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Others, however, are ideally suited to the whitewashed landscape.

Spokelse glides between the trunks like a spectre, her sure hooves silently breaking the crust and her dark eyes startling. Petra and her dogs, busily examining the fallen remains of a frozen wren, will catch up later. For now the doe is drawn either by instinct or luck away and into the trees.

When she falls on the scent of Samael her steps slow, and she alerts him to her presence--if he has not detected it already--with a soft sound that sends a cloud of steam off of her nose and curling away. White deer, white sky, white trees, white snow; she looks at the dark buck and her ears swing forward intently, in a gesture of familiarity.

If deer were capable of conveying apology, perhaps Spokelse would. As it is she simply lowers her head, extending her neck towards him as if offering to touch noses: the friendly gesture of two cart horses meeting one another in the street. As she steps nearer to gauge his willingness to respond in kind, she pauses and looks over her shoulder with a reassuring whuff, a little warning, polite. She is afraid he will run and she does not want him to run.

Petra crunches exuberantly up through the trees, her hair underneath the heavy wool of a shawl and her hands trapped in rough mittens, her ugly dog at her side. She wraps her hand around its rope collar almost instinctively, perhaps thinking for a moment that she has stumbled on a wandering pony and is afraid to send it bolting away into the trees.

But it doesn't last. The dog sits patiently and Petra realizes she recognizes this creature, and she stands back, unwilling to interrupt the moment, panting clouds into the air after her little jaunt and breaking into a nervous grin. It is not for no reason she has been exploring the woods near the fenceline here. Spokelse sends the message clearly: nervous? At the very least distressed. She doesn't know, not really.

Petra is still and quiet for a moment. Her experience with Guardians does not go very far beyond her own, and it is always strange to decide whether to treat them as people or as animals. Perhaps in this case it makes no difference: the favored course is to stand quietly, still, until the tension seeps out of the air. It is aided by Spokelse, who moves back towards Samael, more slowly this time.

This time Petra follows.

She extends her hand towards him, aware on some instinctive level, aided by what Spokelse with her animal wisdom can convey, that he is frustrated, or maybe lonely, or betrayed. But she trembles a little as she does so. She remembers brushing her fingers over a bright-gold totem and its green swirls, as beautiful as a shining gypsy ribbon bobbing from its branch among the browns and blacks, and the immediate sense of guilt and revulsion. She remembers recoiling, she remembers feeling as though she'd cursed at a shrine. She worries what will happen when her hand touches Samael's nose. But she extends it anyway, gently pushing her dog away with her foot without taking her eyes off the buck.

"You're nicer than he is," she whispers, well-aware that he won't understand her.

Petra does not often stroke Spokelse, aside from a hand on her neck. Her own guardian at times intimidates her; her dignity is so entire and her self-possession so much in contrast to Petra's own messy emotions that is rare that she indulges the desire to touch her velvety nose, or her soft chin or the whorls of hair in her forehead.

With Samael, after the initial fear, there is no such hesitation. Somehow he is not the same. Her hand that smells of goats and tobacco and dead wren is gentle; the roughness of her mittens is at least warm. Spokelse meets Samael's eyes with a reassuring tilt of her ears and a curious sniff of his jaw.

And so it is that the strange visits begin--first sporadic, but becoming more rigorous, until in time Petra is bringing sugar cubes in her pocket--a treat Spokelse usually disdains, but is willing to share if Samael indulges also.

Their jaunts are usually the three of them (and the dog, of course), but Petra's nervous glances towards the fenceline never stop. She feels more of a trespasser outside the run-down stone walls, crunching through the snow between Samael and Spokelse, than ever she did grazing on Paul's grass.

But the trespass is not entire. Spokelse and Petra move almost in tandem; if Spokelse finds something interesting in the treeline--a bit of polished glass, a worn stone--Petra immediately turns to see, as though the link between them never truly closes. With the three of them together, Samael can never truly be anything but a hanger-on. Petra's sugarcubes are no substitute for the things she will never have. She will never be Paul. No one will. Petra does not even know Samael's name. Eventually she realizes this, and she stops trying to be.

And so it is that by the third or fourth visit, only a few cursory niceties are exchanged by the fences before Petra bounds off with the dog to collect feathers and rabbit skulls, carefully staying off Paul's property.

But Spokelse has no such scruples. She goes at times where Samael wills, and other times breaks into a sprint to egg him into chase. She moves swiftly through the flakes, half-hidden among them, a ghost winding transparently save for the reality of her hoofprints. She wades icy streams with him, or follows him dociley along the boundaries of Paul's property on both sides of the fence. And during these times, perhaps for the sake of Samael's feelings or perhaps from the novelty of the company of one like herself, she is distant from Petra.

On this day Petra sits among the sluggish flakes, meticulously arranging twigs into hair for a hastily-built snow-woman who is wearing a ratty old shawl. The dog lies at her side, gnawing a rabbit whose blood stains the snow.

She is within view of Paul's fences, and within earshot of Spokelse and Samael's crunching hooves, although she is not sure exactly where it is that they are racing. Her hands are red and chapped in the cold, her mittens dangling from the ends of her sleeves. And she seems strangely intense in her work. Her focus is too sharp, like a wife whose knitting is fierce and distracted while her husband fights in a war.

Petra hears the steps approaching, and although she knows who it must be, she tenses enough that the dog's hackles rise before she sharply tells it to stay.

(Far away over a hill, Spokelse pauses and lifts a hoof, her head turning, her ears pointed, her eyes focused on nothing.)

Without turning away from her work, she waits until the steps are so close that he must surely be about to see her, and she jams a twig into the snow woman's head so hard that parts of its skull turns into a tiny avalanche. "I am outside of your damned fence this time," she announces into the air. "So don't go threatening to shoot little girls because this time it just makes you a murderer."

This time Petra does turn, and her face is full of disdain. The dog lays back into its rabbit.

“I knew you was out of touch,” she says, “but not so much you’d think a goat herd’d be ashamed to smell like a goat. What d’you smell like? Roses and lilies?” She sniffs as well, every bit as insulting. “Ain’t nothing wrong with smelling like a goat. No dog ever gagged at a goat but I’ve seen plenty gag at a perfume shop door.”

At home, in her cache, Petra has a tiny green bottle no bigger than the end of her thumb with a few drops of rose oil in it, purchased dearly and at a great blow to her dignity. When she gets home, she thinks, perhaps she will smash it.

(Spokelse turns, and she bumps her nose against Samael’s jaw encouragingly as she heads back towards her Chosen. No racing this time; only measured steps. She holds her head like a carriage horse when she walks.)