escape on his own! Feeling like he’d accomplished a rite of passage the colt turns proudly and follows the river inland with a high head and flagging ebony tail.

The river is an interesting kind of water. It seems to stay predictably in its bed and does not reach for him unexpectedly like the ocean sometimes does. It was like the springs at home that bubbled up from earth, most of them cold and sweet to drink. Unlike the springs the river is wide and meanders far out of sight. And while it is shallow in many places--Qaen watches a few trout and salmon skittering thought the rocky shallows on their smooth bellies--it is unknowably deep and dark in others.

Qaen has slowed to a walk, wandering along the grassy and pebbled bank. There are many curious things to see along a river’s edge and he is chasing bullfrogs and watching a muskrat wind her way through the water, and then before he knows it bounding into the river shallows after the glinting bodies of fish. He has no idea where he is, but is old enough to understand that to go home he just needs to turn back and follow the river back out towards the coast and home. He has forgotten that he’ll need to wait for a low tide to get home on his young legs.

He notices the older filly after splashing along the river’s bend after a fish. He jumps up onto the knobby dirt bank to stare at her. Her black wings are beautiful, like his father’s huge incredible wings that he hadn’t been lucky enough to inherit. Her blue eyes follow the movements of a pair of large birds and Qaen finds he would like to know her name, and what she likes best about flying, and…

The colt steps forward, moving thoughtlessly and dropping into a deep hole in the river. Water closes quickly over his head and Qaen panics. White light bursts from his skin and for a second lights up the water all around him in a flash so bright that the colt cannot be seen. It fades just before his black face breaks the surface and he scrabbles up into the shallower water that still comes up to his shoulders. Drenched, he snorts and coughs, shakes water from his ears. There he stands embarrassed and sullen in the the river, hooves planted about the slippery rocks as the current breaks against his narrow chest. He avoids looking at the filly, maybe she’ll leave and pretend she didn’t see anything.