hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She watches them, too, from her quiet place higher up the mountain, pressed close to the ice wall so that the near-winter winds cannot reach her as easily. She does not mean to spy, but the kingdom seldom had any visitors and she could not deny the prickle of curiosity she felt when not one but three unfamiliar faces appeared just within the narrow gate. She suspected the lack of visitors was due much in part to the extreme weather, those like she with thin summer coats felt the cold immediately, like needles buried where there should be hair and bruises thereafter when the ice finally dulled the pain to a strange but manageable numbness.
It becomes almost immediately clear that what she is witnessing is likely meant to be a private moment and she flinches suddenly, averting her dark curious eyes for a long moment. She can remember both her mother and her father loving her that way, can remember forelocks ruffled and foreheads kissed, being tucked within her mother’s wings so as to ward off the chill of night before it ever had a chance to touch her skin. But she can also remember when father left and mother drifted, when their small family fell apart without ceremony. She had learned then that nothing was forever, just as these boys would learn it now.
When her face lifts again to where the group stood before, she does not spot them right away. The mare has gone and the two boys are trudging quietly up the mountain, shoulder-to-shoulder, flank-to-flank. She feels a pang in her chest, an unwelcomed weight that settles there like a stone as she remembers her twin, Wyck, her quiet other half. Their closeness struck a painful chord in her heart.
She doesn’t go to them right away, but she watches them with soft eyes as they travel closer and closer to the place in which she hides from the cold. And then before she realizes what she is doing or why, she has abandoned her place against the wall to walk across the bare and frozen ground to join them. Another joins them first though, palomino and unfamiliar, and for a moment she pauses uncertainly, reminded that she is as much a stranger in this place as they are.
But something draws her forward again and there is a quiet almost-smile etched into the soft angles of her face when she joins the trio. She notices their wings first and loves them immediately, reminded once more of being tucked beneath her mother’s so many years ago. She traces the bone armor too, the beak and feather of the bird-like one. They are beautiful in their strangeness. Her dark eyes shift between all three and she does not miss the way two of them shiver openly like she does, hunched against the relentless cold. The smile on her lips deepens a little and she reaches out hesitantly to brush her lips against the neck of the smaller boy with skin as sleek and bay as her own. “It is kind of awful,” she commiserates between teeth that chatter just a little, pulling her chin back towards her narrow chest, “I’ve been assured it gets better though.”
She pauses a heartbeat and shifts to include all three of the strangers standing around her, and then so quietly, “I’m Isle.”
Isle
