“CHICORY!” ASTER PLANTED HER hands on her hips and threw her head back to make her voice carry further. “You need to come back here right now, young lady!”
“Aw, Mom.” Chicory cantered out of the forest, a bow in her hand and a pheasant slung over her shoulder, feathers fanning down her back like a cloak. “Why do you need me now?”
“The babies won’t stop crying, and Lily’s at her wit’s end.” All three women had foaled, two colts and a filly. They were old enough now to have opinions about things, and those opinions tended to feed into one another, so that a single cranky baby could result in three sets of healthy screams.
Regan spent as little time as possible inside the cottage, citing her sensitive human hearing as the reason for her absence. Only Daisy seemed to realize she was lying. Regan’s ears were no more sensitive than a centaur’s, and now that she’d adjusted to the volume at which they lived their lives, she shouted as loudly as the rest of them. Daisy smirked whenever Regan pled her way out of a situation due to her hearing, and let her run off thinking she’d fooled the adults.
Chicory wasn’t so lucky. As the youngest member of the herd, the logic the adults lived by seemed to think she would be the best at caring for young things, since she remembered what it was to be one of them. She found herself tapped for babysitting any time the adults got tired of it, which was often. It didn’t help that none of them had any experience with boys or brothers, not even the three sisters who had come from the north in the first place. These boys were the sons of fathers they might never see, not while they needed to keep Regan hidden and safe.
So Chicory found herself caring for a small horde of shrieking hellions who inadvertently answered many of Regan’s questions about centaur development, questions that had always felt too intrusive and potentially insulting. Like horses, they’d been born capable of supporting their own heads, already prepared to wobble around the cottage on shaky legs with knobbly knees. They had started at what looked to Regan like roughly two years of age, but with the dexterity and naivete of human infants, and they had remained almost exactly the same size for the two years that followed, as their brains caught up to their bodies.
The same couldn’t be said for Chicory and Regan. Both shot up, gaining height at a speed that had rendered Regan’s original clothes unwearable before the end of that first winter. She remained slender as a reed, arms and legs ropy with muscle, chest as flat as ever. Chicory, on the other hand, grew in other directions as well, necessitating a new kind of vest to keep her breasts from impeding her when she ran through the forest. Regan found herself needing to be much more careful where she put her hands when she rode. Not that she needed to hold on all that often anymore; they moved as one creature when they ran together, and Regan learned to mount by dropping out of the trees directly onto Chicory’s back.
Regan’s ability to climb was a constant mysterious delight to the little ones, whose hooves didn’t grant them anywhere near her dexterity. Even Chicory was sometimes surprised to look up and realize how high Regan had gone. The adult centaurs exchanged knowing looks and watched her go, their human, growing and learning in safety, well outside the reach of the Queen. Their loyalties had shifted forever on that long-ago day at the Fair, when the Queen to whom they had previously pledged themselves had allied herself with those who would harm the girl most of them thought of almost as a daughter.
Five years passed in the shadow of the trees, the foundations of their cottage sinking deeper into the soil, taking stability from the passage of time. The colts began growing again when they were almost four years old, putting on height at an incredible rate, vocabularies expanding by the day. Chicory began to enjoy babysitting duties. Regan learned to climb all the way to the tops of the trees, the better to escape her tiny herd of unwanted admirers. Daisy threatened to tie a rope around her ankle so she could be hauled back down when it was time for lessons. Life went on.
The perytons who lived in the deep part of the forest resembled nothing so much as winged deer that had been skinned but somehow managed to keep walking around under their own power. They were carnivores, their powerful jaws making short work of any squirrels or rabbits that came too close. They snapped at Regan when she approached, but didn’t flee. They didn’t press their attacks, either. She began following them through the woods, making an effort to get as close as she could without losing a finger, and was able to track them to the burrows where they lived and raised their young, gangly, half-fledged things that tore and snarled at each other, learning to hunt one mock-battle at a time. Pansy scolded her, telling her to leave the terrible things alone, but Regan was enchanted and no longer accustomed to being told “no.”
“You keep telling me I’m supposed to save the world,” she said, after one particularly intense scolding. “How can I do that if I run away from a stupid skinless deer?”
Pansy folded her arms. “You keep saying you don’t believe in destiny. This was easier before you decided to grow up,” she said. “Can’t you be a little girl again? I liked that better.”
Regan laughed. Here, surrounded by people who loved her but had no idea what humans were supposed to be like, she was normal. No one seemed to notice or care that puberty was passing her almost entirely by, and somehow, that took any potential sting out of the situation. So she wasn’t changing the way Chicory was. She wasn’t the same as Chicory, didn’t have hooves or a tail or pointed ears. Wishing to be a centaur wouldn’t change anything about who she was, and so there was no point in wishing for anything else about herself to change.
“No,” she said. “But I’ll always be yours.” She hugged Pansy then, the top of her head coming up to the centaur’s collarbone, before letting go and running off into the woods.
Her days were split between running wild and working with Daisy, who insisted her education mattered more than anything. The colts were accident-prone; she had already splinted several arms and stitched up several gashes too deep to leave to heal on their own. She knew every medicinal herb that grew in the woods, and several that didn’t, although she wasn’t sure she’d recognize them if she saw them growing fresh, having learnt their shapes and properties from the dried specimens in Daisy’s saddlebags. It was a long, slow apprenticeship, and she sometimes worried that as the colts aged, one of them would show an interest, and Daisy would abandon her in favor of a member of her own kind. Daisy showed no signs of doing so, and Regan began to relax. Her ability to climb let her bring back rare herbs for Daisy to dry and add to the stocks, gathered from the tops of trees and the bottoms of gullies.
And time marched on.
It had been more than five years since Regan ran away from school on purpose and ran away from home by mistake. She barely thought of her parents anymore, and always with the faintest, burning tinge of guilt, like she’d betrayed them and their love by falling in love with another world, one that seemed designed perfectly for her. Part of her was sure they’d forgotten her by now, consigning her to the scrapbooks of memory, and had another child living in her bedroom, getting ready to start classes at her school. Another part of her knew they’d be mourning her forever, unsure whether she was alive or dead, and that part was sorry for what she’d done, even though she hadn’t done it on purpose. She would have gone back in the beginning if she’d been able to, but now she was fifteen and had been in the Hooflands for a third of her life, surrounded by people who loved her for who she was, who didn’t think she was weird or try to shove her into boxes she’d had nothing to do with building. This was her home.
She was never leaving.
She was in the river when Chicory pushed the bushes aside and called, “Regan! Mom wants you at the cottage!”
It was ridiculous how they still called the vast, barn-like building a “cottage,” but Regan’s annoyance wasn’t going to change the way language worked here, and it would have been rude to try. She straightened, icy water biting her thighs—hot showers were one of the few things she did miss from the land of her birth—and called back, “Why? I finished my lessons. I’m trying to get the mud out of my hair before it has time to dry.”
Chicory shrugged. “I don’t know. She just told me to go and get you, and you’d said you were going for a bath, so I knew I’d be able to find you here.”
Regan glared before sinking under the water and scratching her scalp, dislodging the last chunks of mud. She surfaced and paddled toward the shore, where she had a bundle of rosemary and violets waiting. She scrubbed them against her head, hard enough to release the oils in the vegetation, then ducked under again, rinsing the flecks of smashed greenery away.
When she surfaced the second time, Chicory was on the bank, hoof scraping impatiently at the mud. “Come on,” she said. “You know who gets in trouble if we’re too slow?”
“Let me guess,” said Regan. “Is it you?”
“Yes! It’s me! I’m supposed to be your best friend. Getting me in trouble on purpose is mean, and friends aren’t mean to each other.”
Regan blinked before she smiled, slow and sweet as summer. “That’s right,” she said, wading to the bank and stepping out of the water. “Friends aren’t mean to each other.” Her clothes were folded nearby. No one in the Hooflands knew how to make a pair of trousers, which made sense, considering their anatomical differences; instead, she pulled a tunic cut for the torso of a centaur on over her head, belting it around the waist like a dress. It fell almost to her knees.
Her tunics could be bought from the traveling peddlers who sometimes came down the main road with their creaking wagons full of wonders, although the family tried to make as much for themselves as they could, to limit exposure to the outside world. Her underpants had required Rose to work out a pattern and hand-sew them from scraps of fabric. The small complications of being the only one of her kind in an entire world never failed to surprise her. Climbing onto Chicory’s back, she positioned herself and said, “I’m ready when you are.”
“Did you have to get up there while you were still wet?” demanded Chicory, and broke into a trot. “I’m going to smell like wet fur all day now, thanks to you.”
“Just one of the many services we offer,” said Regan, and cackled with delight at her own joke.
Chicory shook her head. “Sometimes you can be so weird,” she complained, continuing to trot toward the cottage.
Regan held on tighter. “You love me being weird.”
“Do not.”
“Do so! You wouldn’t know what to do without me.”
Chicory sobered. “You’re right, I wouldn’t,” she said. “So when they tell you it’s time to go and be a hero, I want you to tell them you can’t do it.”
“What?”
“Everyone says a human has to be a hero. They talk about it at night, when they think we’re asleep. Mom says you’re tall enough to be an adult human now, and that means you’ll probably have to be a hero soon. But I don’t want you to!”
“Why not?” Regan frowned. “If I came here so I could save the Hooflands, doesn’t that mean I should do it? This is my home too. I don’t want anything bad to happen here.”
“Because humans go away after they turn into heroes!” snapped Chicory, and Regan froze. It felt like her heart had turned into a lump of ice and was sinking toward her toes, and all she could think in that moment was that toes were a horrible, human thing to have, and because she had them, she was going to lose this home, too. She was going to be sent somewhere else, and all because of something she’d never chosen and couldn’t help.
Chicory didn’t notice her distress, and continued, voice rising with every word, “Humans come here when they get lost and the Hooflands needs saving, and they stay until it’s time to save the world, and then they disappear forever!”
“Where do they go?” whispered Regan.
“No one knows,” said Chicory. “Mom thinks they go back where they came from, and Aunt Bramble thinks they go to another world that has to be saved, but it doesn’t matter, because they don’t come back. Not ever.”
“I will,” said Regan.
“What?”
“I will. If I have to go—if there’s not any way to avoid it—I’ll come back. I promise. This is my home. I wish I could tell my parents I’m all right, I’m here and I’m happy and they don’t need to worry about me, but I belong here. I’ll come back. I’ll always come back.”
Chicory twisted to look at Regan as she continued trotting toward the cottage. “You really promise?” she asked. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“You’re my best friend,” said Regan. “I won’t ever leave you like that.”
Chicory sagged, the strange tension going out of her shoulders, and trotted to a stop in front of the cottage. “Mom’s inside. She’s waiting for you.”
“Because that’s not ominous.” Regan slid off of Chicory’s back, patting her reassuringly on the side, and tugged her dripping tunic into place as she walked toward the door. It was comfortingly familiar and solid. This wasn’t a door that whisked human children away to new worlds. It was a door that opened to welcome them home, and was still there when they turned around. She brushed her fingertips against the wood as she stepped through, into the straw-scented gloom that always lingered under the roof.
Aster, Daisy, and Pansy were there already, waiting for her. Their expressions were serious, and Regan felt the ice gather again, chilling her from the inside out. The water dripping from her hair suddenly felt like a punishment, running down her neck and leaving clammy dread in its wake.
“There you are,” said Aster in the frustrated tone she always used when Regan and Chicory ranged too far afield and needed to be brought back to heel.
“Here I am,” said Regan. She turned to Daisy. Daisy, her teacher and mentor. Daisy, who would always, always tell her the truth, and wouldn’t try to protect her like Pansy, or put the needs of her own daughter first, like Aster. “What’s going on?” she asked in a small, pained voice. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No, child, no,” said Daisy. “You did nothing wrong, or if you did”—she paused to shoot a quelling glance at the other two centaurs—“we all did. We’ve become too comfortable here. There aren’t many centaur herds in the forest, and it’s rare for them to leave, or to come back if they do. One of the traveling merchants must have grown suspicious about a new herd settling in these parts, and mentioned it where the Queen’s spies could hear. She’s been looking for you. She knew you were somewhere to be found, as the Hooflands have not been saved.”
“And after I save the world, I disappear,” said Regan, voice still small.
Pansy’s head snapped up. She took a step toward Regan. “Who told you that?” she asked. “Regan, who told you that you were going to disappear?”
“Chicory did. She said you talk about it when you think we’re not listening. Humans come, they save the world, and then they vanish.” Regan’s hands balled into fists. “I don’t want to vanish. I’ll still save the world if I have to, because I like it too much to let it not be saved, but I don’t want to vanish.”
“The Queen knows you’re here,” said Aster. “Her spies will make you disappear if we don’t do something soon.”
“What does she even want with me?” Regan shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense. If she’d been willing to leave us alone, we’d still be in the fields with the flock, not hiding in a forest in the middle of nowhere.”
“She hates you because she’s what you’re going to save us from,” said Aster. “Things have grown worse since we left. The merchants speak of it. Prices for crops and livestock continue to drop, and the Queen sets the prices; she’s to blame. The herds are starving. They can’t afford to eat, to replace their tools, to go courting at the Fair—it’s all falling apart. The Queen sends her soldiers to burn their fields when they refuse to tell her what she wants to know. She’s no fit queen any longer. I’m sorry, but it’s time for you to go to her.”
“I did not agree to this,” snapped Daisy. “We can hide again. There’s more north in the world.”
“No,” said Regan. “The foals deserve better than to grow up hiding, and they’ll hate me for it when they realize I’m the reason they had to. Chicory deserves better. All the herds do. If the Queen is hurting them, we have to stop her. You raised me to save our world. Let me save it.”
There was no way to answer that, and so no one said anything, not even when Regan burst into tears and threw her arms around Pansy’s waist, holding on as if her life depended on it.