Skoll rose with the sun, and he jolted with confusion the instant his green eyes opened and he determined his surroundings: thin plains and chilly air. He heard a whickering snort behind him and lifted his head, meeting the gaze of the bay mare as she nudged at him with her velvety pink-and-black nose. She lipped his hair after he didn’t respond, and at her beckoning he sat upright, pushing his messy mane out of his face and staring at the inland coast around him. He’d spent the night out here, but why?
There was a weight around his neck as he sat up, and his fingers carefully gripped the pendant hanging there before he lifted the thing in his palm. He stared at the likeness of the sun for a few good, long minutes before letting it drop and strike him in the chest again.
He remembered: it was his birthday, and his mother was dead.
The blonde boy—a man, now, he guessed, a man more than he ever had been—had not been able to stay in the house after his mother had taken her last breath in that room. He was flooded with so much heaviness and sadness that he hadn’t experienced before, and so like a coward he’d fled, rather than the brave prince he should have been to stay behind and comfort his father and the others. As midnight trickled into the world, he’d seen prints in the mud and his mother’s horse—Hati’s horse, now—missing from the stables. He’ d given chase, but somehow missed his sibling, and spent the night sleeping out in the cold, letting it sap the hot life out of him until he felt near death too.
Hwin was normally meek around strangers, but she was as stubborn as the wolfdog who owned her. When he didn’t budge after his initial movement, she snorted and gave him a shove with her head, her reins swaying from her leather bridle. He fell down into the grass and snarled at her, but she only screamed hoarsely in his face, her nostrils flaring. They stared at each other in mutual anger for a moment before Skoll’s face fell, his eyes dropping to the ground in shame; at this point, the mare reached over to nuzzle him, nickering to him as if he were a foal. Her next nudge got him to his feet, and a few more had him hauling himself onto her back.
The horse wheeled around toward the Kingdom, but he wrenched her head around the other way; there was a momentary struggle for dominance, but the tack gave Skoll the upper hand. He gave her neck a gentle pat as apology and clicked his tongue for her to start walking further inland. He didn’t know where to go (at least, not consciously, even if their steps took them closer to a particular pack), but he knew one thing: he wasn’t ready to go home yet, and face the emptiness of that room again.
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