The Secret Horses of Briar Hill(29)

I glance out the open door, wondering when I can slip away to the garden to string up the handkerchief. Thomas, at some point, must have slipped away himself. I wonder if he is back in the barn, with Bog and the sheep. I wonder if he likes to be alone but not lonely too.

Susan holds up a string of white paper chains. “It’s so plain.” She suddenly spins on me. “Fetch the colored pencils Anna gave you! We can color the links green and red!”

The other children look up at me, their sticky fingers covered in paste.

Dread darkens me like a shadow. The pencils? Anna’s pencils? But she gave them to me.

I shake my head.

Benny huffs and looks at Sister Constance. “Tell her she must share!”

“Anna gave them to her,” Sister Constance says. “She can do what she wishes with them. If she chooses the path of generosity, as Anna so often did, then she will bring out the colored pencils. If she chooses to be selfish, well, then that is her choice.”

“But she’s being a baby!” Benny folds his arms, glaring. There is a wooden cross of Christ strung up behind him. If Jesus’s hands weren’t nailed to the cross, I think he’d be folding them at me too.

I fold my arms and glare right back.

If they want color—real color—then they are looking in the wrong places.

Benny glowers at me, then scoops up a handful of the snow paste on impulse.

“We all miss her!”

He throws the paste at my face.

It fills my mouth with the sudsy taste of lye. I sputter and cough, and Sister Constance grabs Benny by the ear.

“That wasn’t called for,” she admonishes.

“She’s a selfish little monster,” Benny spits out, while his ear is rapidly turning red. “She can’t just…She isn’t the only one…”

He disappears as Sister Constance drags him away, muttering something about staying in his room until the isolation makes his brain work properly.

I glance in the window’s reflection. The paste has turned my skin into a clumpy mess.

The other children are fighting the urge to snicker.

A monster.

The others won’t say it aloud, not with Sister Mary Grace’s watchful gaze right there, but I know they are thinking it.

Thomas is a monster because he is missing something.

I am a monster because I have too much of something. Too much hurt. Too much rage.

I do not care.

Only monsters, it seems, know that there are worlds and worlds and worlds, and ours is only one.





FOR DAYS, I CANNOT sneak out of the house. The Sisters stay up late during the holidays, writing cards to the village boys at war, in the library beside the window with the broken lock. I wait in the dark of the stairs, alone, rubbing my tired eyes, until at last they leave and I can dart outside to knot the farmer’s blue handkerchief into the ivy wall. There is still no letter from the Horse Lord, only my last one soggy and stained, and it leaves me feeling sick, as though I’ve eaten spoiled ham.

Back in my attic room, I cannot sleep.

The wind is knocking at the window. Thump. Thump. It is the same sound as horses kicking at a stall to be set free. I am sweating, even though the wind slipping through the cracks is frigid. No matter how much I ball up the blankets, the cold still gets in. I start to call to Papa to put more coal on the fire, but then I remember.

Papa isn’t here.

The day he left for the war, Mama and Marjorie and I dressed in our Sunday clothes. Marjorie combed my hair back into a ribbon, and she held my hand while we stood on the curb, watching the men parade down Waverley Street toward Castle Green, eating plump cherries Mama had brought, cheering, pointing out the men we knew from church and school, snickering at how serious the bakery delivery boys looked in uniform.

And Papa. Papa, with his wide shoulders strong as a workhorse, with his chocolate-colored hair, and that moment—a moment anyone else would have missed—when he saw us cheering for him and had to hold back a proud smile. It wasn’t until that night at supper, when I saw his empty chair at the head of the table, that the echo of the trumpets in my ears started to feel hollow.

I stare at the attic rafters. There are no spiderwebs. There are no swirls of dust. Sister Mary Grace can do one true thing to fight the stillwaters, and that is keep everything very clean, and so that is what she does.

I start coughing and double over, and something falls off my quilt and rolls across the floor. I collapse back on my pillow, feeling shaky and both cold and hot at the same time, and it is then that I recognize that rolling sound of the fallen object.

A pencil.

I strike a match and light a candle, then lean over to peer at the floor.

868-LAPIS BLUE.

The pencil is on the floor. In two separate pieces.

Broken!

Have I just broken it?

I scramble toward it so fast that I pitch clear out of bed and land on the hard floor. I pick up the two pieces. The end is broken off and dulled, the body snapped clear in two, and my heart pounds as I think of ways to fix it. Stick it back together. Glue the pieces. There must be a way….

The candle flickers, and another burst of color under the bed catches my eye. 845-CARMINE RED. Except it is only a tiny piece. The point of the pencil. With dread, I lift the quilt.

I almost cannot tell you what happens next.

It is too, too terrible.