black sails are on the horizon; any.

[praise]

you can't bribe the door
on your way to the sky

Well, he looks very cross with her…

Praise stares back at him; he takes a drink then steps into the river as if away from her - curious, she thinks, concluding that he has plans to ignore her. Except he doesn’t continue to move down the river despite how often he glances up the length of it. So in a sense, they do share a companionable silence as he basks in the water and she drinks from it. His abrupt manner reminded her a bit of her father, and his long silence reminded her of her sister; Prevail could be like at times, quiet to the point of being almost too quiet, and staring - just staring, like she wanted to dissect her pale apricot sister, or that might have just been Praise thinking those thoughts and imagining that her twin felt the same way.

 

(Everything bore dissection or vivisection until she had the heart of it in her line of sight; sometimes, she touched and tasted too. How else could one learn?)

 

Praise keeps her mouth shut; her lips linger just above the water as she stares at her reflection, occasionally interrupted by ripples from things like fish breaking the water or leaves spinning lazily across the top of the river, and maybe even from the smallest movements he might make in shifting his weight from foot to foot. She snorts the moment the mare breaks through the bushes near them, huffing and puffing like an angry worn-out beast. Her head jerks upright and her light green eyes roll in her pale apricot face as she looks at the oily black picking burrs off her skin and spitting them into the river.

 

She almost laughs, there is something sad and comical about it - even about the way the black suddenly freezes, as if caught in the act of something terrible and secret. “No need to apologize,” she says with a shrug, or what could pass for a shrug in a horse. “You’re hardly intruding on anything but I’m Praise.” Mother always said to mind her manners, though in this, she sometimes took after her father and was a bit more uncouth than others. Who cared about manners anyway? Her eyes slide to him, as if waiting for him to add his two cents in but she just mutters, “It’s a free river anyway.”

praise

mandan x exist