The Secret Horses of Briar Hill(17)

I jerk upright, feeling queasy.

I hurry back into the hospital and slam the kitchen door, heart racing fast. Even through layers of stone and wood and slate tiles, I can feel the Black Horse circling overhead. Foxfire may be safe now, but each night the moon will grow brighter. Before long, the Black Horse will see her, and she will not be able to fly away.

I need to find something yellow. Soon.





DR. TURNER PRESSES the silver stethoscope to my back.

I can see his face in the mirror. He is frowning. Woolly-worm eyebrows knit together. Mustached mouth pinched. He lowers the stethoscope around his neck and lets out a sigh, but when he turns to me the frown is gone. He dissolves two fat aspirin tablets in water and hands me the glass.

“Gargle this and count to twenty, then spit.”

I count slowly in my head, and then spit into a mug. When I look up, he is holding a yellow ticket. His eyes are not quite on mine. He clears his throat. “And affix this outside your door.”

I stare at the ticket.

Yellow?

The Sisters and Dr. Turner think we do not know what the tickets mean, but of course we do. Of course. Yellow means extra doses of cod liver oil. Yellow means only feeling the sunlight from a window.

Yellow means red is one step away.

“You’re wrong,” I say, and my voice is hard. “I’m getting better. I’m not like the really ill children. I only cough sometimes. I’d like the blue ticket, please.”

He does not give me the blue. He does not say anything. His eyebrows go extra woolly, and he turns away to write notes in his book.

My voice rises unsteadily. “Can I at least have a chocolate?”

His pencil stops, and he takes a deep breath, and then keeps writing. He sighs deeply. “There are no more chocolates.”

I shove the ticket into my pocket, beneath an apple I brought to give Foxfire later. While Dr. Turner writes, I watch the winged horses in the mirror-room, but I am too stunned to laugh when they bump the edges of the butler’s pantry, sniffing around the mirror-medicine bottles, nosing through Dr. Turner’s mirror-medical bag. One accidentally knocks over a box of tongue depressors and it clatters to the floor, and the horses jerk up in surprise and race each other for the doorway.

I turn away from them. On our side of the mirror, the real box of tongue depressors still sits on the sideboard.

Then I see it: the label on Dr. Turner’s big bottle of aspirin. It is yellow—863-CANARY YELLOW—the exact match to Anna’s colored pencil in my pocket. The label is old and peeling at the edges, but what matters is the bright, bright color, so bright it will hurt the Black Horse’s eyes.

Dr. Turner mumbles to himself and turns to the cabinet to write something on his pad of paper.

I glance at the bottle. I could take it. Now, while his back is turned.

In the mirror, one of the winged horses has stuck its head through the door once more, watching me.

Now.

I grab the bottle and try to peel off the yellow label, but it sticks. I’ll have to take the whole bottle. There are only two pills left in it. Two pills cannot save Anna’s life. Two pills cannot stop Kitty’s cough. But that yellow label might help Foxfire. My heart pounds, pounds, and something stirs in the stillwaters. I stash the bottle in my pocket just as Dr. Turner turns around, and the stillwaters flood my lungs, and my whole body shakes.

He reaches for a fresh handkerchief. “You must remember to cover your mouth when you cough. It’s very important.”

How can I remember to do anything at all, with a yellow ticket burning a hole in my pocket? I slide off the examination table. It isn’t until I open the back door to the terrace and breathe fresh air that my lungs start to calm.

The sound of clanking pots comes from the opened kitchen window. I don’t have much time before Sister Mary Grace will come find me to peel potatoes. She’ll take one look at the yellow ticket and tell me I can’t go outside anymore, not even to the terrace.

I dart to the garden wall, and climb it.

When the snows first fell, and the world was pristine and white, Foxfire blended into it as if she were made of snow herself. But the snow is not pristine anymore. It’s muddy with earth. Dirty snow coats Foxfire’s legs and underbelly. When she tosses her head, her mane falls in thick clumps that are in need of a good combing. Winter-dead sticks tangle in her tail.

But my heart still soars when I see her.

“You are a mess,” I say. Then I realize my own hair is just as tangled, my own boots caked in mud. “Well, we are a mess.”

Foxfire tosses her head as though she agrees. She comes right up and noses at my pocket until I take out the apple. She chomps at it before I can even lay my palm flat.

Hesitantly, not sure if I’ve earned her full trust yet, I reach up to her mane. “Easy there. I’m just going to untangle these sticks.”

She stops mid-bite, eyes swiveling toward my hand, but she doesn’t buck or rear. I am close. So close. And then my hand is on her neck. Oh, she feels alive. Her white hair is caked in cold clumps of mud, but there is warmth underneath. I can almost feel her heart fluttering. Can she feel mine, too?

“That’s lovely. See? That’s nice.”

Slowly, I stroke her neck from ear to shoulder, ear to shoulder, and bits of crumbly mud and dust rain down to the ground and make me cough. She seems to calm with each stroke. I free all the twigs I can, but the dirt goes deep. I will have to ask Thomas if he has a comb.