Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(32)
Chicory buried her face against her mother’s shoulder to hide her tears. Pansy and Daisy didn’t bother, only stood and let their tears run down their cheeks unchecked. None of them looked away until Regan had reached the place where the road began to bend out of sight. Bit by bit, she disappeared. One of the foals made a disbelieving wailing sound. She didn’t come back.
She didn’t come back.
For Regan, walking away from the forest was the most terrifying thing she’d ever done. She had been afraid before, but the fear had always been connected to consequences, not choices. Laurel’s reaction to her secret had been terrifying; she didn’t regret telling it, not anymore. She wasn’t ashamed of herself. Laurel was the one who had been in the wrong, and anyone who answered a friend’s honesty with horror and rejection had never been a friend in the first place. She’d been afraid when stepping though the illusion of a door had been enough to drop her in a strange new world, but that fear had passed and been replaced with wonder, and love, and security a long, long time ago. She wouldn’t have changed it if she could have.
This, though … this was something she had chosen and was still choosing, with every step away from home and safety. She could run. She could hide. She could refuse to face a Queen who considered her a danger because of who and what she was. She could keep living a happy, sheltered life, protected by her herd, putting her needs above theirs. The foals would be old enough to ask about their fathers soon. They would want the company of their own kind, and they deserved to have it. Chicory deserved it, too. She deserved Fairs and a herd of her own; she deserved a courtship, if she wanted one, and a husband she’d see once a year when she chose to see him at all. They deserved normal lives.
It was ridiculous, thinking about giving normal lives to other people when she was never going to have one for herself, and Regan laughed as she walked, the sound bright and merry in the cool morning air. She was a human who preferred the company of horses, or at least creatures who looked like horses. She was a hero, or she was going to be, and she never wanted to go home, even though she knew her parents had to miss her. She chose this world, where she could never be normal, over the world she had been made for. So it was a little strange that she was so eager to give away the things she could never have, even if she tried to want them.
She was still laughing when a great, shaggy black horse rose out of the ditch next to the narrow road, water weeds tangled in its mane and pond scum dripping from its muzzle. That muzzle was slightly too pronounced for its head, and its lips bulged like they were trying to contain something no herbivore’s mouth should have to hold. It looked at her with one immense brown eye. That, at least, looked like it could have belonged to a normal horse, wide and soft, the color of chocolate, and fringed with long, delicate lashes.
“I’m not coming any closer to you,” Regan informed the kelpie. “And you shouldn’t come any closer to me. I know what kelpies do to anything they think of as prey.” She unslung the bow from her shoulder, keeping it low by her hip as she pulled an arrow from the quiver at her side. “You go your way, and I’ll go mine.”
The kelpie’s lips pulled back from jagged teeth that would have looked equally at home in an alligator’s mouth. Then it said, in a gravelly voice, “Human girl. These roads are not safe for you alone.”
Regan jumped. “They never told me kelpies could talk,” she blurted.
The kelpie tossed its head. “And they kept you away from us, so you would never have cause to learn,” it said dismissively. “The centaurs are weak, and so they hate us. Civilization makes you weak. The centaurs have been civilized for long and long. If we had found you first, your time in the Hooflands would have been a very different thing.”
“Yes, because you would have ripped me to pieces and devoured my liver.”
“Perhaps,” allowed the kelpie. “But not until the time had come for you to play at salvation. We aren’t civilized, but we aren’t stupid.”
“That makes sense,” said Regan, and slung her bow back over her shoulder. “Still would have been nice to know you could talk before this. You startled me.”
“Other things in this forest will do worse than startle you if you keep on the way you’re going,” said the kelpie. “Here. Get on my back. Humans are notoriously slow, and I can have you to the castle in less time than it takes my stomach to sour.”
Regan took a step backward. “If I get on your back, you’ll rip me to pieces.”
“Have you saved the world yet?”
“Well, no.”
“Then no, I won’t. I told you, I’m not stupid. My hunger to survive is greater than my hunger for human flesh. Especially not human flesh that’s been kept by centaurs for years on end. You’ll taste of austerity and bad cooking. No, thank you. Get on my back and I’ll carry you where you need to go.”
Still Regan hesitated.
The kelpie stomped one foot in the muddy puddle it was standing in.
“Don’t be foolish, child. The sooner you save the world, the sooner I can eat you.”
“Do you have a name?” asked Regan hesitantly. For once, the conviction that she had a destiny seemed to be working in her favor, if it was keeping this kelpie from eating her.
“My mother called me ‘Gristle,’ for she thought I would be the toughest of her children, and she was right, for of my brothers and sisters and I, I’m still here and they’re long-since devoured and digested and gone to fertilize the fields. As all of us must one day do. Well, human child? Will you let me carry you?”