REGAN WOKE WITH AN aching skull and hair that felt sticky, like something had been spilled on the back of her head. Blood. No other explanation made sense. Also, she was on her side in a bed of hay in a dark room, her hands in front of her, her wrists and ankles tied together with some sort of twine. She tried to sit up, only to topple over when she failed to find the balance she needed to remain upright.
There were voices in the distance. She went still, straining to hear what they were saying.
“—centaurs are going to kill us,” said one of them, unfamiliar, deep and rumbling, like rocks rolling across the bottom of the sea.
“Only if they catch us before we hand the brat over,” said another, lighter and higher, but still unfamiliar. “Did you have to hit her so hard?”
“The little filly was going to catch up to us if the human had the freedom to fight,” said the first voice. “I did what I had to do. The Queen’s guard will pay dearly for delivery of the creature, dead or alive. Dead might even be better. Dead doesn’t overthrow the government.”
“She’s just a child,” said a third voice. This one Regan recognized, and she stiffened with the indignity of it all. It was the faun who’d sold her the bag of nuts, the one who’d been willing to take her money. She must have signaled the others as soon as Regan had walked away. How dare she? How dare she?
Regan began to squirm, trying to loosen the knots around her ankles. She didn’t need her hands to run, and she was more likely to hurt herself if she rubbed twine against bare skin. So she kicked as much as she could, and was still kicking when a door suddenly opened and spilled light into the room. She froze, wide-eyed, and stared at the slim figure silhouetted in the opening, antlers visible to either side of her head. It was the faun.
“You’re awake,” she said. “I’m sorry we had to hit you. That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“So untie me and let me hit you back,” said Regan.
“You know I can’t do that,” said the faun.
Regan narrowed her eyes. “But you can hand me over to people who want to hurt me,” she accused.
The faun took another step into the room, hooves clacking delicately against the floor. “No one wants to hurt you,” she said, with what sounded like genuine surprise and regret in her tone. “But you’re worth so much money that it would be irresponsible of us to let you go wandering around free, the way those centaur savages you’ve been with did. The Queen will take excellent care of you.”
Regan stared at her, heart suddenly beating too hard and lungs suddenly tight, unable to take in any additional air. Finally, she managed to wheeze, “The Q-Queen?”
“Yes. Doesn’t every colt and filly dream of meeting Her Sunlit Majesty?” The faun’s tone was artificially sweet, the voice of someone who didn’t care for children trying to empathize with one. “Queen Kagami has everything you could ever dream of wanting. A palace, servants, the finest food—nothing like what you’ve been experiencing with those savages.”
Regan, who had experienced love, and care, and acceptance with the centaurs, said nothing at all.
The faun seemed to take her silence for awe, because she took another delicate step toward Regan. “They should have taken you to her right away, so you could begin fulfilling your destiny.”
“I don’t believe in destiny.”
“Destiny believes in you.” The fawn took a breath. “I really am sorry we had to hit you.”
“I’m sorry too,” said Regan.
“You understand this was for your own good.”
“I understand you think this was for my own good.” Regan shifted in the straw, pulling herself as far back as she could manage with the twine binding her ankles. “I understand you think you know what’s best for me, when you’ve never met me before and don’t know what I want.”
“There’s nothing personal about it,” said the faun. “Humans must be taken to the Queen, and if we’re the ones to deliver you, we’ll get paid. So much money that our families will be safe and protected for years to come. You’ll be pampered and cosseted and cared for. Surely a little slice of your freedom is a fair price to pay for knowing our families will never go to bed hungry.”
Regan had never met the faun’s family, and while she was a generally kind and generous child, she was still a child; this wasn’t an argument that would gain any ground with her. She glared and shook her head. “What about my family?” she asked. “They took care of me. Shouldn’t they be rewarded for that, if anyone is? And if I just disappear, they won’t know what happened! They’ll look for me forever.”
“You’re the only human in the world. You don’t have a family.”
“I have the herd.”
“They’re not your family, and if you think they’ll keep looking for you once the season turns and the snow comes down, you don’t know them as well as you think you do. Centaurs are barely more than beasts.” The faun shook her head, ears flattening in disgust. “They’ll never be loyal to you. They’ll never come looking.”
“They took care of me when they didn’t have to,” snarled Regan, and kicked her feet again, straining against the twine. “They’re my friends, and they’re as good as my family, and they’ll come for me. They’ll find me, and you’ll be sorry.”
“Be still, child,” said the faun, sounding concerned.
“I won’t!” said Regan, kicking harder. The twine felt like it was starting to give. She might be able to break free soon if she kept this up.
She was less sure of what would happen after that, but anything would be better than being tied up and helpless.
“Hush!” said the faun, casting an anxious glance over her shoulder at the door she’d entered through. “You don’t want to—”
“What’s going on in there?” boomed the unfamiliar voice Regan had heard before. She stopped kicking and shrank back in the straw, trying to make herself as small as she could. Whoever that voice belonged to, they didn’t sound happy.
The clomping of massive hooves echoed down the hall. The door was pushed wider open, and one of the bull-headed men she’d seen at the fair ducked through, horns barely clearing the frame. Seen this close, he was terrifying, a mountain of a man walking through a world built to a much smaller scale. Each of his hooves was larger than her entire face. He swung his muzzle around to face her, expression bovine and unreadable, and snorted.
“You making trouble back here, human?” he demanded.
Irritation won out over fear. “How could I?” she asked. “I’m tied up and my head hurts, because you hit me! I didn’t do anything to you!”
“You exist,” he replied. “Humans only ever mean upheaval. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t coming to make trouble. The Queen wants you where she can keep an eye on you, and I’m happy to be the one to deliver you.”
“I’m not a package, I’m a person!”
“You’re a human. Whether you’re a person is still up for debate. Now be quiet, or I’ll give the Queen your corpse and tell her it couldn’t be helped. If the universe really wants us to have a human, it’ll send another one. The hills are heavy with the bones of would-be heroes.” He jerked his massive head toward the faun. “Come on. We’re ready to leave.” Then he strode out of the room, leaving the faun to anxiously follow after him, glancing over her shoulder at Regan. In moments, Regan was alone again.
She lay on her side in the straw, shaking with a combination of fear and fury that put her teeth on edge and made her feel as if every nerve in her body was on fire. She wanted to scream. She wanted to rage until they returned to silence her, and then she would kick and bite and do everything else she could to make them regret taking her from the Fair.
And then they would kill her, and she would never see her family—either family—again. No. Rage was the wrong answer, at least right now. She forced herself to breathe slowly in and out, and began twisting her ankles again. The bull-headed man had hooves. All of them had hooves. None of them had any experience with human-type legs, so maybe they hadn’t tied her up the right way, and she could get loose.
She didn’t know how long she’d been there, twisting and straining, when she heard a small snapping sound and her ankles came abruptly apart. She rolled onto her back, letting her legs fall where they would, and waited for the tingling in her feet to fade. Once that was done, she squirmed further around to lever herself onto her knees and from there to her feet.
Regan squinted against the dimness, trying to figure out what was supposed to happen next. She was alone in a dark room with no weapons, no allies, and no use of her hands. But she had her legs, and they’d done their best to take those away from her, which meant they were worried she’d escape. She knew where her kidnappers were, behind the one door she was sure of, and so she tiptoed in the other direction, becoming aware of another advantage in the process.
Everyone in the Hooflands had hooves. They never walked quietly, unless it was on grass or soft earth, and while there was a layer of straw covering the floor, it wasn’t enough to muffle the sound of hoofbeats. Human feet in sneakers worn smooth as river rocks were another matter. She moved silently across the room, and no one came to see what she was doing, or seemed to realize she was loose.
It was too dark for Regan to see anything, so she placed her joined hands against the wall at roughly the height of a knob or latch and began tiptoeing around the edge of the room, waiting for the moment when her fingers would snag against something that didn’t fit.
She had made it almost halfway around when she felt cool metal, not machined like the latches back at home, but beaten against an anvil until it turned smooth. It was textured, something like brick and something like rough wood and something like a wrought iron fence. Regan swallowed, closing her eyes in silent hope, before grabbing it and pushing down as hard as she could.
If she’d been a smaller or less athletic child, she might not have had the strength to move the latch. She leaned against it with everything she had, and it clicked, a tiny but somehow terrifying sound, before it swung away from her, taking a large piece of wall with it.
Outside, it was dark, and the moonlight hung silvery over an unfamiliar field. She took a shaking step forward, and then another, until she was standing next to the building where she’d been confined, and could see that it was closer to a traditional barn than anything else she’d seen in the Hooflands. It was more constructed-looking than the longhouses the centaurs favored, with a sloping roof and whitewashed walls.
She took another step, and then she was running, racing for the distant line of what she assumed was a fence. Every time her feet hit the ground, it sent a jarring impact all the way along her spine to the sore spot on her skull, which throbbed and ached in tempo with her flight. She didn’t slow down. Instead, she ran faster, loping along until she felt like she could outrun Chicory, like she was the fastest thing in the world.
Behind her, she heard a door slam open and the bull-headed man’s angry bellow as he realized his prey was escaping. If he’d been a centaur, it would have already been over, with no chance of escape, but he was a biped like her, only bigger and bulkier, which meant he might be slower. The faun and the silene were smaller, sure, but they had less motivation to run than she did; she was confident enough to keep on going. The throbbing in her head got worse and worse, and her lungs began to ache, but she had to get away.
Destiny wasn’t real. Destiny was for people like Laurel, who could pin everything they had to an idea that the world was supposed to work in a certain way, and refuse to let it change. If these people said her destiny was to see the Queen, she would prove them wrong. She wasn’t their chosen one. She was just Regan, and as Regan, she ran.
Then the fence was there. She couldn’t climb it with her hands tied, so she dropped to the ground and rolled below the bottom bar. For once, her delayed puberty seemed like a blessing and not a punishment; if she’d developed the hips or breasts she’d been envying on the other girls before coming to the Hooflands, she might not have been able to fit.
Unfortunately, rolling meant she saw what was behind her, and what was behind her was the faun, running faster than seemed possible with her narrow legs and cloven hooves. Regan rolled, moving out of reach just as the faun reached the fence. She lunged across it, trying to grab the human girl, but Regan was already scrambling to her feet and backpedaling across the grass, getting further out of range. The faun began climbing the fence, and the other two were close behind her, their hooves not carrying them as quickly. They carried them all the same.
Regan spun around and broke back into a run, heading for the distant smudge of a tree line. There would be kelpies there if there was water, and perytons if there wasn’t, and either way, she’d be delivering herself into their terrible teeth—but their teeth seemed suddenly less dangerous than the people chasing her. Their teeth didn’t want to bind her to a destiny.
She was halfway to the trees when a dark shape loomed out of the underbrush, racing toward her at a pace she couldn’t have hoped to match, much less beat. I guess the kelpies heard me coming, she thought, already resigned to what was going to happen next. Still she kept running, as hard and as fast as she could, until it felt like the muscles in her thighs would tear and break away, until it felt like there was nothing in the world but running. At least she’d die knowing she’d tried; at least she’d go down fighting to the last to survive.
Then the figure drew close enough for her to see the moonlight glinting off the steel-gray of her coat and the matching steel-gray of her hair, and Regan’s heart leapt as she held tied hands out to Pansy, silently pleading. The centaur barely slowed as she reached down, grabbed Regan around the waist, and slung the girl across her back like a sack of wheat, wheeling and running back the way she’d come.
Regan watched as the figures of her kidnappers dwindled in the distance and were gone.