She is peering up at him from beneath her curling forelock and for a moment, Lilliana keeps her edge. The red mare of Taiga doesn’t push against him but neither does she retreat. It had been one thing to think of plans while she had been in Pangea. It had been one thing to think of ideas and of all the things she would do once she got her freedom again.
There had been so many ideas and then Lilliana had lost her daughter. She had returned to the North to find Elaina gone (again), her sons nearly grown and the land she so dearly loved in turmoil. The chestnut mare had her own part to play for it and when she bluntly admits it to @[Leilan], she is already bracing for herself the judgment she knows will be waiting there.
The Freyr purses his lips in a line - perhaps a sign of it - but he doesn’t hurl words at her like stones. He doesn’t look disgusted. There is no seething hatred. For the heartbeat that Lilliana had been preparing herself for it, when it doesn’t… she just blinks and lifts her head, almost startled by its absence. Leilan, to his credit, doesn't leave.
(And if Lilliana knew what Leilan thought about black sheep, Lilli would have said that it was her. That she is the black sheep, she is the one always looking to belong. She is the one that never quite fits.)
Lilliana turns her attention away from him. The ocean is gray and angry, unlike his eyes that have somehow turned warm. His eyes had been changing colors, reminding Lilli that there is Magic in everything. It twists her stomach and feels like a knife in her gut. "No,” she bluntly says as the winter wind whips around her, "I don’t.” The chestnut mare pauses before adding, "But I’d like to, one day. I’d like-,” and then stops.
Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, she warns inwardly.
Before this conversation goes too far, Lilliana asks several things she has wondered. That she has spoken with Lethy about and they had considered for Taiga. "What do you want, Leilan? For yourself? For the Isle? The North?"
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions