Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(30)
And time marched on.
It had been more than five years since Regan ran away from school on purpose and ran away from home by mistake. She barely thought of her parents anymore, and always with the faintest, burning tinge of guilt, like she’d betrayed them and their love by falling in love with another world, one that seemed designed perfectly for her. Part of her was sure they’d forgotten her by now, consigning her to the scrapbooks of memory, and had another child living in her bedroom, getting ready to start classes at her school. Another part of her knew they’d be mourning her forever, unsure whether she was alive or dead, and that part was sorry for what she’d done, even though she hadn’t done it on purpose. She would have gone back in the beginning if she’d been able to, but now she was fifteen and had been in the Hooflands for a third of her life, surrounded by people who loved her for who she was, who didn’t think she was weird or try to shove her into boxes she’d had nothing to do with building. This was her home.
She was never leaving.
She was in the river when Chicory pushed the bushes aside and called, “Regan! Mom wants you at the cottage!”
It was ridiculous how they still called the vast, barn-like building a “cottage,” but Regan’s annoyance wasn’t going to change the way language worked here, and it would have been rude to try. She straightened, icy water biting her thighs—hot showers were one of the few things she did miss from the land of her birth—and called back, “Why? I finished my lessons. I’m trying to get the mud out of my hair before it has time to dry.”
Chicory shrugged. “I don’t know. She just told me to go and get you, and you’d said you were going for a bath, so I knew I’d be able to find you here.”
Regan glared before sinking under the water and scratching her scalp, dislodging the last chunks of mud. She surfaced and paddled toward the shore, where she had a bundle of rosemary and violets waiting. She scrubbed them against her head, hard enough to release the oils in the vegetation, then ducked under again, rinsing the flecks of smashed greenery away.
When she surfaced the second time, Chicory was on the bank, hoof scraping impatiently at the mud. “Come on,” she said. “You know who gets in trouble if we’re too slow?”
“Let me guess,” said Regan. “Is it you?”
“Yes! It’s me! I’m supposed to be your best friend. Getting me in trouble on purpose is mean, and friends aren’t mean to each other.”
Regan blinked before she smiled, slow and sweet as summer. “That’s right,” she said, wading to the bank and stepping out of the water. “Friends aren’t mean to each other.” Her clothes were folded nearby. No one in the Hooflands knew how to make a pair of trousers, which made sense, considering their anatomical differences; instead, she pulled a tunic cut for the torso of a centaur on over her head, belting it around the waist like a dress. It fell almost to her knees.
Her tunics could be bought from the traveling peddlers who sometimes came down the main road with their creaking wagons full of wonders, although the family tried to make as much for themselves as they could, to limit exposure to the outside world. Her underpants had required Rose to work out a pattern and hand-sew them from scraps of fabric. The small complications of being the only one of her kind in an entire world never failed to surprise her. Climbing onto Chicory’s back, she positioned herself and said, “I’m ready when you are.”
“Did you have to get up there while you were still wet?” demanded Chicory, and broke into a trot. “I’m going to smell like wet fur all day now, thanks to you.”
“Just one of the many services we offer,” said Regan, and cackled with delight at her own joke.
Chicory shook her head. “Sometimes you can be so weird,” she complained, continuing to trot toward the cottage.
Regan held on tighter. “You love me being weird.”
“Do not.”
“Do so! You wouldn’t know what to do without me.”
Chicory sobered. “You’re right, I wouldn’t,” she said. “So when they tell you it’s time to go and be a hero, I want you to tell them you can’t do it.”
“What?”
“Everyone says a human has to be a hero. They talk about it at night, when they think we’re asleep. Mom says you’re tall enough to be an adult human now, and that means you’ll probably have to be a hero soon. But I don’t want you to!”
“Why not?” Regan frowned. “If I came here so I could save the Hooflands, doesn’t that mean I should do it? This is my home too. I don’t want anything bad to happen here.”
“Because humans go away after they turn into heroes!” snapped Chicory, and Regan froze. It felt like her heart had turned into a lump of ice and was sinking toward her toes, and all she could think in that moment was that toes were a horrible, human thing to have, and because she had them, she was going to lose this home, too. She was going to be sent somewhere else, and all because of something she’d never chosen and couldn’t help.
Chicory didn’t notice her distress, and continued, voice rising with every word, “Humans come here when they get lost and the Hooflands needs saving, and they stay until it’s time to save the world, and then they disappear forever!”
“Where do they go?” whispered Regan.