The Secret Horses of Briar Hill(31)

He rubs the sleep from his eyes once more, and glances at the hospital as if he has half a mind to walk me back there and turn me in to Sister Constance. But he stifles a yawn, and opens the door wider.

I hesitate.

I have never been in Thomas’s cottage. None of us has. Benny says it is the place that he takes his victims to cage them until the witches eat them, but I see no children in cages. I see no swords or knives. I see only a rope bed with a straw mattress, like mine but bigger, and a woodstove with a coffeepot on top, and a few shirts hung in the rafters to dry.

There is a gnawed bone on the floor—but I think it belongs to Bog.

Thomas closes the door behind me to keep the heat in. He rubs his chin. “What is so important in the middle of the night?”

The heat from the woodstove makes my armpits damp. I fumble for the Horse Lord’s letter, starting to feel silly. Maybe this could have waited until the morning. Maybe it is childish to be here.

But no. Some things cannot wait.

I hand him the letter. “Read it.”

But he doesn’t take it.

“Well, go ahead.”

He clears his throat. He shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the woodstove. “Groundskeepers only read the weather.”

I’m a bit flustered—perhaps he cannot read and is embarrassed—and I take back the letter and read aloud the part about the special people who die before their time. When I’m finished, I look at him expectantly.

His brow is knit together like he doesn’t understand.

“That’s what I came to tell you,” I explain. “That certain special people who die before their time become winged horses. Your father, I mean. He was a great man who died before his time.” I tuck the letter back into my pocket. “Death isn’t the end for him. The Horse Lord says so.”

Thomas looks at the woodstove. Then he presses his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose, and takes a deep breath. He reaches down and rests his hand on my head. His palm is broad. It’s clear he is a man of the land, of the soil, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a man of the heart, too.

“If the Horse Lord said it,” he says, “then it must be true.”

“And for Anna, too.”

He nods. “For Anna, too.”

“And for me, if I die from the stillwaters.”

His hand, patting my short hair, stops. Bog looks up from gnawing on the bone, and cocks his head. Thomas takes a deep breath. The Sisters get upset whenever we talk like this. Asking about what happens if we die. They say it is our duty to think about life, not death, and to eat our bread and leave such matters to God. Dr. Turner gets upset too. He says many children survive the stillwaters. He tells us we could very well go on to live long lives, and become wives and mothers and husbands and doctors.

Thomas gives a soft sort of smile. “If that happens,” he says, “then you’ll fly the fastest of all the horses, I know it.”





THE NEXT DAY, the snow turns to stinging little pellets. Sister Constance’s strained voice carries from the classroom; she is teaching the little ones how to do basic sums. In the residence hall, all the older children’s doors are halfway open as they study from dog-eared textbooks with small print and no pictures.

I make for the attic stairs. Maybe there is a trunk I missed in one of the storerooms. Some long-forgotten package, filled with dusty paper that I’ll lift with care, to find a vase gleaming the color of tangerine orange. There used to be orange all over the world, I remember. At Christmas, oranges in our stockings. The oak tree’s leaves in autumn. Marigolds in spring.

But it is not spring.

It is not autumn.

It is winter, and there are no tangerines this year, not even with ration booklets. And without the color orange, the spectral shield is not complete. It is not strong enough to keep the Black Horse away.

I turn the corner, and stop.

The weight of eyes is on my back. I spin.

The hall is empty.

The only sound is snoring coming from Rodger’s bedroom. But when I turn back toward the attic stairs, the sensation returns, and I spin around again, and then again, in a full circle. The hair on the back of my neck tingles and—and is that the smell of apples? Movement in the hall mirror catches my eye. One of the winged horses steps into view in the gilded frame. He has a gray snip on his nose. He presses his muzzle against his side of the glass so that it fogs with each breath from his nostrils.

He is looking right at me.

“Um…hello.” I take a slow step closer. I reach up toward the mirror, but he pulls away, and my first two fingers brush only cold glass.

He tosses his head, and then snorts once, twice, and prances away. The mirror is once again just my own plain face looking back, short tufts of hair and green eyes and two sticky fingerprints.

But then—there. Movement from the next mirror down the hall, back the way I’ve just come. The same winged horse with the gray snip on his nose is there now, shaking his head so the ropes of his mane fall in his eyes. I reach for him, but he tosses his head again and disappears. Just like the bakery horses used to do with my sister, Marjorie. Letting her come close, close, close…and then prancing away. It was a game they played.

I rest my hands on my hips.

“I don’t have time for games.”

But he tosses his head again and prances off. In another moment he appears in the next mirror down the hall. He taps his nose against the glass. When I don’t come closer, he taps it again, more insistently this time, and rubs so hard against the glass that I’m afraid it will break.