“Speak too much,” she grumbles, mostly to him and partly to herself, looking down as she did her best to untangle the latest sentence he had given her.
Hot messes. Idioms. All foreign words that just blurred the meaning he was trying to portray. It was not necessarily that Anastasia was stupid, it was just that she was smart in a very different way than most of the horses around Beqanna. She did not have the same vast vocabulary they had; she did not understand their politics; she could not unpack their complex relationships. But she could tell you the best way to hunt deer crawling up a mountain, and she could tell you the best place to bleed out a rabbit, and she could show you how to snap a neck with one quick shake.
“Shadows no like all of your words,” she frowns at him. “Do not like when hot air goes ‘woosh’ from your mouth.” She mimics by puffing up her cheeks and blowing out, eyes going comically wide. “Sound dumb like babe who ruins hunt. Blah, blah, blah.” It wasn’t necessarily true, and she knows that. The shadows seemed to like Michaelis just fine—clinging to his coat, scampering up his legs (traitors, she thinks viciously)—but it made her feel better to think that he was the stupid one in the duo.
Her ears remain pinned back to her skull, but one swivels forward at his name and she huffs loudly, giving him the equivalent of a stink eye. “Mich-ae-lis.” One hoof traces the dirt in front of her, and she mutters under her breath. “Dumb name.” Her thoughts and childish mutters are interrupted by the shadow that he sends out to her, and she is distracted by it, leaning into the dark touch for a moment before remembering herself and straightening. “What is fav-or-ite ani-mal to eat?” she asks suddenly, hoping that he could perhaps salvage his reputation, but knowing it was likely futile.
like the moon, we borrow our light
{I am nothing but a shadow in the night}