She was not here because she wanted to come home, if it can even be called home anymore. Surely she cannot claim the Falls now, not after abandoning it. She can’t even bring herself to take Nairne all the way to the borders – because she doesn’t want to go home. She and Mikhael have built something else for themselves, something that makes them happy. She wants to go back to him, to that, and she knows that the thunder of water falling from great heights will call to her in a way she can’t resist. Just like she could not leave the Falls to follow him to his Deserts as a love struck, silly child, she would not be able to turn away from her Kingdom to return to him in the unknown if the siren song of the waterfall is allowed to reach her ears.
Perhaps she is weak, or perhaps it is just that the Falls runs so strongly in her veins that it is nearly a compulsion.
But Nairne wants to go back. The girl remembers the land of her birth – she has dreams of the waterfall, Natilyn knows, dreams of fields of flowers and golden fish in the crystal clear pool. And she has nothing to hold her back – Mikhael and Natilyn might have found fulfilment in traveling together, but it offers little to their daughter. So they’ve come here, to the meadow, where Natilyn plans to leave her oldest – her only! – daughter to find her own way back to the Dazzling Waterfalls. She will wait a few days, to be sure that Nairne hasn’t changed her mind, and then she will go back, to him. Already she misses him intensely, an ache that doesn’t go away. They would love to have Nairne with them, but neither of them would hold her back from her own life.
“You’re sure you remember the way?” she asks again, breaking the silence. The buckskin mare (no longer a child, as Nat frequently has to remind herself) gives her mother a patient look, but her eyes shine in a way that says she can’t wait to go. “I can feel the way. It’s like the land is telling me how to get back.” comes the reply – so matter-of-fact. But Nat knows the feeling. The Earth sings underneath her own hooves, calling her back to the Falls: she just doesn’t intend to go. And even though Nairne is eager to go, neither of them move.
They match today, because Natilyn is the natural buckskin she shares with her daughter, no colors flickering across her skin, because she often reflects her thoughts on her coat, and all of her thoughts are with her daughter. Often she thinks of the healing waters, their calming touch (and just as often, she is the beautiful complex blue of the waterfall), but she can’t afford that now. She can’t go back to the Falls, because missing Mikhael if she did would tear her apart. “I worry, is all.” she says, trying to put a lightly teasing tone into her words, but they fall worried and tense instead. “Don’t be silly, mama. It’s the Falls. No where safer.”
