Somewhere not far off a horse startled and reared up, and Titania whirled to see hooves kicking in the air far off. There was a streak of brown as someone was thrown from the beast just before she ran. The alphess was shocked, she had been so distracted that she didn't even notice the horse and rider until all the commotion happened. She didn't even think to go see if the woman was hurt, she just stood there looking dumb for a minute until the gasping woman got up and started walking towards her.
Some might get tense in this moment, with a stranger coming toward them in an unfamiliar land, but the worst thing that could ever happen to Titania had just happened and she did not have the will to fear a stranger right now. Okay, maybe she would have guarded herself against a more foreboding stranger, but this one wasn't really all that threatening. She was just another woman, like herself, and she did not seem threatening, especially not the way she was hugging her bruised ribs.
Her ears perked when the woman asked her question. Well, she supposed it was a fair enough one to ask seeing as she had just been thrown from the horse because of her. “My mate,” she replied. And then all her Alphess pride whooshed into her core like metal to a magnet, and she would not give a stranger any reason to think she doubted Zalen's love. “I was reciting Shakespeare.” She lied, covering her tracks and hopefully deterring the woman from the point. But she still couldn't cover up the way she looked positively distraught, like she had been crying recently.
“Are you alright?” she asked, not knowing that once, a few months ago, this very woman and her own mother had had a stand off full of bows and arrows and misunderstanding. “That was a nasty fall.” This was a good way of distracting her from the problem - remind her of her own physical pain.
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