Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(36)

“I think I can walk from here,” said Regan. Gristle stopped, and she slid down from his back, stretching to work out the kinks in her spine. Then she began walking toward the castle, with Gristle pacing her on one side and Zephyr on the other. Their hooves clopped softly against the soft earth, and the sky smelled like rain on the way, and everything about the moment was inevitable; everything about the moment had been coming for her since the moment she’d walked through a door that wasn’t and into a world that somehow knew enough to know that it was going to need saving.

Not just saving: saving by someone who loved it. If the door had opened now, today, and dropped a gangly, long-limbed Regan wearing fresh new jeans and smelling of her mother’s perfume into the field, she wouldn’t have been fit for saving anything at all. She had never been given the opportunity to become that version of herself, but she knew in her heart that the other Regan wasn’t somehow the better one. The other Regan would never have understood the simple joy of fishing in the lake during her morning bath, hooking fat, slow bass under the gills with her fingers and flipping them onto the shore. She wouldn’t have seen the colts growing up, or lain with Chicory in fields of sweet grass, wondering about the shape of the future. If she was going to save the Hooflands, she had to be this version of herself, this awkward, half-wild, uncertain girl who’d grown up on a centaur’s back, racing through woods and breathing in air that always smelled, ever so faintly, of horsehair and hay. That other Regan had been the first sacrifice necessary to save the world, and she had made it without even knowing, and still she had no regrets.

She still didn’t believe in destiny. Clay shaped into a cup was not always destined to become a drinking vessel; it was simply shaped by someone too large to be resisted. She was not clay, but she had been shaped by her circumstances all the same, not directed by any destiny.

Regan walked on toward the castle, which loomed larger and larger before her, until it dominated the line of the sky. “Was she always a bad queen?” she asked. “Do either of you know?”

“The only bad thing I’ve ever heard of her doing was burning the centaur fields to the south,” said Zephyr. “She tried to take the human from them shortly after it arrived—I’m sorry, tried to take you—and when her people failed, she ordered the hippocampi to carry burning brands and set alight everything the centaurs owned, to punish them for disobeying her.”

Regan, who had heard nothing of this, stiffened but forced herself to keep walking. All these things had happened years ago, and she couldn’t change them now. All she could do was try to keep them from happening again. All she could do was keep moving.

“All queens are bad queens,” said Gristle. “When the queen is a centaur or a faun, they treat those of us without hands as if we were somehow less a part of the Hooflands than they are, when the very world is named for us. When the queen is a kirin or a hippogriff, they behave as if those who eat meat are savages who don’t deserve the lands we live on. There’s never been a kelpie queen. Those doors are closed to monsters like me.”

“There’s never been a peryton queen, either,” said Zephyr sadly. “They call us monsters, too, because they can’t talk to us.”

“Why can’t they?” asked Regan, confused. “If I can talk to you, they should be able to.”

“Civilized people don’t know how to listen,” said Gristle. “All their magic goes into the places they believe it belongs. You, human, have been here long enough to learn some magic of your own, and now any of us can speak with you, if we have cause to want to.”

Regan blinked slowly. “Oh,” she said.

“It won’t make the centaurs stop thinking of us as monsters,” said Zephyr. “There will never be a peryton queen.”

“But that’s not fair,” protested Regan. “How does a queen get chosen, anyway?”

“When an old queen dies, every herd in the Hooflands puts forth their finest candidate. They go to the meeting chamber built by the first Alliance of Hooves and Hands, back in the days before we had memory or thought, when the humans came here and refused to claim our pastures as their own. Only one leaves the chamber and ascends to the throne. The others are lost forever.”

“One of my mother’s sisters went when this queen was chosen, even though she knew a peryton would never hold the throne,” said Zephyr, sounding almost wistful. “I never met her, but Mother says she had antlers like cupped hands, full of wind and moonlight, and she was beautiful beyond bearing.”

Regan didn’t feel like she could say anything about peryton standards of beauty, so she didn’t say anything at all.

“As to how the queen is chosen from among the candidates, no one knows,” said Gristle. “Maybe she eats the others. Maybe she takes the throne with a full belly, containing part of every other thinking creature in the Hooflands. Even if she doesn’t eat them, they all vanish utterly and eternally.”

Regan shuddered. “But that would mean every reign began with murder. That’s no way to start.”

“We know she’s a bad queen now, so maybe she was always bad and just took a while to show it,” said Zephyr.

“Yes, but if she killed all the other contenders, then all the other kings and queens before her had to do that too. And if they all had to do that, there have never been any good rulers.”