Home.
It’s strange to be here, on the verge of the familiar territory again. She can feel it humming under her skin – a familiar song, a good feeling, but even better than before. Something has changed, which of course she had heard through the grapevine, but knowing and feeling it for yourself is different. Nairne has struck out ahead, wandering into the home of her childhood, but Nat hesitates on the border. She thought she might never come back, once upon a time, because she wasn’t welcome in her entirety. But that has changed.
Cautiously, she thinks about the waterfall – the sky – a flash of lighting – the green spring grass. Her color changes as quickly as she thinks the things, and with none of the accompanying nausea she had grown used to. Joy leaps in her head and she laughs, leaping forward to run and catch up with Nairne. The twins are safe in the playground, watched over by forces supernatural, because she cannot bring them here yet. First she must take them to meet their father – Mikhael knew that Nat and Nairne were coming back to Beqanna, to return Nairne to the Falls, but she’d not known she was pregnant.
She wants to stay, so badly, but she cannot. Not without going back to Meeka and telling him. She will not leave him without a word, and she will not wait an undue amount of time before introducing him to his two younger children (and won’t he be surprised? A part of her brain supples). Inhaling deeply, she moves past Nairne and into the pool of water, her beautiful waterfall, wading chest deep before she stops, tears of conflicted emotion not quite falling from her eyes. “I though you weren’t coming,” her daughter says quietly, from the shore of the pool, worried. She had not heard the rumors that her mother had, but the fact that Nat is the same color as the water she stands in, not her natural buckskin, tells Nairne that something is different. When she was a child, her mother was unable to change color. It was only after leaving the Falls that she had regained that ability.
“Everything’s different.” Nat whispers.
