"I always thought it would be you,” Lilliana admits quietly, looking away from her cousin. They had spoken of this once before, when the chestnut mare had teased Elaina about waddling through winter and babies come spring during one of those visits to Caunion’s country. The autumn before Broch had stolen her away to Culloden - before the beginning of the end of their time in Beyond.
"But yes,” she says, moving the conversation away from the days clouding her mind.
The copper mare looks down to the black water that laps past their legs and wonders how she can explain all the ways she is terrified for them, how it paralyzes her now. For all their stories and legends, how does she explain anything about what has transpired in the years that have separated them? Not just an affair - not only tangling her heart in the way they both swore they wouldn’t - but something much darker and Lilliana lives on those ledges that Elaina claims to love, looking for that door Kagerus had once told her she could slip through.
"You’re here,” Lilliana replies, looking up sharply. "Of course you can meet them.” Part of her expression is mired in shadow and the other half of her face is framed by a curling forelock, "you’re family.” She softens as her dark mouth reaches for her cousin again, "Their aunt.” That is something, regardless of where they found themselves, that couldn’t be altered. A bond of blood and that was something, for Lilliana, that would always be stronger than any pulling tide at their ankles, any silver stars twinkling above their heads.
When she pulls away, Lilli listens with an ear on Elaina and another flicking between the tide and behind them. Her cousin, after all this time, still seems so impossibly sweet, girlish. She is told that she is Father’s child (and she has always known that, deep down. She has always been more of Valerio than Aletta - impossibly soft, reckless-hearted and wind-spirited. Like Aletta, though, she is singularly independent - her problems have always been her own and she will find her own way out of them).
If Elaina leads this conversation like a child with a kite, Lilliana follows eagerly like she always has. The two of them fall into those same frantic strides - one girl racing after another, running and never bothering to see where they are going.
Until Lilli looks up.
Seriously, she tells her cousin: "It’s your bloodline, too. It’s in you as well.” And for a moment, that terrifies her. For all their stories, there is so much they still don’t know and to see the hope still shining on Elaina’s lovely face terrifies her. The veil of fog nearly chokes it out of her.
"Elaina,” she whispers, "I'll show it to you."
'I missed you, if even it was for a short time,' the golden girl says. 'Did you find any adventures while I was gone?'
'Adventure? I’d call an afternoon outing to the Meadow an adventure. Trying to find you has been an epic.' The copper filly grows serious, her features sobering for a moment as she studies her cousin. 'Where have you been?'
'And I would call it an epic success,' she says with a laugh towards the chestnut girl. 'I think we would always find each other in the end.'
When the memory recedes (like the midnight mist won't - it barricades them from the outside world, envelops them in an embrace that Lilliana has become familiar with over the years), she asks, "Do you remember that day?"