4
Estajfan runs alone. He’s always run alone. In the mornings he’s gone before Petrolio and the others are even awake. His gallop down the mountain is a whirlwind of light and sound, a tangled fall of dark trees and leaves—in the bitter winter wind, in the summer with the rush and hint of morning sun to come. He jumps and he lands and he lunges and jumps again, his arms spread for balance, his muscles tensing and releasing over and over again.
It feels good to be alive in these moments, possibly because he knows it could all change so quickly—one hoof snagged and down he would go, a foreleg snapped, tumbling in a different way, the weight of his body the thing, in the end, that will kill him. But he doesn’t stumble. He runs and jumps, and always his hooves land exactly where they should. He doesn’t break.
When the mountain meets the ground, he keeps on running. He runs until he reaches the edge of the mountain forest and can see the houses and their already overgrown yards through the trees. And then he stops, and waits.
The ground magic is different here, where the earth is flat. It used to be louder, but it has been muffled by the human houses and human roads, by the pipes that run underground and disrupt the dirt.
It’s getting louder now, day by day.
The trees are moving slowly south—half an inch this day, half an inch the next. He feels them stretch their roots beneath the soil and inch forward the way caterpillars inch along their branches. The way that vines are inching over the houses. The way that slowly, slowly, the human city is sinking back into the green.
No one has noticed this yet, he thinks, except perhaps for Heather.
They will notice soon enough.
He hears her footsteps on the sidewalk long before she comes into view. The city is so quiet now. There are cars, but only rarely—there is no power, so the houses do not rumble and shake. There are noises now and then from the centre of the town, but nothing like they used to be. It isn’t hard to hear the ground bring her close to him. That gait—tap-TAP, tap-TAP—that belongs only to her.
He sinks into the trees as she comes into view. She will go into the forest as far as she is able, and walk amongst the trees with her girls. She tells them stories, or she weeps silently as they wail to the sky.
She is looking for him. He knows she is always looking for him.
When he was younger, he ran only at night. He ran down the mountain and past the city nestled in its shadow—beyond the foothills, beyond the rivers. He ran through the flatlands—keeping always in the shadows and away from human roads. When he needed to hide, the ground told him where was safe.
Their father had also been restless. Gone from the mountains for days at a time as a horse, and gone for days at a time in his new life as an in-between thing, hiding the way that Estajfan would eventually learn to do. He came back to the mountain with clothing and toys and all manner of human paraphernalia—pots and pans, books that he shelved on a structure he made from dead trees. At night he told his children stories of their village, even though Estajfan had known, from the time he was small, that they did not belong there. Not as a family. He knew their father went back to the village and roamed it at night when everyone was sleeping. The toys that he brought them, the tools that he used to build things on the mountain—all of this came from the village and smelled of the past.
After their father died, Petrolio had wanted to fling these things off the mountain. But Estajfan couldn’t bear to let them go. He wanted more of it—the touch of the human world, the things they made. His longing for their father was so great it brought him down into the world their father had forbidden them to see—down into the midnight darkness of the flatlands, past these squat human houses all bursting with things. He crept through the trees and watched humans make their way down cobblestone streets. The gas lamps on the sides of their roads, the chugging power of the trains.
When he came back up from his first run, Aura met him on the mountain trail.
“Da told us not to go down,” she said.
“Da isn’t here anymore.”
“You want to honour him. So do I.” Her voice was thick with pain.
“Our whole life has been the mountain,” he said. “But what if it can be more than that?”
“They’ll hurt you,” she said. In the moonlight her blue-green eyes seemed frightened and huge and her blonde hair shone white. “They won’t understand.”
“How do you know that? Have you ever been down?” When she didn’t say anything, he felt his bones soften in shock. “You have?”
“Not really,” she said, quickly. “Only in dreams.”
“Dreams,” he repeated, looking at her. He didn’t dream, and neither did Petrolio, but he knew enough about dreams to understand that they weren’t real. “So you don’t actually know what the humans would do.”
“I know what they did to Da,” she said. “I know what they did to us. That’s enough. It should be enough for you too.”
It wasn’t. As the years went by he went down more and more. He stole children’s toys and items abandoned around a country farm. He stole picture frames propped against the side of a darkened house. When he brought them back up the mountain, it felt as though their father was still alive.
Their father’s eyes had been mossy brown, like the eyes of the new centaurs birthed by the mountain. Centaurs who looked and talked like them but were comfortable in their bodies in ways that the three of them were not. The new centaurs didn’t cry. They didn’t laugh. They had no interest, whatsoever, in the world below them. A world that moved so quickly—gas lamps that gave way to electric lights. Trains that soon ran beside highways and cars. Subways. Children who so soon became adults. Every time Estajfan went down it felt like a jump into the future. He brought back a music player that ran on batteries, a handheld mirror that was one thing the mountain centaurs adored. Sometimes he caught Petrolio with it, and teased him, but the mirror unnerved Estajfan a little. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw his face in the stream—his father’s face, his mother’s eyes. He wished that no part of him had reminded their father of her.
This had been his life. It was not enough, but it had been bearable.
Then, the girl and her father on the mountain.
Today when Heather comes she is already weeping, the babies squalling and squirming in pain. He watches her stride through the field and into the trees. She passes so close he can smell the dampness of her hair. Beneath that, her sweat and fear and sorrow. She is thinner than she was a week ago. In the night, when he creeps among the houses in the dark, he hears the whispered worries of the people in the city. No one has come to help them. There has been no news.
I can’t do this anymore, she’d said those months ago. I want to be up on the mountain with you.
He’d told her again that the mountain was not her home. It’s barely even my home, he said. He could tell that she didn’t believe him.
You’ve lived there all your life. It’s the only home you know.
He tried to make her understand. It is an in-between place, he said. For an in-between thing.
Rigid with anger, she’d gone back to the city.
The next time he saw her, she was pregnant.
I think it would be better, she said, if we didn’t do this anymore. You’re right. I belong here. You belong there. I was stupid to think otherwise.
He didn’t think she was stupid. He wanted to tell her that. But in his head, he heard his sister.
They’ll hurt you, Aura had said. They won’t understand.
And so he let her go.
After the meteors came, he stood vigil in the forest, day in and out, until he once more heard her footsteps on the streets of the city. Unmistakably hers. Tap-TAP, tap-TAP. He shouldn’t have been able to hear them, but he did—the ground, he knew, was giving him a kindness. Only then did he make his way back up the mountain.
Now he comes down every day and waits for her, though he stays hidden. The trees bend around him, obscure him in leaves.
With her babies, she is not an in-between thing, even though she might wish to be. She does not belong on the mountain.
He sees the fox tempt her at the edge of the forest. He sees the portal open up. He is ready to yell when she unwraps the children and lays them before it, ready to come crashing out and scoop up the babies. She grabs them just in time.
When she walks past him again this time, oblivious to the centaur hidden in the trees, he lets out a breath and a prayer.
On the way back up the mountain, he encounters Fox on the mountain path.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.
Fox only shrugs. “You cannot control what she wants forever.”
“You aren’t offering her what she wants!” he cries. Through that portal is the mountain’s deep gorge and a long, heedless fall to the ground.
Fox licks her lips. “The world is no longer a place for in-between things,” she says. “If you decide to speak to her, you would do well to tell your human that.”
“No longer a place?” he says. “What does that mean?”
Fox blinks. “It means you have a choice to make.”
Farther up the mountain, his sister waits for him.
“You need to stop going down,” Aura says. “You can’t help her, Estajfan. You can only make things worse.”
“They have no home. Their home has been destroyed.”
“What can you do?” Aura says. “Nothing. You need to stay here.”
He turns to her, incredulous. “I expect that from the mountain centaurs. Not from you.”
She flushes. “Estajfan, we aren’t meant to be down there. With them. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” he almost shouts. “Aura, they are going to starve.”
“You don’t know that,” she insists. “Fox says they’re storing food.”
“Do you think that food will last forever?” he asks. She’s never been down off the mountain. She hasn’t seen their cities, their malls. The cars that used to scuttle along the roads. Their bicycles, their buildings. Their mirrors and their music players, their batteries, their gas lamps, their electric trains.
They are magic, he wants to tell her—a different kind of magic from the mountain. Raw and selfish and angry, yes, but magic all the same.
“They’re planting gardens,” he concedes. He doesn’t want to fight with her. He thinks of the magic in the ground around the city—how much louder it is now, how gleeful its rage. “But I don’t think that’s going to help them.”
Aura doesn’t meet his eyes. “We don’t belong there,” she says.
The mountain centaurs sang when fire rained down from the sky. They raised their arms and cheered.
Why not? he wants to say. Why can’t we belong anywhere we want to go? “We don’t belong on the mountain either,” he says instead, and walks on past her.
Aura had been with him that day, years ago, when the girl and her father had come up the mountain. The two of them had been alone and basking in the sun, and suddenly there were human voices coming closer, carried to them on the wind. They shrank into the trees and watched the father and the girl climb up and stop in a small clearing on the path. Watched them sit down and open their packs and begin to eat.
Aura moved toward the humans first. That is what happened.
He still doesn’t know what alerted the father to their presence, whether it was Aura passing through a shaft of sunlight, a sound. But he looked up from his meal and straight at her, no longer quite as hidden in the trees. Then the girl looked up too, and gasped.
He can close his eyes and see the scene in detail all these years later. The shock on their faces. The joy and the terror. Aura was close enough to touch, and the moment the father realized this, he stood and reached out, likely expecting something magical to happen.
“Hello,” the father had breathed as he took hold of Aura’s wrist. She jumped back, startled, but he tightened his grip, turning to the girl. Estajfan couldn’t hear what he said to his daughter, but he watched betrayal bloom over her small face. As the father turned back to Aura, she yanked her hand away with such force the man pitched forward and wobbled, unsteady on the mountain rocks. And then he lost his balance and tumbled over the side of the mountain.
Estajfan was almost in time, lunging for the man’s outstretched arms, his fingers brushing the father’s fingers, but he was gone, no time for screaming. They heard the impact in the trees so far below, then nothing.
The girl stood frozen. He felt as if she could reach into his chest and know everything there was to know about him—the longing, the fear. Her shoulders began to heave and she opened her mouth. He was terrified that she would scream, that the mountain centaurs would hear her and come running and toss her off the mountain too. He scooped her into his arms before she had a chance. Then he was running down the path, the girl’s tears hot against his shoulder.
He ran until they were at the base of the mountain, until they were in the forest, until they were outside the girl’s house. It took a long time. It took no time at all. He bent and put her on the ground; he expected her to collapse, but she stood firm.
“How did you know where my house was?” she whispered. It was dark now, and her face was a collection of shadows.
“I didn’t,” Estajfan said, because it was true. The house had called to him, alive with the girl and her memories. He’d never forget where it was.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Estajfan.” A light came on in the dark house. “Don’t ever come up the mountain again,” he said. “You, or anyone else.”
The girl nodded. He could see that she was still shivering—still waiting to scream. Somehow he knew that she wouldn’t tell anyone about it—Aura, how her father had died. He thought of Aura, whom he’d left alone on the mountainside.
“Forgive me,” he said, finally. And then, “Forgive him.”
He saw the girl’s fists tighten and he turned around and ran for the forest.
The scream, when it came, reached him anyway.
Before the man fell, Estajfan had never dreamed. The first time it happened he woke up screaming, to find the mountain centaurs massed around him, silent and suspicious. Aura had come running too. “It’s all right, Estajfan,” she said. “It’s just a dream. It will go away.”
She was wrong—the dream came back. It was always the same: the mountain, the father, the fall. The look of hurt on the child’s face. That tiny slice of time when the father’s fingers brushed his and then were gone. That tinier sliver when Estajfan had hesitated. These humans, climbing up into his home without asking. Touching Aura like she was something they owned.
Expecting magic from them, like it was something they were owed.
He didn’t dream of the girl. He didn’t need to. After her scream followed him back up the mountain, he felt her every day—a presence down below, a shadow that moved through the halls of her home. He knew that she was hurting. Though her pain dulled in time, every now and then her grief would spike, the swell of it so huge that Estajfan would have to stop and close his eyes.
She had gone silent, lost her words. He could feel the worry of everyone around her. No one knew what to say, what to do.
He did not know what to say, or do. As the anniversary of the father’s death approached, her silence grew loud and desperate. He felt her mind whirling up here, looking for him, as she trudged from school to home and back again.
He woke on the morning of that first anniversary with a pain in his chest that wouldn’t go away and the remnants of a dream—this time of the girl, standing at the edge of a cliff. He paced the mountain path alone, wandering lower and lower, until he reached the spot where they’d picnicked a year ago.
The flowers were as bright and red as ever. Beneath them, he saw the father’s knapsack, toppled on its side and crusted over with dirt. Animals had long ago eaten whatever food had been inside.
He picked flowers until his arms were full, then slung the knapsack over his shoulder and made his way down the mountain.
Before he reaches their home on the mountain, another centaur stops him. Mossy green-brown eyes like his father’s. Hard like the mountain in everything else. A female palomino with white-blonde hair, like Aura’s.
“The humans are ending,” she tells him. “You should not be going down the mountain anymore.”
“I can’t leave them alone,” he says.
The mountain centaur shrugs. “The more you try to stop what is happening, the more it will hurt.”
He’s so tired of hearing them say this. They could all go down. They could help the humans find food. They could—he thinks of the way Heather’s father’s face erupted in joy at the sight of them so long ago—carry flowers right into the houses. The humans might be frightened at first, but beauty could bring them happiness too.
Don’t they deserve that, at least?
Doesn’t Heather?
“You should stop thinking about what the humans deserve,” the centaur says, “and focus on what you deserve.”
“No one deserves what’s going to happen next,” he says. He’s unsure what that is, exactly, but the rage deep in the ground makes him uneasy.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen either,” the centaur says. “And I don’t need to know. The mountain has given us what we need. Stay here, and let that be enough for you, too.”
She isn’t being unkind—none of the mountain centaurs are unkind to him and his siblings, exactly, but they don’t understand him, and they don’t care to.
That night he climbs to the top of the mountain and sees the palomino standing with another centaur. Watching for what, he doesn’t know. The stars pinwheel over their heads in a slow, constant circle. Estajfan goes to the three old willows and lets his heart reach deep into the ground.
Da, he says. Show me what to do.
His father has been dead for more years than he can count. And the mountain, if it has any wisdom, refuses to give it.
On that first anniversary the girl had found him in her backyard, half hidden in the trees. He’d dropped the knapsack at her feet and held the bouquet out to her.
“What are those for?” she said. The first time he’d heard her voice since her father died.
“They’re…for you,” he said.
“Flowers aren’t going to bring him back.” But still she took them from him. She was thinner than she’d been a year ago. And taller, as though grief had stretched her out. She sniffed the flowers. “Why are you really here?”
“You’ve been silent,” he said. “I was…worried.”
The girl cleared her throat. “How would you know? Have you been spying?”
“Spying?” he said, confused. “I don’t know what that is. I can feel your silence.” He took a step closer. “Why aren’t you talking?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t have anything to say.” She put the flowers gently on the ground and then picked up the knapsack and sniffed it. “It still smells like him,” she said, surprised. “I thought it would smell like the mountain.”
He looked up at the house. He could feel her mother in there somewhere, sleeping. “Your mother worries about you,” he said.
She mulled this over. “Does she worry about you? The other…”
“Centaur,” he said, giving her the word. “Sometimes. She’s my sister. She always worries.”
The girl smiled faintly. “I don’t have a sister. No one worries about me except for my mom.”
“Everyone worries about you. I can feel that, too.” He spread his hands. “If I could take anything back—”
“It wasn’t your fault he fell.” She looked down at the flowers, cleared her throat. “The flowers he grew are dead now. My mother wouldn’t let me take care of them. She said the greenhouse was too close to the mountain. She’s afraid I’ll go back up.”
“Will you?”
The girl looked straight at him. “I miss the mountain. I was afraid of it, but I miss how it made me feel—strong.” She dropped her eyes as she whispered. “Was he right?”
“You are not meant for the mountain,” he said. “The mountain will not save you. You do not need to be saved.” Her head went up at this, her gaze puzzled and hopeful as she tried to understand. “But,” he said, relenting, “I can bring you flowers, if you want.”
He could tell that it wasn’t what she wanted, but she nodded. “What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Heather.” She looked back down at the flowers, then swallowed hard. “How come I’m the one that survived?”
He thought of the way she made her way through the halls at school. The uneven, inexorable stride. And then he thought of his father, building their life on the mountain alone. “Maybe you were ready to survive,” he said. “Maybe you’ve always been ready.”
“My father used to tell me stories,” she said. “No one’s told me stories for a year.”
“A year,” he repeated, slowly. When she looked at him, he only shrugged. “Humans are like the stars that fall in the sky,” he said. “Everything about you is so quick, and then gone.” He cleared his throat. “I can tell you stories. My father used to tell us stories too.”
“I would like that.”
They stood for a moment in silence. Estajfan cleared his throat. “What kind of story would you like to hear?”
She moved forward until she was standing directly beneath him.
“Tell me where you come from,” she said. “Tell me about where you live.”
In the morning he wakes with a jolt, the air around him hushed and still, another dark dream about that day receding. The mountain centaurs are gone and he is alone on the summit.
The air is clear here. It is so easy to believe that life on the mountain can continue exactly like this, forever.
The red-haired man, he knows, is the father of her twins. Each day he tries to rebuild the city while Heather walks through the trees alone.
She tells her daughters stories. She tells stories to herself. She doesn’t say his name.
She is safe, at least for now. She said that she doesn’t want to see him.
But he can keep her safe. Even if he can’t help everyone else.