With his family becoming the focal point in his mind - retrieving his youngest child, protecting Noel, and assuring that their other children remained safe with their shadow kin - Nashua hadn't returned to the Isle. His mind had been full of worries and in the face of a Curse that has afflicted his family for generations, he had lost part of himself in the history of it.
He'll have to go to Tephra, he knows. Wishbone had said that there had been attempted theft of her daughter. They were allies and she certainly deserved to know that Hyaline had stolen another child.
His.
Leilan would deserve an explanation. The former Freyr hadn't wanted to be on the Isle long and in any other circumstance, Nashua wouldn't have kept him. If it had been any other problem, Leilan would have been the first horse that Nashua would have sought out. His pride had prevented it, because what would he have said? The draconic stallion has been the only father that he has ever known; how does he explain that the ghost of his actual sire had come back to haunt Beqanna?
When he finally returns to the Isle - returning first where his duty lay - it is them that he goes searching for. The bay roan stallion had never been easy to find, being the tricky-sort even before he had been gifted Magic. But he finds Ciri staring off across the sea, with a new pair of lovely wings hanging at her sides. (Had he really been gone so long?) Nash stops, watching the way that the light plays off her feathers before he sighs and swallows his sense of failure.
If he had spoken of the Curse, if they hadn't tried to bury it in the dark, then maybe others might have been prepared. Perhaps nobody else might have suffered.
"How are you faring?" Nashua finally asks as he approaches, allowing her to decide what she wants to speak about.
Or if she even wants to speak to him at all.
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