Whitefish River some unconscious stream of twisted logic

Pink fangs greeted her; had it been a true snarl, the druid wouldn’t have halted her. In her tattered, graying mind, she suppose she deserved the flamekept stares and bitten words of her daughter all the same, just as with—  “Forgive me,”  she muttered in return to Isi, crown canting to study the mouth.  “Someone hurt me, a long time ago. I’ve been dreaming of him ... again,”  words almost monotonous with absent care, because it wasn’t her in pain, here. No, no: her daughter’s hurts that needed to be tended to were more real than any figment of her waking haunts or that of her traitorous heart.

Their staying in the riverlands was for him and her and him. And, again, things which Aurëwen might’ve believed to have become true or to have occurred — she hadn’t told either three in detail of what had occurred. Whether or not her misgiving of leaving her rampant  (and rightfully-so)  children with no less than a stranger, the druid hadn’t exactly told them why she’d gone from them that day. Where Trikova had sworn he was versed to kill, Bounkola could only hope to kill.

Blinks came in a flurry, then, and the silver resumed a study of the gouge which Isilmë had claimed to be her own doing.  “You pierced your gums, by biting something. What in heavens did you bite, my shrike?”  As she queried she rose, turning — a twinge in her foreleg, ignored — to look through her dried stores, slung across crumbled quartz beds.