The Secret Horses of Briar Hill(16)

The winged horses are stirring.





“May I see your colored pencils?” I ask.

At first, I had thought to use the pencils for the spectral shield. But I could never take Anna’s beloved pencils away from her, not even to save Foxfire. And besides, the Horse Lord said the objects had to be large enough to be seen from a distance. But they can still help me remember the colors of the rainbow. They can be my guide.

Anna leans forward to open the secret desk drawer, and the motion stirs the stillwaters. Murkiness rises in her lungs, and she muffles a cough. She takes out the box of colored pencils and some paper, but I shake my head.

“I don’t need paper.”

She gives me a curious look, but doesn’t ask. She sets the box on the bed. Anna is nothing if not organized, and the eight pencils are arranged just as the manufacturer boxed them, a spectrum of rainbow colors.

845-CARMINE RED

848-BLUSH PINK

849-TANGERINE ORANGE

863-CANARY YELLOW

865-EMERALD GREEN

867-SEA TURQUOISE

868-LAPIS BLUE

876-HELIOTROPE PURPLE





I press my finger into the tips of each pencil that Anna keeps so carefully sharpened.

“What’s wrong, Emmaline? You look unhappy.”

“I need to borrow them.”

It is Anna’s turn to look displeased. “We’ve talked about this. You can have paper and chalk, and you can use the pencils here in my room anytime you want, but they are too dear to me. I’m sorry, you can’t take them with you.”

The Horse Lord’s letter is stiff in my pocket. I run my finger over the paper’s edge again and again. My eyes shift to the mirror on her side table. The winged horses are stirring. The winds are growing stronger on the other side of the mirror, sweeping their manes and long tangled tails into their eyes. One in front, a dark brown horse with a bald face, throws its head toward the sky as if sensing danger. If I tell Anna how dire Foxfire’s situation is, she might try to go outside again. And I am afraid of how thin her arms look. Afraid of what more snow would do to her.

“Why can’t you just draw with them here, like you usually do?” She motions to the fan of drawings laid out on her bed.

I slip my hand out of my pocket.

“It’s a secret.”

“Does this have to do with the winged horse in the sundial garden?”

I pause. “Her name is Foxfire.”

Anna’s eyes, for just a second, flick to the mirror. Inside it, the horses are starting to run now. Faster and faster, racing the wind, across the front lawn. They’re almost to the stone fence that separates the hospital grounds from Mr. Mason’s farm. The horse in front stretches out its white-tipped wings at the last minute and soars. Does Anna see the horses? Does she see them fly?

But no. She is only looking at the dried lavender next to the mirror. Sister Constance says the smell is good for the stillwaters, but I think it must be the shape of the flower that Anna likes best, because she draws it over and over.

Anna runs her fingers over the box of pencils. “Well, it sounds very important, so you may borrow one at a time,” she says. “Which would you like first?”

I point to 863-CANARY YELLOW. The color of Marjorie’s raincoat. Anna draws it out of the box with fingers that are so fragile and so white that they could almost be bone china.

I study the pencil. I think of all the things that are yellow in the hospital. Butter. Sweet corn. Tinned peaches. My stomach grumbles. It’s almost teatime. The smell of broth is coming from downstairs, and then Sister Mary Grace walks in with a tray of leek stew and a glass of water for Anna.

“Emmaline,” Sister Mary Grace says, “go round up the little ones and tell them tea is nearly ready.”

I slip the yellow pencil in my pocket next to the Horse Lord’s curled note. I couldn’t put butter or sweet corn or peaches in the sundial garden. Foxfire would just eat them.

I go to the library, and to the ballroom filled with wooden benches to make a chapel, and finally find the three little mice and Arthur outside, sitting on the kitchen stairs.

“It’s teatime,” I say. They jump at my voice and then giggle in their mouse language, which poor mute Arthur must not understand, because he starts sucking his thumb. He stares at me with his big wide eyes, and then looks past me at the tin laundry tub, and then Beth pokes him and they all scamper past, into the kitchen. I grab hold of Susan, the littlest mouse.

“Where exactly did you find those long black feathers you had the other day?” I ask.

“Right there,” she says proudly, pointing to the corner of the terrace where Sister Mary Grace does our laundry. “They blew off the roof, I think. When the snow melts, I bet we’ll find hundreds of them. Kitty says they must come from giant crows that have flown all the way from America.”

I let her go, and she flounces back to the others, who are waiting.

I look toward the roof.

I do not think that there are crows that big anywhere, not even in America.

And then I take a step toward the far edge of the terrace, where laundry basins are stacked, and go no farther, in case one of the Sisters is watching from a window.

My foot squishes in something wet and smelly.

Cripes.

Sheep droppings. I drag my boot across the bricks to wipe the muck off, but pause. Something isn’t right. There are small bones of tiny animals in the clumps. Bird wings and mouse teeth. Things that shouldn’t be in manure at all. Perhaps these droppings are from foxes. Or perhaps they are from a wicked horse that hunts other animals, a horse that leaves angry hoof prints on the roof and rains down long black feathers. I smell a trace of rotting seaweed.