Iktome Plains As the crow flies

*scoops this up and dusts it off*

She thinks, sometimes, about her time spent with Fen in the Red Meadow, and what her life might have been like if he'd lived just a few years longer. Perhaps she would be a wife and a mother by now, instead of just a nursemaid.

Of course, she loved her life, and it was a moot point either way. It was just hard, sometimes, to grow older and wiser and to look back and see all the ways things could have been different. The world seems very big at those times, and she thinks that the older and wiser she grows, the less she seems to really know with any certainty.

But she knows — Coelacanth had taught her — that a pup in need is always worth helping, and always her business. When she caught sight of the sooty youth, she stopped her pacing along the beach to watch her dart from bush to bush. There was a pack nearby, of course, so Moorhen hoped the girl wasn't lost, but she seemed still too small to be out and about unaccompanied — in Moorhen's mind, at least.

"I am hope you have permission to be out," said Moorhen, and it was a credit to how very many times she'd had to say it before that the words came out mostly in the right order, without any of them tripping over each other.