They looked at each other again in silence.

“Tell me anyway,” Madeleine murmured.

Well. All right. Hæra smiled wryly. “I wanted to be able to talk to you,” she said. “To understand you when you returned.”

Madeleine hugged her knees more tightly, as if holding herself together. “How did you know I would? Did you—did you⁠—”

Hæra frowned. “Did I what?”

“Did you cast a spell on me?” Madeleine blurted. “Did you compel me to come back?”

What a question. Did Madeleine think Hæra was a witch at the bottom of a whirlpool, full of magic and still unable to save herself? “If I could’ve done that, you’d never have left in the first place.”

That didn’t seem to reassure Madeleine. “So…you would have compelled me if you could.”

“Didn’t I just say that?” Hæra turned toward Madeleine so she faced her rather than sitting parallel to her. “I would have then. It’s different now. I don’t want to trap you here.”

“No?”

“No. I’ve learned about being somewhere because you’re forced to.” Hæra looked back down the hill toward the farm. Her life’s work. “You can find good things about it, but it’s still not your choice. Why would I want you to feel that way about me?”

Madeleine was silent. Hæra kept looking at the farm, waiting.

“You’re forced to be here?” Madeleine asked eventually.

“Yes.” It was hard to look at Madeleine for this part. How strange. “My family caught me transforming and coming ashore. I’m not sure how. I think it was Asgall who saw.” He was much more likely to have been lurking around the surface than Beathag or Calder.

“Asgall?”

Hæra pursed her lips. “My brother.”

Madeleine looked horrified. “Your own brother turned you in?”

“Asgall hates me. He always has. He’s a creature of bitterness and spite.” Hæra heard plenty of bitterness in her own voice. “My mother—Beathag—isn’t fond of me either. When I returned from Jonathan’s one night, she and Asgall were waiting for me, along with the Sire of the herd. They tried to kill me. I escaped, although they believe I’m dead.”

So she hoped. Yet again she thought uneasily of the horse’s head she thought she’d seen in the water last night. All those precautions she’d taken for all these years couldn’t be for nothing, could they?

But she’d seen nothing else. Out of everyone in the herd, only Calder, Asgall, and Beathag knew her human form. If they’d seen her alive, they’d have come ashore to destroy her for good. The presence of one lone human wouldn’t have deterred them. In fact, Madeleine would have been a bonus prize.