THE OUTLINE OF THE castle appeared on the horizon as the sun was dipping lower in the sky, casting long shadows across the fields. It was not as crenelated and precise as a castle from a fairy tale, but was rough-hewn and imposing, as if the rocks had simply fallen from the sky and piled themselves into the shape of a castle, without any sapient intervention. Gristle slowed, gallop becoming a canter, becoming a trot, finally becoming a walk. Zephyr landed and walked beside him, although far enough away that he couldn’t easily bite or strike her.
Regan sat up straighter on Gristle’s back, untangling her hands from his mane and wincing at the new lines his hair had cut into her palms. “Is that it?” she asked.
Gristle snorted. “No, we’re going to a different castle. Of course that’s it. The Queen’s castle now. The King’s castle once. Hoof to hoof, hand to hand, back to the beginning of the Hooflands.”
“I think I can walk from here,” said Regan. Gristle stopped, and she slid down from his back, stretching to work out the kinks in her spine. Then she began walking toward the castle, with Gristle pacing her on one side and Zephyr on the other. Their hooves clopped softly against the soft earth, and the sky smelled like rain on the way, and everything about the moment was inevitable; everything about the moment had been coming for her since the moment she’d walked through a door that wasn’t and into a world that somehow knew enough to know that it was going to need saving.
Not just saving: saving by someone who loved it. If the door had opened now, today, and dropped a gangly, long-limbed Regan wearing fresh new jeans and smelling of her mother’s perfume into the field, she wouldn’t have been fit for saving anything at all. She had never been given the opportunity to become that version of herself, but she knew in her heart that the other Regan wasn’t somehow the better one. The other Regan would never have understood the simple joy of fishing in the lake during her morning bath, hooking fat, slow bass under the gills with her fingers and flipping them onto the shore. She wouldn’t have seen the colts growing up, or lain with Chicory in fields of sweet grass, wondering about the shape of the future. If she was going to save the Hooflands, she had to be this version of herself, this awkward, half-wild, uncertain girl who’d grown up on a centaur’s back, racing through woods and breathing in air that always smelled, ever so faintly, of horsehair and hay. That other Regan had been the first sacrifice necessary to save the world, and she had made it without even knowing, and still she had no regrets.
She still didn’t believe in destiny. Clay shaped into a cup was not always destined to become a drinking vessel; it was simply shaped by someone too large to be resisted. She was not clay, but she had been shaped by her circumstances all the same, not directed by any destiny.
Regan walked on toward the castle, which loomed larger and larger before her, until it dominated the line of the sky. “Was she always a bad queen?” she asked. “Do either of you know?”
“The only bad thing I’ve ever heard of her doing was burning the centaur fields to the south,” said Zephyr. “She tried to take the human from them shortly after it arrived—I’m sorry, tried to take you—and when her people failed, she ordered the hippocampi to carry burning brands and set alight everything the centaurs owned, to punish them for disobeying her.”
Regan, who had heard nothing of this, stiffened but forced herself to keep walking. All these things had happened years ago, and she couldn’t change them now. All she could do was try to keep them from happening again. All she could do was keep moving.
“All queens are bad queens,” said Gristle. “When the queen is a centaur or a faun, they treat those of us without hands as if we were somehow less a part of the Hooflands than they are, when the very world is named for us. When the queen is a kirin or a hippogriff, they behave as if those who eat meat are savages who don’t deserve the lands we live on. There’s never been a kelpie queen. Those doors are closed to monsters like me.”
“There’s never been a peryton queen, either,” said Zephyr sadly. “They call us monsters, too, because they can’t talk to us.”
“Why can’t they?” asked Regan, confused. “If I can talk to you, they should be able to.”
“Civilized people don’t know how to listen,” said Gristle. “All their magic goes into the places they believe it belongs. You, human, have been here long enough to learn some magic of your own, and now any of us can speak with you, if we have cause to want to.”
Regan blinked slowly. “Oh,” she said.
“It won’t make the centaurs stop thinking of us as monsters,” said Zephyr. “There will never be a peryton queen.”
“But that’s not fair,” protested Regan. “How does a queen get chosen, anyway?”
“When an old queen dies, every herd in the Hooflands puts forth their finest candidate. They go to the meeting chamber built by the first Alliance of Hooves and Hands, back in the days before we had memory or thought, when the humans came here and refused to claim our pastures as their own. Only one leaves the chamber and ascends to the throne. The others are lost forever.”
“One of my mother’s sisters went when this queen was chosen, even though she knew a peryton would never hold the throne,” said Zephyr, sounding almost wistful. “I never met her, but Mother says she had antlers like cupped hands, full of wind and moonlight, and she was beautiful beyond bearing.”
Regan didn’t feel like she could say anything about peryton standards of beauty, so she didn’t say anything at all.
“As to how the queen is chosen from among the candidates, no one knows,” said Gristle. “Maybe she eats the others. Maybe she takes the throne with a full belly, containing part of every other thinking creature in the Hooflands. Even if she doesn’t eat them, they all vanish utterly and eternally.”
Regan shuddered. “But that would mean every reign began with murder. That’s no way to start.”
“We know she’s a bad queen now, so maybe she was always bad and just took a while to show it,” said Zephyr.
“Yes, but if she killed all the other contenders, then all the other kings and queens before her had to do that too. And if they all had to do that, there have never been any good rulers.”
“You’re starting to understand!” said Gristle, sounding proud of himself. “You’ll be a wonderful dinner, after you’ve saved the world. Wisdom seasons the meat.”
“I’m not meat, I’m Regan,” said Regan. The castle wall was in front of them now. It was a smooth unbroken gray, the stones stacked so carefully that there was scarcely a seam between them. Regan kept walking, paralleling the wall, until she saw a place where the stones didn’t quite fit. They gapped, not much, not enough for even Zephyr, who was slim, with her doe’s body, to fit through.
But it was wide enough for Regan.
“Thank you,” she said, turning to face both the strange creatures who had become her traveling companions. “I wouldn’t have made it this far, this fast, without you. But now it’s time for me to keep going on my own.”
“Let me check first to be sure it’s safe,” said Zephyr, and launched herself into the air before Regan could object. The peryton gained height with surprising speed, banking and wheeling above the castle walls, and perhaps there were advantages to being thought of as an unthinking monster, because no one raised any alarms at her presence. Regan stayed where she was, watching her fly, suddenly understanding how a peryton could be considered beautiful. Zephyr was lovely in the air.
When Zephyr landed again, she shook her head, like she was chasing away the last slivers of the wind, and said, “There are guards in the high battlements, but they won’t see you if you enter from down here. Your way is clear.”
“Thank you,” said Regan again. “I’m ready to continue.”
“Good luck,” said Zephyr.
Gristle didn’t say anything at all, only watched as Regan turned sideways and squeezed into the break in the wall. He stayed there, silently watching the space where she had been, until Zephyr spread her wings and leapt back into the air, and he was alone. He paced a circle, then lay down in the grass, head resting on his forelegs, and waited.
Inside the wall, everything was darkness and stone, pressing down on Regan until it felt like there was no air left, and she would surely suffocate and be forgotten. Would the door that caught her in the first place go hunting for another human child to sweep away, leaving them here to save the world? Or would that take too long? She was supposed to save the world, but the world had done just fine for five years while she was happily running through the woods.
She worked her way deeper into the narrow tunnel, until every trace of light was gone and she was simply squeezing her way into infinite shadow. Just as she thought she could go no farther, her questing hand hit open air, and she was able to force her way out of the wall, into the cool, draft-ridden open space beyond.
Still there was no light. Regan grimaced, put her hands in front of herself, and began feeling her way gingerly through the darkness, stopping when her foot struck what felt like the base of a stairway. They were deep, narrow stairs, cut to suit a human’s tread, and not the longer stride of a centaur or kelpie or other four-legged creature. It was strange, but not strange enough to keep her from feeling around until she found a bannister and beginning to pull herself up into the darkness.
It had been long enough since she’d had cause to climb a flight of stairs that she stumbled several times, catching her toes against the steps, nearly falling into the dark. How many other aspects of being human had she allowed to slip away from her while she was running through the forest? It was an impossible question, and so she kept going without stopping to answer it. The light began to return, a little bit at a time, the world going from utter blackness to gradients of gray, still dark at first, but thinning, until she could see her own hands, until she could see the carved shape of the bannister winding its way upward, into the highest reaches of the castle.
Regan kept pressing onward, until the light was bright enough to read by, until the stairs leveled out at a small landing, connected to a long hall. Unslinging her bow from her shoulder, she swallowed hard and walked on.
The air in the castle was cold and stale, nothing like what she expected from a palace. It should have been warm and bright and filled with life, scented with cake and tea and other delicacies. This didn’t feel like walking into a castle. It felt like walking into a tomb.
The thing about walking into a tomb is that it leaves plenty of time to consider what a foolish idea that is. As she walked, Regan remembered Pansy telling her about Queen Kagami, back when she’d first arrived in the Hooflands.
Regan stopped.
According to Pansy, Queen Kagami had been assisted in reclaiming her family’s castle from a wicked kelpie king by the last human to come to the Hooflands. But Zephyr and Gristle agreed that a kelpie had never held the throne, and said the crown was passed by a challenge, not along family lines. Why would they lie to her? Why would Pansy, who was a second mother now, have lied to her? Unless the centaurs weren’t lying, just mistaken—but then why did they have one history of the Hooflands, while the kelpies and perytons had another? It made no sense.
It made no sense unless Gristle and Zephyr told the truth when they said that there was one set of rules for the people who agreed that they were people, and another for the monsters who everyone else agreed couldn’t be people at all. It made no sense unless the Hooflands had been unfair since the very beginning.
“I can hear you breathing,” called a voice from somewhere up ahead of her, old as the grave and dry as dust. “Come in, little intruder. Come in. I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for so long.”
Regan had never seen a kirin, but from what she remembered, they were shaped much like unicorns, with hooves and horns and long, equine muzzles instead of flat human faces. The voice had none of the faint lisp she was accustomed to hearing from equine lips. The voice was low and tired and ancient, and entirely indistinguishable from a human’s. Cautiously, Regan started walking again, suddenly deeply glad for the bow in her hand.
A door stood open a little distance down the hall. Regan peeked around the frame, into the room on the other side.
It was large and square, with tapestries on the walls and carpets on the floor. A fire crackled in the grate, struggling and failing to warm the space. At the center of the room, positioned well away from the walls, was a tall canopy bed, mounded with pillows, and at the center of the bed was a human man, his hair grown long and wispy to match his unkempt beard and mustache. His body was so slight and wasted that it barely made a shape beneath the covers, which might as well have been tucked down flat.
He met Regan’s eyes, lifting his head the barest fraction of an inch in the process, and smiled.
“Took you long enough,” he said.