Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(29)

Chicory wasn’t so lucky. As the youngest member of the herd, the logic the adults lived by seemed to think she would be the best at caring for young things, since she remembered what it was to be one of them. She found herself tapped for babysitting any time the adults got tired of it, which was often. It didn’t help that none of them had any experience with boys or brothers, not even the three sisters who had come from the north in the first place. These boys were the sons of fathers they might never see, not while they needed to keep Regan hidden and safe.

So Chicory found herself caring for a small horde of shrieking hellions who inadvertently answered many of Regan’s questions about centaur development, questions that had always felt too intrusive and potentially insulting. Like horses, they’d been born capable of supporting their own heads, already prepared to wobble around the cottage on shaky legs with knobbly knees. They had started at what looked to Regan like roughly two years of age, but with the dexterity and naivete of human infants, and they had remained almost exactly the same size for the two years that followed, as their brains caught up to their bodies.

The same couldn’t be said for Chicory and Regan. Both shot up, gaining height at a speed that had rendered Regan’s original clothes unwearable before the end of that first winter. She remained slender as a reed, arms and legs ropy with muscle, chest as flat as ever. Chicory, on the other hand, grew in other directions as well, necessitating a new kind of vest to keep her breasts from impeding her when she ran through the forest. Regan found herself needing to be much more careful where she put her hands when she rode. Not that she needed to hold on all that often anymore; they moved as one creature when they ran together, and Regan learned to mount by dropping out of the trees directly onto Chicory’s back.

Regan’s ability to climb was a constant mysterious delight to the little ones, whose hooves didn’t grant them anywhere near her dexterity. Even Chicory was sometimes surprised to look up and realize how high Regan had gone. The adult centaurs exchanged knowing looks and watched her go, their human, growing and learning in safety, well outside the reach of the Queen. Their loyalties had shifted forever on that long-ago day at the Fair, when the Queen to whom they had previously pledged themselves had allied herself with those who would harm the girl most of them thought of almost as a daughter.

Five years passed in the shadow of the trees, the foundations of their cottage sinking deeper into the soil, taking stability from the passage of time. The colts began growing again when they were almost four years old, putting on height at an incredible rate, vocabularies expanding by the day. Chicory began to enjoy babysitting duties. Regan learned to climb all the way to the tops of the trees, the better to escape her tiny herd of unwanted admirers. Daisy threatened to tie a rope around her ankle so she could be hauled back down when it was time for lessons. Life went on.

The perytons who lived in the deep part of the forest resembled nothing so much as winged deer that had been skinned but somehow managed to keep walking around under their own power. They were carnivores, their powerful jaws making short work of any squirrels or rabbits that came too close. They snapped at Regan when she approached, but didn’t flee. They didn’t press their attacks, either. She began following them through the woods, making an effort to get as close as she could without losing a finger, and was able to track them to the burrows where they lived and raised their young, gangly, half-fledged things that tore and snarled at each other, learning to hunt one mock-battle at a time. Pansy scolded her, telling her to leave the terrible things alone, but Regan was enchanted and no longer accustomed to being told “no.”

“You keep telling me I’m supposed to save the world,” she said, after one particularly intense scolding. “How can I do that if I run away from a stupid skinless deer?”

Pansy folded her arms. “You keep saying you don’t believe in destiny. This was easier before you decided to grow up,” she said. “Can’t you be a little girl again? I liked that better.”

Regan laughed. Here, surrounded by people who loved her but had no idea what humans were supposed to be like, she was normal. No one seemed to notice or care that puberty was passing her almost entirely by, and somehow, that took any potential sting out of the situation. So she wasn’t changing the way Chicory was. She wasn’t the same as Chicory, didn’t have hooves or a tail or pointed ears. Wishing to be a centaur wouldn’t change anything about who she was, and so there was no point in wishing for anything else about herself to change.

“No,” she said. “But I’ll always be yours.” She hugged Pansy then, the top of her head coming up to the centaur’s collarbone, before letting go and running off into the woods.

Her days were split between running wild and working with Daisy, who insisted her education mattered more than anything. The colts were accident-prone; she had already splinted several arms and stitched up several gashes too deep to leave to heal on their own. She knew every medicinal herb that grew in the woods, and several that didn’t, although she wasn’t sure she’d recognize them if she saw them growing fresh, having learnt their shapes and properties from the dried specimens in Daisy’s saddlebags. It was a long, slow apprenticeship, and she sometimes worried that as the colts aged, one of them would show an interest, and Daisy would abandon her in favor of a member of her own kind. Daisy showed no signs of doing so, and Regan began to relax. Her ability to climb let her bring back rare herbs for Daisy to dry and add to the stocks, gathered from the tops of trees and the bottoms of gullies.