This place is stuffed with bodies despite the early hour. It is so unlike home, so unlike the wide, reaching plains sparsely populated by the wilder ones that it gives her pause. Zosma watches them through the sheer curtain of her forelock before venturing closer. This is what she has come for, civilization (and a civilized people, most of all). This is the difference between the brutes of the borderlands and the soft press of unperturbed strangers. This is Beqanna, the fabled land whose existence she’d been promised. It is different – of course it would be – but she doesn’t know how to approach it at first.
Out of the corner of one cornflower-blue eye, she sees a man with a tawny hide stretched over a bone-thin frame. She thinks it is him, at first, and she grits her teeth. “Remember the copse,” he’d asked. “Remember, Cecilia, how I made you a woman?” She can hear him now, though she knows he isn’t here. He can’t be here, or there, or anywhere. But her moment of hesitation blurs into minutes as she stands watching this tawny man that can’t be. She feels her resolve falling away like the sand that had slipped under her feet. Because of course he had found a way – he always had in the end; her future was not her own.
But then the stranger crests the fall-crisped hill and she sees that he is just that – a stranger.
Her held breath hisses out between her teeth.
The glass man comes then, in the space between fear and realized folly. She’s even smiling a little herself, shaking her head lightly against the contrast of her dark thoughts. The stallion’s skin catches sunlight like the surface of a lake, and she turns into the sudden brightness. “Hello yourself.” It is too easy because he is too fragile. Even she can see how quickly he would shatter beneath her veteran-hooves. It makes her confident when she possibly shouldn’t be. It takes away some of the newness, some of the strangeness of this foreign land.
Still, she’s never seen anything like him.
Zosma moves in with predator intent. She is a land-shark in deep waters easily navigated. It is her natural, instinctual stance (because he’d asked her to remember the copse – she couldn’t forget the way the leaves had fallen alongside her innocence). But she realizes herself almost immediately and relaxes her approach. “They told me this place was different, but I hadn’t imagined you.” His paper-thin skin barely covers the red-white mass beneath, all of his muscles bared to the open sky. She is no stranger to what lies beneath a hide, but she’s never seen anyone able to breathe and live in such a state.
Her statement is true, but it is also rude. “Forgive me. The road to this land has been rocky and long.” Isn’t that the truth of it as well? “Zosma,” she says, close enough to see the twitch of each individual muscle he moves. But just as she’s about to dive deeper into the waters of conversation, they are joined by another. This one is sleek and black and too pretty to have come from the wildlands; there is no wayward scrub-grass in her hair or burrs poking at her sides. She smells like the meadows, though, and Zosma wonders where the girl hails from.
“Days like these are to be cherished when the world is not so generous with its wonders.” The pale mare smiles conspiratorially, though there is more truth to it that aches to her very soul. They won’t know, though, and she almost prefers it that way. Besides, she rather enjoys being cryptic. “Zosma,” she says again for the girl’s benefit. “Tell me, what wonders I can expect from this place?” She directs the question to Kena, but turns to the glass stallion after the words have left her lips. “I’ve already seen one miracle for myself. Seems like good odds so far.”
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