Tonight Djinni is not the soft young thing she most often appears. The bright moonlight highlights a face that has passed the first bloom of youth and settled into maturity. She is not dewy, but she is somehow even more striking without it. She’s a woman grown; a mother. This is her true face, the face that – along with her earth-brown eyes – she hasn’t shown to anyone in decades. Some part of her is glad that it is the face that Ivar saw the first time; she likes that she was able to be herself with her son.
She is not so sure she likes being herself with Stillwater.
Letting her guard down near the child is different than letting it down with a monster nearby. Yet as she made his shape out in the darkness, she hadn’t tensed. She had not drained the last of her magic to whisk their son to safety. Instead she had smiled without conscious thought, reached out to him even as he settles in beside her. Stillwater is not exceptionally warm, but to a mare drained of her blood and knitted back together with magic, any heat is acceptable. She had told the blue girl that she loved him, but she is not quite sure that that particular verb fully captures the extent of emotions she feels when she thinks of Stillwater.
“He looks like my father,” she tells Stillwater, her eyes never leaving the boy between them. It’s not something that the black stallion needs to know; it’s not anything important. Djinni does not share things like this.
This is too uncertain, too much like grasping at sand. She feels unbalanced even as she presses her dark mouth to his jaw, stirring at the sensation while simultaneously fearing it will disappear in an instant. Of all the emotions she has found in the last two years, she hates fear most of all. She had not felt it before the night of Ivar’s conception. It hadn’t ripped into her with his teeth, but rather swelled swiftly and silently in the moments just before that, when her entire world had narrowed to him – only him.
“I thought you were angry with me.” Djinni says as she turns to look out at the lake and the moon’s reflection, “I wasn’t sure you’d want to know.”