Tales of a Half-Blood Orphan

The cart jostled and bounced as a small child with small pointed ears, gripped a small wooden horse. Its straw hair was frayed and worn away from her pensive stroking of it. Now after four years in an orphanage, Velencia was being escorted to her new family. They seemed pleasant enough, but she didn't trust these humans at all. She blew a tendril of rich brown hair out of her dirty face and nuzzled her horse closer. At the age of eight, the young half-blood has seen death, abandonment and the loss of many of her childhood friends through adoption or sickness.

As they came down a beaten path, a ball of tension tightened in the girl's bosom. The man riding with her and holding the reins, looked down at the child and smiled, his sun dried skin crinkled around his eyes, "We are nearly there, little one. Now you will see many horses."
Velencia gripped her horse figure tighter and tried to make herself smaller, she looked down the path at the wooden fences and house at the end of the path. She could already see a woman and a child around her height standing in front of the cottage, waving. Turning her head with a sniff, she blinked against the sun to see the running horses in the feild beside them, she instantly put her toy aside and watched the beautiful creatures run. It was a mix of sleek jumpers and thick sturdy work horses. Dapples and roans, Palamino and blacks all running together. She scooted closer to the edge of the cart's seat to watch the joy of those magnificent free animals, it was this distraction that allowed the face of a strange boy to coax forth a scream of surprise when it popped up in front of her.
"Boy, she's a scaredy."
"Niros! Don't make her first impression of us be your filthy face in hers!" A kind feminine voice sounded that made Velencia jump; for a moment she mistook it for one she hadn't heard in half her life. The face she looked into though, was not that of her mother's.