Kelpie's Knight

Prologue: Reed, Age 15

It had been raining for five days.

The glass was cool against her face; and each breath only fogged up the window a little more, making it hard to see out, but she did not move. She watched it rain outside, huddled up on the window's seal with her legs pulled tightly to her chest.

"You're making it to storm again, Reed." Her mother would have said—her forehead fell against the glass pane with a cold thump. Yes mother, the five day rain was her fault. "Can't you smile for me, my little foal?" Her mother would have asked. No mother, she could not smile, because there was no longer a mother to smile for.

Tears dripped off of her chin, but she made no move to wipe their tracks off of her cheeks. She remained silent against the window pane, staring out at the pasture that was slowly beginning to flood. Though the rain was a large inconvenience, no one in her household dared ask her to make it stop. She knew eventually, though, that she would have to make the rain cease. She knew this could not go on forever, but for now, she let it pour. She let the thunder roll, and the lightning snap—and she let herself mourn.

She and father had become distant, unsure how to approach the other. While she made the rain fall from against her window, her father could do no such waiting and weeping. It'd been five days since she had last seen him, but she knew where he had holed himself up. Her father was a man who desired distraction. He hated to feel his own emotions, especially when they dabbled into the uncontrollable. It had been five days since she'd last seen her father, and she wondered how much firewood he had managed to split during that amount of time.

Gregory, on the other hand, fed her and never asked her to leave the window seal she had rooted herself in. Her Godfather had always been a kind man, and though he knew not to speak to her while the rain fell, he made sure she was eating and drinking. Another tear trickled down her left cheek, mimicking a water drop streaking down the glass in front of her.

It had been raining for five days. She had slept in the window for five days. Father had not been back in the house for five days, and mother had been dead for six.

Movement caught her eye, and she noticed that that black horse was still loitering at the edge of the flooding pasture. Unlike the horses safely tucked away in their barn, this one was unphased by the storm that raged around them. It had been waiting there for five days, waiting for her to come out of the house. Waiting for her to go to it. Her head fell against the wood surrounding the window and she squeezed her eyes shut—she wasn't ready, not yet. That horse would have to wait just a little while longer.