by Amanda Leduc
The woman did this, but her babies did not appear, and so she took her changeling children home and put them to bed as if they were her own. The next day, she did it all again, to no avail. When she did it for the third time, she cried aloud into the forest air and begged the fairies to listen.
“I miss my babies!” she said. “I will not be whole unless you give them back to me.”
The forest was silent; the forest said nothing.
In frustration and despair, the woman turned from the two babies on the ground and left the forest. When she had gone beyond the trees, three mountain fairies—one red-haired, one brown-haired, one with hair black as night—crept out from the trees and reached out for the babies.
“Come with us,” they said. “We’ve been waiting for you. We’ll give you halls full of golden toys and warm fires to lay by, and so many good things to eat.”
The babies were cold and defeated by the rumbling of their stomachs. They held out their hands and the fairies scooped them away.
When the mother suffered deep regret and came back to find them, it was as if the twins had never been.
7
Estajfan is tired of watching the humans starve, tired of the city’s dark stink, tired of the despair that hangs around the buildings. The despair that sits in Heather’s bones—the slope of her shoulders, the lines on her face. He is tired of it all.
But he is also tired of the mountain and its unrelenting calm—the carelessness of the mountain centaurs, the cagey silence of his sister. Petrolio’s indifference.
People are starving! Estajfan wants to scream, over and over. These people are going to die!
But he doesn’t say this because he knows that no one cares. Not the mountain centaurs, not the mountain, not even his siblings. Deer are being hunted in the daylight; squirrels are being roasted over human fires. The animals that live amongst the mountain trees are longing for humans to perish.
The humans dwindle, weaken, disappear.
At last his brother offers to come down off the mountain with him—to walk through abandoned human streets, to peer hidden in the trees and see them starving. Petrolio comes to him after he has begun to drop food at different points around the city. It isn’t worry for the humans that brings Petrolio down from the mountain. It is worry for him.
Petrolio meets him on the mountain trail one morning, his blue-green eyes unsettled and searching. “Are you eating?”
Estajfan laughs. “I’m eating,” he says. “They are starving to death. Like I’ve said a hundred times already.”
Petrolio grasps his arm. “Estajfan—they’re only humans.”
He pulls away. “Does that mean they deserve to starve?”
“Humans had their chance,” Petrolio says. This is what the mountain centaurs say. Humans had their chance. Humans are a disease on the land. Humans no longer deserve to be here.
“Heather is different,” Estajfan says fiercely. “Heather is not like the rest.”
“Estajfan,” Petrolio says softly, “all of them are the same.”
“How would you know?” He points a finger in his brother’s face. “I don’t see you off the mountain, do I. And yet you’re perfectly happy to ogle that mirror when you think no one’s looking.”
Petrolio flushes. “Da told us all we needed to know,” he says. “You know what they did to him. You know what they would have done to us.”
Estajfan refuses to believe it. “Da also told us other stories. He went back down the mountain. He went into human cities. He went back to our village. Why would he do that if he hated them so much?”
“Why do you want to help them so badly?”
“Why do I need a reason? They need help. We can give it.”
“If the ground magic is killing their gardens,” Petrolio says, “how much do you think we can do?”
“I don’t know,” Estajfan admits. “But I can try. We can try.”
“And if trying makes no difference?” Petrolio’s voice is soft. “We go down and bring them food and try to help and still they starve? What happens then?”
You have a choice to make, Fox had said. The world is no longer a place for in-between things.
“At least we’ll know we tried.”
Petrolio watches him for a long moment, then sighs. “I’ll help,” he says. “Tell me what to do, and I’ll go down with you. But honestly, Estajfan—I don’t know what good it will do.”
“It will keep them alive a while longer,” Estajfan says. “Right now that should be good enough for all of us.”
He hears the words as clearly as if Heather speaks them straight into his ear. Right now, Estajfan, isn’t going to last forever.
* * *
In the dark early hours of the morning they run down the mountain like they did when they were young and then they run past the city, farther than Petrolio has ever gone. Day after day after day, they run through the foothills and into the flatlands. They run past buildings grown over with vines, abandoned cars like small green hills that rise up where the roads used to be. They go into abandoned cities and search the buildings for cans of food, sacks of rice and flour.
They drop what they find at different points throughout the mountain city. A bag of rice at the end of one street, a sack of apples gathered from the mountain trees at the end of another. Nuts and cherries, figs and pears. Estajfan is careful to be random, careful to avoid extra attention falling on Heather. Still, she pulls him into her orbit. He makes sure she has enough.
They travel under cover of the trees, under cover of the darkness, and the vines that grow over the ground muffle their footsteps. Yet, every time they run through the city, he waits for someone to jump out and see them. No one does.
They run through other cities; they take all that they can.
* * *
He finds her in the forest, walking with the girls. Every now and then she checks the sky and he knows she is thinking of snow—when it will come, if it will come, what will happen when it does. When he asks her how they are all doing, she only shrugs and looks resigned. “We might survive the winter. We might not.”
“You will,” he says.
But Heather looks away. “No one has come to help,” she says. She blows gently over the faces of the twins, plays patty cake with their grasping hands. “We have hardly any gas left. There is no way to plow the roads and by the middle of the winter people will be too weak to shovel.”
“We are bringing as much food as we can,” he says. He doesn’t tell her that they run later into the morning now and there are hardly ever humans around to see them.
“We?” she says.
“Petrolio,” he tells her.
Heather takes this in. “And Aura?”
“Aura will not come down,” he says.
She nods. “She’s still afraid. I understand that.”
She doesn’t understand, not entirely. But he doesn’t know what else to tell her.
The babies are not afraid of him. He watches them roll on the ground and giggle. He watches the way their eyes follow the swish of his tail. Later, when Heather is getting ready to leave, Greta reaches up from her sling and touches his flank, her tiny human hand like a fly against his flesh. His tail twitches involuntarily. The baby laughs.
“Come, Greta,” Heather says, and she pulls her hand away. This might once have made her smile, but there is no room left in her face for laughter. No room left for joy.
He thinks back to the day, long ago, when she drew him the picture. She’d had joy then, even in her sorrow. She’d been excited. She had believed.
The girls crane their heads to look at him.
“Once there was a mountain,” he says. He feels Heather go still. “Once there was a mountain that reached high into the clouds.”
* * *
They have been running for days—like deli
very boys, Petrolio says with a half sneer, but still he comes—when they see the first human bodies. A woman and her child lying facedown by the road. It is still dark, very early morning—they almost miss them, half buried in the ditch. The child clutches a mirror in his small, dirty hand. His mother is bent over him. Already they are half covered in vines and dirt. As Estajfan watches, more vines snake slowly over the bodies, pull them deeper into the soil. He wants to look away but doesn’t.
Petrolio comes to stand beside him.
“What happened to them?” he asks.
Estajfan lifts his hands. “Who knows,” he says. “Maybe someone killed them. Or maybe they just starved.”
There is another option, he knows. He looks at the flowers that line the borders where the road used to be. Orange flowers, green leaves. Dark berries. He looks back at the bodies.
The vines keep on coming. The mouth of the earth, green and hungry. He stands with Petrolio until the two are little more than humps beneath the green, and then turns to go.
* * *
They bring down the food, they run farther and farther. They notice other bodies by the side of the road—some sinking into the grass and vines, others still fresh, glassy-eyed, looking up to the sky. It is winter, but still Estajfan sees the berries everywhere. Dark berries, white flowers, bright-orange bells that dip over the ground and smell so sweet.
When he asks the mountain centaurs what they think, they are evasive, unconcerned. “The humans are weak,” they tell him.
“But they aren’t weak,” he says. Heather is strong, despite herself, and the doctor in the city—Tasha, Heather tells him—has not stopped in her quest to keep the city together. “They’re fighting to survive.”
“Humans had their chance,” a black centaur says. He’s tall and graceful, with a voice as deep as their father’s used to be. “It is time for the world to thrive now.”
There had been other mountains, other creatures, other parts of the world where magic was rampant and then died. The winged horses long gone now, the dragons of these mountains dead before the horses arrived. The mermaids and monsters of the deep all dead or disappeared. The humans alive and flourishing. Digging their holes into the earth and laying their roads where trees used to be. They multiplied like a disease. They built machines, smoked the air. They didn’t need magic when they had airplanes and could fly. They forgot about the creatures that swam in the sea. They no longer listened to the voice of the earth, and animals around the world grew fewer, and died.
“I’m tired of everything dying,” Petrolio says then—surprising Estajfan, surprising them all.
“Some things die so that others can live,” a mountain centaur says. She has white-blonde hair and golden feet—the centaur who gave Estajfan his first warning months ago. “This is always what happens.” She fixes her gaze on them both. “Do not go down the mountain anymore. We are not like them—we will live to see a new world.”
Petrolio looks at her, and then at Estajfan. “We had a human mother,” he says. “We might not be human, but we’re not so different from them.”
Beyond the other centaurs, Estajfan sees Aura listening.
The mountain centaur blinks. “Yes,” she says. “But now your home is here. The mountain feeds you, the mountain shelters you from harm. Would you rather be without it?”
You have a choice to make. He watches the same realization dawn on Petrolio’s face, followed by the same tinge of incredulous fear.
Aura, keeping watch, says nothing.
THE MOUNTAIN
Once there was a mountain that reached high into the clouds. On that mountain there lived a herd of wild horses. The ground magic was strong here, far from humans, and so were the horses. There were cougars on the mountain too, and mountain goats, and large brown deer with antlers that were heavier than gold. There were rabbits and foxes and squirrels that could fly, and all the animals could speak to one another without making a sound.
The horses were kind and curious, beautiful and grave. But they were also reckless—they were off the mountain as much as they were on it, eager to run down into the foothills and see what the rest of the world could tell them. Horses died in avalanches, horses fell into crevasses and were never seen again. But they were the mountain’s children as much as the cougars and the foxes and the deer; the mountain forgave them their curiosity, and loved them without question.
The mountain was also a child of the earth. It had been born hot and red many millions of years ago, before there were oceans, when the sky above stretched out into green. Over the millennia, the mountain grew—earthquakes thrust it higher into the sky. The gradual creep of oceans brought it life. Grey-green lichen fed its insects, and low-lying trees fed the deer. The ground around the mountains softened into rolling hills and flatlands. The mountain, swathed in clouds, reigned proud and jealous over them all.
As is the case with most jealous things, the mountain had a favourite son. A black horse, the largest of the wild herd, a stallion with a star on his forehead. He was gentle and kind and beloved, but with a curiosity so great it dwarfed the mountain.
The stallion was faster than his brothers and sisters. But that didn’t stop them from racing. Each day they ran down the mountains and far into the foothills, the other stallions and mares trying as hard as they could to beat the black. It never happened. He went faster and longer than they could match, running so far into the flatlands he lost sight of the mountain. Eventually the others stopped racing him altogether and the stallion went down the mountain alone.
One day, the stallion stopped by a stream. While he was drinking, a group of human women came down to the water, laughing amongst themselves. The stallion backed into the trees along the river and watched them until they returned to their village. He had never been this close to humans before. They seemed so tiny—quick and shining, there and gone.
The mountain told him that humans lived the way that comets shot across the sky—bright and burning, falling, gone. If you blinked, they disappeared.
The stallion didn’t want to blink. The next time he ran down the mountain, he went back to that stream. Late in the day the women came down to the water again, and once more he hid from them in the trees and watched them laugh. Their joy seemed so impossible and fleeting.
After this, the stallion returned to the stream every day. He stayed hidden, but soon noticed that a young girl with blonde hair and blue-green eyes would always turn her head toward the trees. Could she sense he was there? He wasn’t sure. But soon he stopped looking at the other humans and watched this one only. She never came close to the trees and he never ventured out, but every time he saw her, the ground magic shivered hard beneath his feet.
Then, one day, he found her alone. The stallion stood in the trees for a long time and watched her skip stones across the water. When she was finished, she came to where the stallion was hiding and gave him a gift—a flower chain she’d made. She put the chain around his neck.
“I see you,” she said.
The garland felt so heavy and precious it might as well have been made of gold. As he ran back to the mountain that night, the horse was careful not to break it. When the other horses saw him wearing it, they looked away.
The woman met him every day after this. They would walk along the stream, or she would ride him, out into the flatlands, her hair flying behind her, her arms flung wide to the world.
The mountain felt the horse slip away and was powerless to stop the stallion as he ran to the woman. The ground magic was different in the flatlands—subtle, the magic of green growing things. It understood something about the stallion that the mountains did not. The stallion was already changing. He was already no longer the same.
By the time he climbed the summit on a night bright with stars, the stallion was a stranger to the mountain. He knew what he wanted; he knew what he had to do.
This is your
home, the mountain said to its favourite son. You belong here more than you belong anywhere else.
But the stallion didn’t want to belong to the mountain. Instead he dug himself a grave and laid down in it. He wished for the magic of green and growing things; the ability to bend, the resilience of moss and tulips. And the magic of green and growing things came to his call.
In the morning, he walked away transformed, and the mountain raged and raged.
8
Tasha is resting in the bedroom at the townhouse—a rare moment of silence and calm—when she hears Annie’s footsteps clatter up the stairs. She hasn’t bothered to take off her shoes.
“Someone left food on the outskirts of town,” Annie says from the doorway. “And in front of the clinic.”
Tasha sits up. “What do you mean, food?”
“Food,” Annie says, incredulous. “A bag of apples, and some rice and flour.”
“Who did it come from?”
Annie spreads her hands. “I have no idea.”
“You’re sure someone left it? Someone didn’t break into our stores?”
Annie rolls her eyes. “Gee, I didn’t think of that. Someone broke in and then left whatever they stole right outside.”
Tasha flushes. “Well, what else are we supposed to think—it just came out of nowhere?”
When they get to the clinic, Elyse is standing guard over the food while a boy and girl sit nervously in a couple of the chairs.
“They brought it in,” Elyse says, pointing to them.
Tasha goes to the children and crouches down, tries to remember their names. “Hello, you two. You found the food, and brought it here? Good job.”
The girl nods, then looks at the boy, who must be her brother. “We just found the apples,” she says. Nina. That’s her name. She’s seven, maybe eight. Thin and scrappy.
