Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(14)
And then there were the centaurs.
It was almost difficult for her to focus on them; her mind kept trying to skip over them and go to the more familiar details, like the mud and straw on the floor and the faint scent of horse manure in the air. Those were things she understood. Even Pansy was a thing she understood at this point; she had encountered Pansy on her own, as a singular entity, and an exception was always easier to grasp than a category—but the others? They were too much.
There were eight of them, all female, all built on the same massive scale as Pansy herself, their breasts covered by laced vests, their arms bare and powerful, with biceps bigger around than Regan’s thighs. Their coats came in every color of the equine rainbow, dapple and bay, chestnut and a silvery-gray that would have seemed luminous if not for the unicorns outside, reminding the world what “luminous” really meant. The oldest looked like she could have been Pansy’s grandmother, with wrinkles and lines worked in the soft skin of her face and hair as white as a swan’s wing. The youngest looked to be about Regan’s age, smaller and lither than the others, with a gawky dun filly’s body. She was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first to drop the carrot she’d been idly munching, and point a trembling finger at Pansy and Regan.
“Human,” she said, in an awed voice that was probably intended as a whisper, but which boomed through the room, as proportionately loud as Pansy’s. “Pansy found a human. Mom! Pansy found a human!”
A dark chestnut centaur with elaborately braided hair walked over to the young one, clamping a hand down on her shoulder like the pressure enough would be a command to silence. “I see that, Chicory,” she said, and unlike her daughter, she kept her voice low enough not to hurt Regan’s ears. “Humans can speak. She heard you. I taught you better manners than that.”
Regan’s cheeks flushed and her ears burned with secondhand embarrassment as the young centaur drooped, pinned by her mother’s hand. She shot Regan a look filled with shame, and it was so familiar, so essentially human, that Regan relaxed. These people might be centaurs, creatures out of myth and storybook, but they were people. They could be embarrassed by their own actions and by their overbearing parents. They weren’t awe-inspiring. They were just people.
Regan reached deep enough to find a smile and pull it to the surface, offering it to Chicory. The young centaur blinked large brown eyes in evident surprise before smiling back, then grinning, her lips stretching wide to expose square, sturdy teeth as large as the rest of her.
A hand clapped hard on Regan’s shoulder as Pansy boomed, “Her name is Regan. One of the wayward unicorns found her by the water, and I found the unicorn, and now she’s here, with us! We have a human!”
The centaurs cheered, the noise so large in the enclosed space that it virtually had physical form. Then they rushed forward, surrounding Regan with the hot equine scent of their bodies as they bombarded Pansy with questions about where she’d found the human, had it been frightening, had there been any warnings before it happened. Chicory inched closer and closer, until she was close enough that Regan could have reached out and touched her, if that wouldn’t have been impossibly rude.
Chicory’s vest was made of pale leather. Regan thought of the unicorns and swallowed bile. It wasn’t right to judge these people when she didn’t know anything about them. If they were eating unicorns—and oh, she hoped they weren’t eating unicorns—it would be more respectful to use every part they could, including the hides. Right? Right.
“Hi,” said Regan in a soft, shy voice. No matter how hard she tried to think of the centaurs as people, not storybook creatures, part of her still regarded them with almost overwhelming awe.
“Hi,” replied Chicory, and belched, as loudly as she did everything else. One of the other centaurs cuffed her in the back of the head, not hard, but casually, like she was swatting a fly. Chicory ducked her head and covered her mouth, giggling. Regan did the same, and for a moment, they were just two young girls surrounded by adults, united in a way that had been true since the beginning of time.
The adults were too preoccupied to notice when Regan backed away from Pansy’s side, beckoning Chicory to follow. Even being their precious human didn’t stop her from making her escape; like small, slight girls everywhere, she was well schooled in the ways of ducking under adult attention. They would notice her absence eventually, but in the meantime, she could get to know the only person here who might be unguarded enough to honestly answer her questions.
The voices of the adults masked the clopping of Chicory’s hooves. They weren’t shouting—quite—but they all seemed to be trying to drown each other out all the same. Life with centaurs was a noisy life, that much was obvious, and Regan had to swallow the urge to clap her hands over her ears. She moved as far away as she thought was safe, to the end of one of the long tables, and stopped there, casting uneasy glances at the door, like it might reach out and grab her at any moment.
Chicory noticed. She frowned and asked, “Did you see something outside? Or are doors dangerous where you come from? Do they grab people who get too close?”
“Sort of,” said Regan. “I was walking home from school, and I found a door in the woods that wasn’t supposed to be there. I went through it because I thought it was funny. I wound up here.”
Chicory blinked. “Don’t you want to be here?”