@Druid's eyes were deadening. her sister was not getting better, and heda began to fear that something was going to take her away. something, something; something blackened and creeping was consuming druid and heda felt completely helpless. her sibling was away now, with @Fiona was the hope. perhaps they were talking.
she took over as much of the nursing and den-tasks as she could, feeding kikimora often with her own newer boys, cleaning the others, discarding their bedding, bringing in new — the days whirled and whirled and @Dinah did not come home and @Ava Amara disappeared from the corners of the den.
begging @Etienne to watch the shelter, she found the fading scent of her girls trailing from rivenwood; she followed on desperate steps into the valley, almost an hour, until the heaviness in her breasts told her to return. druid was in no way to be stuck with six puppies.
a yawning ache reopened in heda; suddenly she was on the shoreline of sweetharbor again, looking back lotswife to see that her sons did not follow.
one by one they had all disappeared.
never, never, should she have left.
"them too, god?" heda sobbed as she crumpled into the rainwet grass of a valley springing to green life. "you took everyone else. you couldn't let my last two stay?" this was all her fault, heda realized, hating anselm and @Glaukos and herself for their weakness of flesh and her own jezebelled hand in it; twisting that loathing to burn against her very sentiment of womanhood; if there was widow's garb for a furred body, heda was yanking it back on, sliding her arms into sodden sleeves and pulling a veil over the face which had never earned god's grace.
it was why he had taken her husband and her children. it was why he had placed her in a lie. she had turned her back on him and now he showed her what that meant. oh; she clung to this self-immolating truth, finding in it an absolution if she only bow her head and accept the deep sin that still rotted inside her.
when she was emptied of tears, of indeed, anything, heda went back to her sons, and to druid's children; she fed them and washed them in rote silence, informing etienne and the other men that the girls had gone toward the mountains it seemed, her voice a ragged plead that someone search for them.
and when she lay her head down at last, heda dreamt of caracal beside the surf. how vivid the warm fragrance of lavender in the sea! how strong his arms around her, the timbre of his voice as he laughed wifey into her ears. 
i'm coming, caracal. i'll never leave you again.
the dream departed. she opened her eyes to sunlight and the insistent pull of babies' mouths — and smiled hazily at the den's ceiling.
how sweet the relief that her time cast adrift from the island had an end date. she needed only to count down. 
heda surrendered.