A storm had passed over in the late afternoon, and the trees around the pregnant grullo mare still drip down a steady trickle of water, even though the storm clouds themselves have moved east. Late dusk is a pretty time in Sylva, but Djinni does not have eyes for the soft blues and purples of the land. She doesn’t have eyes for anything, really. She’s wandering.
She wanders for hours.
Not until she has stared unseeingly at the moon for nearly ten minutes does she realize where she is. The moon ripples softly, sending the soft white light dancing across the face of the tobiano mare. The movement breaks her concentration (or lack of) and she blinks. The real moon is high overhead; she has been watching its reflection from her position chest-deep in the lake.
Djinni startles, a quick intake of breath and a surge of motion that leads…nowhere.
She’s only sent another wave of ripples across the lake’s still surface, but she remains where she was, have completely forgotten exactly what she’d been doing a moment before. She’s quite forgotten everything. The entirety of her world has narrowed to a single painful sensation. It is all she feels for hours. The still water roils as she spins through it – one moment finned, the next hooved – and the froth of bubbles she creates are a soft pink above the dark red water.
The foal she carries should have been born more than two weeks ago, but sometimes these things go wrong. Sometimes, in times like these, they go very wrong.
It is fortunate then, that Djinni is just the sort to take a wrong thing and make it right.
In the end, she lays on her side, her body on the shore and her legs in the water. It’s unlikely that she would be able to stand even if she had tried. She is too tired. But she doesn’t try, because the foal half in and half out of the water is able to nurse where he lies. She’s not had time to really look at him until now, and she raises her weary head and blinks her tired brown eyes. He’s much smaller than she had expected. (She’d seen her siblings as newborns, of course, but memories fade over the decades.) He also looks like her, dark haired and pied; she doesn’t quiet that sigh of satisfaction. Of course, he looks like his father as well. His father, whose cave overlooks this lake; his father, who Djinni simultaneously hopes is far away and coming any moment.
They will have to move eventually. The flicker of her magic is all but extinguished; she can’t risk it being gutted completely. Soon, they’ll both stand. They move deeper into the woods, find shelter behind a large boulder from the cool spring night winds. Djinni will keep her son safe with nothing but the strength of her exhausted body and the warmth from her shivering chest.
Soon.
For now though, they rest.