Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(17)
The first time Regan was called to assist with a birth, Pansy boomed with laughter and slapped her on the shoulder so hard she staggered. “I told you. Thumbs! It’s all about the thumbs with you humans.” And then she cantered off to round up the unicorns, who were closer to a gully than was good for them.
That night, Regan helped Daisy ease a foal with a dappled coat and a needle-sharp horn the length of Regan’s own index finger into the world, wiping him clean before settling him beside his mother, who lowered her head and shook her horn at the interlopers. Daisy laughed, swatting her on the flank.
“Be quiet, you old thing,” she said. “My apprentice is only here to help, and she got you a fine boy instead of an early grave. Appreciate what you have and let yourself be happy.”
“Apprentice?” Regan asked, voice trembling.
“If you want to be,” said Daisy. “You’re our human, and you don’t have to work if you don’t want to; just having you with us is a sign of status in the eyes of the other herds, and I know you must go to the Queen in her castle when it’s time. You can be indolent and foolish until then, if it’s what makes your heart happy. But I don’t believe it is. You’re too slow to scout and too small to handle the stallions, so you can’t work the herd. Yet you volunteer whenever there’s something you think you can do. This is something you can do. You can help me save lives. I can teach you.”
“What happens if a door catches me?” asked Regan, voice suddenly small.
Daisy sighed, putting one large hand on the girl’s shoulder. “They’re not predators, child, not like the kelpies. They won’t chase you down to break your bones and rend your flesh. When your time to return to where you came from arrives, the door will find you and it’ll be up to you whether or not you go through.”
“But everyone says humans disappear after they do whatever they came here to do,” protested Regan, voice getting louder. The centaurs never scolded her for yelling. Her normal speaking voice was soft enough compared to theirs that they heard almost everything she said as if it was a whisper. “I don’t want to be your apprentice and then disappear on you! That’s not fair!”
“Peace, child, peace.” Daisy offered her a smile. “Any of us could disappear at any time. Landslides, predators, even illness, they come for us all if age doesn’t get there first. So you can be my apprentice, and I’ll teach you as much as I can before you leave us, and when you do leave us, I’ll find someone else who wants the things I have to offer. It won’t be Chicory. She has no grace for it, and no desire to be tied to the herd for all her days. Maybe at the Fair we can barter for another girl who’s interested in the healing arts, if you feel it necessary.”
“The Fair?” asked Regan.
“We’ll go there as the year turns, before you and Pansy travel to the Queen,” said Daisy, picking up her basket of herbs and balancing it on her withers. “We’ll bring the stock to sell what we can, since the flock can’t be allowed to get too large. We’ll visit our husbands, those of us who have them, or the local boys, if we don’t. And some herds will have grown too large, and may be looking to send their daughters off to learn honest trades. We could sustain a few more mouths.”
Regan blinked. This was the first she’d heard of husbands, and while she’d wondered why all the centaurs were female, she had never felt she could ask before. “Husbands?” she asked.
Daisy clucked her tongue. “Go tell Pansy the foal’s out, and the mare survived. You’re too young to speak of husbands. Go now, go.”
Regan, who was generally obedient when she lacked reason not to be, turned and ran for the longhouse. The more time she spent with the centaurs, whose walking pace was her jog, the harder she found it to do anything slowly. So she ran, and Daisy smiled, watching the girl go.
It had been so long since there was a human in the Hooflands. She didn’t like to consider what might be ahead of them that was bad enough to require human intervention. Humans were heroes and lightning rods for disaster, and none of the stories she’d heard about them when she was a filly had ended gently for them, or for the people around them. Aster had always been careful to tell Chicory the most hopeful of the human stories, the ones where the humans did their grand deeds and disappeared, presumably going back where they came from, but Daisy’s own mother had been less circumspect, and she knew where most of the humans had gone when their battle ended—into the ground. She couldn’t possibly say whether the same fate waited for Regan—it was too soon for that, and she’d never heard of a human hero as young as Regan was, or as eager to please—but the girl was more likely to find her own doom than a doorway home. In the meantime, the herd would care for and tend to her, and part of that caring was keeping her busy enough that her thoughts didn’t devour themselves alive. She was a child, far from home, surrounded by members of a species that wasn’t hers. It would have been understandable for her to fall into despair. The fact that she hadn’t was barely shy of a miracle, and one more piece of proof that humans could do anything when they put their minds to it.
Daisy sighed, one hand stabilizing her basket, and started plodding toward the longhouse. They were going to protect and nurture the girl as long as they could, keeping her safe from a world that would have happily destroyed her. Regan still viewed anything with hooves as a potential friend, looking on them with joy and wonder, no matter how many times she was warned about the kelpies and the perytons and the bat-winged pterippus. It made Daisy wonder how many humans they had missed, children who had stumbled through a door without someone like Pansy nearby to save them from their own adventure. Regan could have been lost before she was ever found, if the kelpies had been only a little bit hungrier on the day she’d crossed over.