Hoshor Plains kivva ⥈

it was an embarrassment for kukutux, who tensed alongside maia but slowly set her gaze elsewhere. maia's tone held the fury that men perhaps could not glimpse; rational, poised, fair, and utterly scathing.

brecheliant had not forgotten. its children only had short memories.

but in this the same greensnake raised its head within the duck. she had become mother to many who shared her ways for she practiced them in all places and adopted others into her rites. she would not have allowed her own to forget such a slight. maia would forego her status in this wedding on the unstated word of a young girl too besotted by her man to notice a thing amiss.

bronte had come to ask for medicinal practice. maia declined her gifts. pride did nothing if there was only emptiness behind. 

this overture had been for chickadee and kivaluk. her shame faded behind resignation that moonglow and brecheliant were again very different, and with those who remembered her own rage, there would be no forgiveness.

so it must be.

she would set chickadee's bride-price, and she would seen it paid all the same to the hearth of the blackthorns. 

perhaps it was to be that the young pair belonged neither in the spine nor the caldera. she thought of ariadne who would surely become a mother in this next time, and how such children might affect kivaluk.

would he bear to watch them grow beneath the watchful attentiveness of a man who had abandoned him?

she too stood, swinging the hide around her own shoulders.

"may your hunting be safe, maia," she murmured for the ears only of the brecheliant woman. 

but her jadestone gaze was a pierce of light. chickadee's mother would pluck her own self away as if she was a pinfeather, and for pride. coldly; why would a girl call for something she did not need? maia waited for her children to come home. kukutux went of her own accord to bring them back. 

it was a bad choice. but she could lay no more judgement in her wounding. maia had struck her mark all the same, and kukutux moved off, back toward moonglow camp with a heavier heart and a more pensive mind, to contemplate the still-brilliant fire of those remembered words.

the sharp thrust of her deepest guilt silenced the duck for a long while.