“Hey,” said Duncan, his heart skipping in his chest, “white horse, are you here?”
There was a slight pause, and then, “Honestly, where else do you think I would be? It’s not like I can work the latch on the stall door.”
Tension fled from Duncan’s shoulders. He released the breath he had unconsciously been holding. “Oh, good,” he said as he moved toward that second stall.
The gray muzzle appeared, followed very quickly by the horse’s white head. “What’s gotten into you?”
“She told me last night that if I ever failed to beat you, you’d regain all your strength in one night, break free of your stall, and trample me to death.”
“What utter nonsense,” said the horse, and it retreated back into its stall.
The black horse nipped at Duncan as he passed, but he skirted out of the way. Within the dark stall, the white horse looked as pitiful as it had the night before, still small and emaciated.
“So she lied to me,” Duncan concluded in a murmur.
“Of course she lied to you. She’s a witch. That’s what she does. Look, Duncan, I told you last night that you should escape before you become entangled with her. I’ll tell you again—get out of here, while you still can.”
“I have nowhere else to go,” Duncan protested. “Besides that, if she really had it in for me, what would stop her from coming after me?”
The white horse rolled its eyes but made no contradiction.
“Do you have a name?” Duncan asked abruptly.
The horse was very still for a telltale moment. “I do,” it said at last. “I do.”
“What is it?”
Its ears flicked back. “Wildfire,” it said, and that announcement sounded almost impulsive.
Duncan bit back a laugh. “You don’t look like a Wildfire.”
“You don’t look like a Duncan,” the horse retorted pettishly.
He couldn’t very well argue with that, as he had never met another Duncan. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said penitently. “Did you really not regain any strength last night?”
Wildfire snorted. “All I regained were some memories. That cane removes them, I think. You’d best take a swipe at Goliath with it before you go, too. Dame Groach takes him out for a ride every morning, and even if he can’t speak plainly, I’m sure he’s able to communicate with her somehow.”
Duncan’s eyes shifted to the huge black horse, which stood at the very edge of its stall as though eavesdropping on their conversation. He didn’t know if Wildfire was telling the truth or merely seeking to make his stable-mate take another blow. There was certainly no love lost between the two horses. The last thing Duncan wanted was for Dame Groach to realize that he had disobeyed her, though. Accordingly, he picked up the cane and knocked it against Goliath’s nose. The horse jerked away with the same dazed look as the night before.
“Best get out of here before that wears off,” Wildfire advised. “Be very careful, Duncan.”
He obeyed the first edict, but he wasn’t quite certain how to take the second. So far, Dame Groach had done nothing truly menacing. He could easily believe that she was a witch—she looked like one, for starters, and she obviously lived among magical charms—but the very idea was so far-fetched that his logical mind couldn’t really accept it.
Then again, his logical mind couldn’t really accept the idea of a talking horse either. Of the two conundrums, the witch and the talking horse, the latter seemed to be the more reliable source of information. Dame Groach had already lied to him about the reason for beating Wildfire and the consequences for failing to do so. All Wildfire had lied about, that Duncan could tell, was his name.
Obviously it wasn’t really Wildfire, but who was he to deny a captive talking horse such wishful thinking?
He probably should have taken the horse’s advice and fled as far from the strange estate as his legs would carry him. He did give it some thought, but in the end he dismissed the idea. If Wildfire was telling the truth and Dame Groach was an evil witch, then the horse really was being held captive and Duncan alone was in a position to help him. Besides that, the mysteries he had encountered thus far—the crumbling estate, the cryptic owner, the talking horse—would all drive him to insanity if he didn’t at least attempt to discover more about them.
Nothing interesting had ever happened back on his father’s farm. Duncan had heard the old saying that curiosity killed the cat, but he wasn’t a cat, and he knew enough to be careful. All he needed to do was stick to his list of duties for a time, and surely the truth would come to light.
It was too early in the morning for breakfast to be laid in the dining room. Duncan found his way to the kitchen and cooked himself an egg and toast there. The larder was well-stocked. He would have assumed that the food was supplied from a nearby community, except that the egg he took from the basket had already been replaced with another when he turned back to grab something more.
“Magic,” he muttered. Eating magic food didn’t quite sit well with him, but it beat going hungry.
After his simple breakfast, he turned his attention outward to the overgrown front lawn. The morning hours would be coolest for working outdoors. Armed with a trowel and a scythe from the garden shed, he went to pull weeds and mow the grass.
Time passed quickly. At midmorning, Goliath trotted by with Dame Groach perched squarely in the saddle. It was almost noon when they returned. Duncan had not finished even half the lawn.
“Take my horse, boy, and rub him down,” Dame Groach called. He could do naught but follow her back to the stable. She descended to her spindly stepstool with nothing more than a grumble and disappeared back into the house. Duncan put Goliath back in his stall, dodging several nips as he went.
“Mean thing,” he complained.
“Beat him with the stick,” said Wildfire from the other stall. “That seems to make him docile for a bit.”
Duncan didn’t see what harm could come of defending himself from the black horse’s attacks, so he duly retrieved the cane and took it with him as he went to rub down the creature. Every time Goliath snapped at him, he swatted the great black hindquarters. Sure enough, the horse would stand still for several moments, almost as though his mind had gone completely blank.
“I just need to change out your water, and then I can get back to mowing the lawn,” Duncan said at last, cheerful about the progress he had made.
“Could you change my water too?” asked Wildfire. “It’s disgusting.”
“I guess so,” Duncan said with a shrug. Changing out two water troughs wasn’t much more difficult than changing out one, all things considered.
“Can I have oats instead of straw, too?” Wildfire added hopefully.
“Wouldn’t Dame Groach notice if her oat supply was being used twice as fast as usual?” Duncan replied. He suspected that the oats were self-replenishing just like the eggs had been, but he didn’t know if Dame Groach was aware of how often or how much anything replenished.
Wildfire had a very logical answer to the question, though. “Just feed my straw to that old brute,” he said, indicating Goliath. “Then we’re still using the same amounts of both.”
Still Duncan hesitated.
“Come on,” the white horse coaxed. “He’s been nothing but mean to you, and I’ve been nothing but nice. I haven’t tried to bite you once, and he tries every opportunity he gets. Why should he be rewarded for bad behavior?”
“You just want to eat his oats,” said Duncan scornfully. “Don’t think I can’t see that well enough.”
Wildfire snorted. “You try eating straw for months on end and we’ll see what measures you take to get better fare.”
“I didn’t say no.” He scooped some oats from the barrel into the white horse’s feeding trough. Goliath whinnied in utmost indignation, but Duncan merely thumped the top of his head with the cane. Then, he tossed some straw into the black horse’s trough and left the pair.
“See you this evening, Duncan,” Wildfire cal
led cheerily to his retreating back.
With the sun high overhead, Duncan decided to work inside for an hour or two before returning to the lawn. Of all the rooms on the second floor, he had only been within the black bedchamber and the bathroom, and he was determined to see the others.
As he turned toward the west wing, though, he heard the squeal of hinges. Ahead in the corridor, Dame Groach’s head poked out from what she had previously identified as the library.
“Don’t forget to feed the canaries,” she said, and then she immediately vanished back into the room, shutting the door tight behind her.
Coincidentally, Duncan was standing right next to the door that led into her bedroom. He glanced down at its handle, which was ornately carved from a marbled pinkish stone to resemble an open rose. There was something oddly distasteful about that. He didn’t know much about omens, but he thought the unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach probably represented one.
With Dame Groach in the next room, though, he could hardly bypass this assigned task. Thus steeling his nerves, he grasped the handle and turned.
It was locked.
Somehow, the doors in this house were always locked, even when Duncan thought he had left them otherwise. He pulled the ring of keys from his pocket and stared down at the mass. There were fifty-seven in all, and he had only matched five: the stable, the garden shed, the laundry house, the black bedchamber, and the bathroom.
“Only fifty-two to sort through,” he muttered. It wasn’t such a difficult task, though. The keys came in a variety of sizes and metals. Dame Groach’s lock was made of shining brass and looked like it required a medium-sized key to open it. Only three of the keys that size were definitely brass, and two of them were tarnished. Duncan chose the third and inserted it.
A satisfying click answered the flick of his wrist. His feeling of foreboding increased as the door silently swung inward. The sight that met his eyes shouldn’t have surprised him, he thought. The door handle should have given it away.
Everything was pink, in varying shades from the palest puff-pink to a violent, nauseous one. The walls were papered with pink, the bed was swathed in pink, the floor was covered in pink. Even the glass window panes were rose-colored. For a long moment, Duncan stood in the doorway and tried to resolve in his mind the disparity between Dame Groach and the very pink room that she inhabited. The two did not match one another at all.
A curious chirping caught his attention. He honed in on the one item that stood out in the otherwise monochromatic room. Near the window, a delicate golden cage hung from an equally delicate stand. Within, two little dabs of yellow hopped about as though beckoning to him.
“You don’t look like you belong in here at all,” Duncan remarked as he trotted toward the two canaries. One was perfectly gold in color, and the other had bands of gray on its wings. Both merrily chirped at him.
A quick glance around the room showed him a bag of birdseed on a nearby table, where even the wood looked pink, much to his disgust. He deposited a handful in their nearly empty bowl. The water had already been changed. He wondered vaguely if he was supposed to do something about the seeds and refuse that lined the bottom of the cage, but then, Dame Groach had said nothing about that.
“Well, there you go,” he said cheerily, and he turned to leave.
The canaries chirped as though pleading for him to stay. Duncan was half-surprised that they didn’t call out to him with human voices, as Wildfire had. Not everything on the estate needed to be incredible, though. The canaries were just canaries, and he rather preferred them that way.
Having taken care of that task, he turned again to the west wing. The first door he came upon had a purple doorknob and a narrow iron keyhole. He fished out the key ring, sifted through its ranks, and selected a likely candidate. When the door gave way, though, he only glanced within before moving on.
As he had suspected, everything in that room was purple. Or at least, it would have been purple if not for the thick coat of dust that had collected during an obviously long spell of disuse.
The second door knob was white with a tarnished silver keyhole. Within was a sitting room, all fixed in dust-ridden shades of white. Duncan continued to the next room—orange knob with a large bronze keyhole—and found the same conditions within.
“Orange everything,” he muttered.
He wasn’t there just to gawk, however. Since the only room left along that corridor was the black bedchamber, he decided that he might as well clean the orange room next. Duly he stripped the curtains from the window and the linens from the bed and carted the load back downstairs and out to the laundry house. Once the boilers had been filled and the fire lit, he returned to the half-manicured front lawn.
He divided his attention between the laundry house and the lawn for the rest of the day, despite the afternoon temperatures. He preferred working outdoors to indoors. Mowing the lawn was like threshing hay, except that the overgrown thatch didn’t need to be gathered into bundles for market. Instead, Duncan piled it into a rickety old cart he had discovered back by the shed and deposited it in loads near the stable. He could use it later for composting. Likely the garden would need it badly.
By sunset his unruly hair was plastered to the back of his neck with sweat. He had nearly finished the front lawn, and the orange laundry had been hung to dry hours ago. He thought it was probably time to wrap up his outdoor chores for the day and thus made his way to the stable.
“You look like you’ve been working hard,” Wildfire remarked when he stepped through the door.
Duncan paused uncertainly. It was the first time the white horse had stood at the front of the stall like that, like a normal horse. From all appearances, he seemed to have been waiting for Duncan’s return.
“I have been working hard. It’s been months since that lawn was mowed.”
“Years, probably,” said Wildfire. “The last caretaker was such an old goat. He died shortly after I arrived.”
Duncan hesitated. Normally, he wouldn’t feel the need for clarification on such a seemingly straightforward statement, but under the circumstances, he thought he ought to double-check. “By old goat, you mean…?”
“An old goat. Four legs, horns, a little raggedy beard on his chin. He used to eat the grass on the lawn down to its nubs, had been doing so for ages before he finally succumbed to the way of all the earth, or so I understood.”
“Could he talk?” Duncan asked.
The white horse snorted. “Heavens, no! Who ever heard of a talking goat?”
Whoever heard of a talking horse, Duncan wanted to say, but the other occupant of the stable chose that moment to remind them of his presence. A very sharp whinny cut through the air, and the black horse rolled its eyes impatiently.
“All right, all right,” said Duncan. “Your food bin’s empty. I’ll get you some oats.”
“Straw for him,” Wildfire reminded him. “Oats for me.”
Duncan leveled a flat gaze his direction.
Wildfire blinked innocently. “What? I’m the nice one, remember?”
Chapter 4
The days passed in a blur. Duncan was accustomed to working long hours. His body naturally woke up in the dimness before dawn, and it was well after dark when he retired to bed. In between, he threshed and cleaned and weeded. The front lawn became manicured, and the paths from the house to the outbuildings were cleared of overgrowth. The whole place had been so far gone that even the simplest job produced visible change, much to his satisfaction.
He worked outside in the mornings then retreated inside for the hot afternoons. Of Dame Groach he saw very little, just a glimpse when she left on her ride with Goliath, and then again when she returned. As one day passed into another, she seemed increasingly vexed about something, but Duncan wasn’t about to ask what it was.
He had reversed her care of the two horses: Goliath received straw and a few whacks with the cane while Wildfire had oats and fresh water daily. The white horse was al
ways jovial when Duncan visited the stable. Not once had he tried to escape, or even to cajole Duncan into letting him leave the stall. He seemed to know not to push his luck. Usually he just waited patiently at the half-door and chatted as Duncan went about his work. After the first few days, Duncan had grown so accustomed to talking with a horse that it seemed more unusual to him that Goliath couldn’t talk than that Wildfire could.
One morning, he entered to see only the great black horse glaring back at him. “Morning, Wildfire,” he called toward the second stall.
“Good morning,” the white horse cheerfully replied, but he did not appear.
Duncan frowned. “Is everything all right?”
“You tell me. Come and have a look.”
That didn’t bode well, Duncan thought. The far end of the stable was dimly lit as always, with no windows on that side, and Wildfire’s stall was the darkest corner of the whole place. Duncan cautiously peered inside.
“Boo!” said a black horse, and it lunged toward him.
He yelped and tripped backward, onto the ground. The creature burst into laughter, its dark head hanging over the stall door as it chortled.
“You should see the look on your face! Ha!”
Duncan glanced in confusion between the two stalls. Goliath huffed and rolled his eyes, still huge and angry as ever. The other horse, though… “W-Wildfire?” he asked uncertainly.
“It’s me, it’s me,” said the horse merrily. “I remembered some magic last night and thought I’d try it out. What color am I?”
“Black,” said Duncan.
“Yes! It worked perfectly! I wasn’t sure it would, since I’m a horse and all.”
“What do you mean, since you’re a horse?” asked Duncan.
“You think horses cast a lot of magic?” Wildfire retorted. “I remembered the spell well enough, but I didn’t really think I could cast it. Here, let me change back.” He retreated a couple paces into his stall. Duncan heard him mutter something under his breath, though he didn’t quite catch the words. Paleness blossomed over the creature and enveloped him, until he was his usual mottled white.
Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale Page 4
