The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  You are no friend at all.

  In the mountain city, she stops and writes a letter to her sister. I will be late, she writes. I have something to attend to here. Please give the girls my love.

  Is it a betrayal to want to see the children, to know that they’re all right?

  I only care about you, she wants to tell the centaur. I only want to see you happy.

  She posts the letter and makes her way back to the mountain.

  26

  When Tasha finishes her story, Heather doesn’t know what to say. She can tell that Estajfan and Petrolio don’t know what to say either. Aura might know, but it’s hard to look at her. There’s too much in her face.

  Finally, Annie clears her throat. “You knew,” she says to Tasha, incredulous. “You’ve been lying to us this whole time. You knew about the mountain. You knew about—them.”

  “I didn’t think it was real, Annie—I thought they were only stories.”

  “Stories are never only stories,” Heather says. “Remember?”

  Tasha shakes her head. “My mother told me stories about the mountain when I was small—she made them up, Heather, to try to help me sleep. Not because she thought that they were real.” And then she is telling them all about her family’s stories, fables passed down from mother to daughter, all the way back to twin sisters, and an aunt who was beloved. The doctor and her sister. The nieces, rapt in bed and listening to the words.

  Estajfan says, “We never met the doctor. Our father never said anything—are you sure this is true?”

  Tasha throws out her hands. “I don’t know if any of it is true. But I thought you weren’t real, and here you are.”

  Heather moves to stand beside Estajfan. “How does it end? The story with the doctor.”

  Tasha glances at Annie, and Annie looks away. “I have no idea,” she says. “One year she went up the mountain and that was the last anyone ever saw of her.”

  Aura reaches for Tasha’s hand. “I can tell you.” In her voice is Tasha’s sadness, magnified over and over. And beneath that, the resignation, the deep fear of facing that thing one hates the most.

  Grief is inevitable. That doesn’t make it any easier.

  “Aura,” Estajfan says. “What happened?”

  “I need to take you up the mountain,” Aura says to Tasha. “You deserve to see it—I will show you where she is.”

  27

  And so it comes to pass that the centaurs and the humans make their way up the mountain after all. Aura leads them herself, following the path that her father carved into the mountainside—the same path that Heather and her father climbed those years ago. It is overgrown, but not difficult. They’ve left Brian back down in the clinic, with Darby standing guard.

  As Moira climbs, she feels her anger at the centaurs dissipate. The light on the mountain trees is its own kind of knife, slicing her open. Jaime would have loved this—the clean air, the wildflowers that bloom at their feet. She sees the shadow of her sister everywhere—there her quick, slender hand, there the flash of her bright smile and face. It is so painful she almost can’t breathe, and so beautiful she doesn’t think of stopping.

  There she is, just ahead, smiling at the centaurs.

  Jaime’s voice in her ear, or maybe just Moira’s own. They’re impossible, I know, but here they are.

  Yes, she thinks. Yes, they are.

  As they climb higher, she sees shadows coalesce around them that might be clouds but also might be people. A black-haired, black-skinned man, a woman with dark hair and a blue satchel. Another man who hovers over Heather and hums her a song. Moira wants to call to Heather to tell her to look, but the magic overwhelms her. Instead she looks to the others—to Joseph, who climbs with a face cracked with awe, to Elyse, who had been sitting warily on the back of the female centaur but is now silent and watching the sky. To Annie, grim and silent, who climbs beside Tasha as though she’s stomping on her own heart.

  She has no idea what to call this feeling that she has. It feels like waking up.

  * * *

  As Tasha climbs, she thinks of that long-ago doctor who was a witness to another kind of magic. The other doctor, who carried the birth of these babies with her through the years, and one year told the story to her sister late at night. A magical tale that was real.

  The other doctor, she imagines, would have told Annie the story right away.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers as Annie climbs beside her.

  Annie doesn’t reply, just puts one foot in front of the other.

  * * *

  Estajfan, the largest of them all, brings up the rear. Heather in front of him, limping and cautious but determined to climb.

  Up the mountain, down the mountain, up and down and up again. The longest of goodbyes.

  The world below them is a place he barely knows. He’s only stolen from it—human things, human stories. He has been told his whole life that he doesn’t belong there. And yet without the world below the mountain there would be no Heather; without the world below the mountain the centaurs wouldn’t be at all.

  They will leave. He and Heather. He isn’t sorry.

  He will run for her, he will go beyond the sea to find food if that is what she needs.

  Wherever, he thinks. Wherever you will go.

  * * *

  Heather climbs, and her father climbs beside her, breathing out of every leaf and twig.

  The girls are not with her. It is as if they’ve never been.

  Instead there is the baby, who kicks every now and then as they go higher.

  She thinks back to those moments on the highest part of the mountain. The dirt that almost choked her, the taste of earth like copper in her mouth. The weight of it. She hadn’t, as it turned out, wanted to be other than what she was in those moments. She only wanted to be herself, to be alive.

  The baby kicks so hard she stumbles and falls, landing on the path on all fours.

  Estajfan is beside her, his hand on her arm. “You’re all right,” he says. “You’re safe.”

  She breathes in and out, her forehead against the soil. She shuts her eyes against the sting of tears. It hurts, climbing the mountain again. She doesn’t want to climb anymore. The only mystery she wants to unlock is herself. “I understand now,” she says. “I do.”

  “Yes,” Estajfan says, and he bends to help her up. “I know.”

  She wants to ask him what he means, but the others are far ahead now and they need to catch up. She starts to climb again.

  Some time later he picks her up. She wants to protest—You’ve been injured, put me down—but he doesn’t falter.

  I’m all right, she thinks. I am safe, and I am climbing.

  * * *

  As she climbs, Aura thinks about her father—how kind he could be, how patient, and also how jealous and bitter. Don’t ever leave the mountain. The human world will break your heart and kill you.

  What would he do, she wonders, if he was still alive and waiting for them up ahead? Would he welcome these humans into their home or hide from them the way he’d hidden Aura and her brothers? Enveloping them in a magic made of love and pain and stories, weaving a net all around them that was hard to escape. Humans will betray you. Humans will not love you. Look at your mother, look what she did.

  But look at the humans around them. Elyse, so sickly but so determined to hang on. The woman, Moira, who had saved Estajfan even though she feared him. Tasha and Annie, who kept the humans alive even as the ground tried to starve them.

  Heather, always Heather, who saw a grief in the centaurs before even Aura herself knew what to call it.

  Even Joseph, she realizes.

  They’ve endured, these humans, in a way that surely even the mountain would understand.

  Da, she thinks as she leads them past the place where Heather and her father had stopped thos
e years ago. Da, tell me what to do.

  He does not answer. He never does.

  * * *

  They climb for hours. They climb until the path stops in front of them, and then Aura crests the small cliff before them and sets Elyse down onto the ground before reaching down to pull Tasha up, and then the others. The other centaurs follow, one by one. Aura leads them down a path and around a little hill to a place where the ground opens into a tiny, improbable meadow filled with flowers. Forget-me-nots and larkspur and lilies. Black-eyed Susans that bend softly in the wind. Dark-red amaryllis that pop up through the grasses. Daisies, hollyhocks. A peach tree, an apple tree. Sunflowers that stand tall and proud. The plants here have none of the darkly beautiful menace that infuses the flowers down below.

  In the centre of the flowers, there are two bare patches of earth. Aura turns around to face them.

  “This one.” She motions to the patch on her right. “She’s here. Where the flowers do not grow.”

  Tasha takes a step forward and the others part for her. She falls to her knees before the grave.

  “We came down to pick flowers,” Aura says, her voice far away. “My father and me. That’s when she came around the corner. He wasn’t expecting her.”

  “What happened?” Tasha says.

  But Heather knows. She sinks down in front of the other bare patch of earth. “He threw her over,” she says. “He picked her up, and he threw her over the side of the mountain.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Petrolio is the first to break the silence. Sharp, raw, betrayed.

  “He was afraid for us,” Aura says. “I think that made him into something he didn’t want to be.”

  “He forbade us to go down!” Petrolio cries. “But he went down because there were things there that he loved? He didn’t tell us any of these stories. How could he do that?”

  Aura nods. “When I looked at him after that, all I could see was her face as she fell. And he knew it—I think he saw her face too. I went down and found her body. I carried her here, and buried her. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Your bag,” Tasha says. “That belonged to her.”

  Aura’s hands go to the old satchel slung over her shoulder. “Yes,” she says. “I carry her with me wherever I go.”

  “And you?” Estajfan says. He is not as angry as Petrolio, but the hurt in his voice is deep. “What were you afraid of, Aura? You’re the one who insisted we stay here.”

  “People have died!” Aura points to the graves. “Every time humans and centaurs come together, something happens, Estajfan. Someone gets hurt. The doctor wanted to help, but she died. Our father only wanted to love, and the house that we were born in—it almost took him. I was there. I saw it.”

  “You went down with him?” Petrolio says, betrayed.

  “In a dream, or a vision, or—something.” Aura shakes her head and her eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t leave the mountain. We aren’t meant to be off the mountain. And humans aren’t meant to be up here.”

  “We aren’t meant to be anywhere!” Estajfan cries. “We don’t belong below the mountain with the humans—but we don’t belong here, either, Aura, and you know it.”

  “Yes, we do,” she whispers. “This is the home Da made for us. Da didn’t think we were monsters.”

  “Da isn’t here anymore!” he shouts. “It was the mountain that made Da into an in-between thing, Aura. It was the mountain that made it so that Da didn’t belong.” Estajfan clenches his fists. “And the mountain did that because it knew that he wanted a different kind of life.”

  “We’re safe here,” she says, stubbornly. “Look what just happened to you! We’re safer here than we’ll ever be down below.”

  “Aura.” Petrolio steps closer to her. “The mountain centaurs—when we left, you know what they said—”

  “I don’t want to leave the mountain only to get shot by the side of the road!” Aura is weeping in earnest now.

  “Yes,” Annie says, surprising them all. “And I don’t want to be in a world that’s starving us to death. But it doesn’t seem to matter what we want, does it.”

  “I don’t know,” says Elyse. She’s resting with her back against the peach tree. “I never thought I’d get up to the top of this mountain, and here we are.” She laughs, and then doubles over, wheezing. When she catches her breath again, she locks eyes with Aura. “Here we are,” she says, “no matter how hard the world tried to starve us. And you helped us up the mountain despite also saying that it tried hard to keep us away. Maybe Tasha’s right. Maybe there’s a reason we’re here. Us, and all of you, and no one else.”

  Heather laughs then, unexpectedly. They turn to look at her. “Maybe you were ready to survive,” she quotes. She looks at Estajfan. “Maybe we’ve always been ready.”

  In the silence that comes after this, Moira clears her throat. “There are two patches of bare earth,” she says. “What is the other one for?”

  Heather closes her eyes. “My father,” she says. “This is my father’s grave.”

  * * *

  The world behind her eyelids is swirling red and orange; Heather bends her forehead to the ground again and breathes in the smell of the mountain.

  “I brought him here to be with her,” Aura says.

  Heather looks up. All around her is hazy sky and grey-brown stone and sturdy green lichens, fuzzy green moss. And the flowers. And yet there is no danger here that she can feel—only the colours, and love.

  “He asked for help,” she says. “When we climbed up. He thought that you could help me, that you could make me into something other than what I am.”

  Aura nods. “Yes,” she says. “I remember.”

  “But I didn’t need help,” Heather says. “My body didn’t do everything that I might have wanted it to do, but it was mine. I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want him to want me to change.” She bites her lip. “I saw him stumble. I could have reached for him too, and I didn’t. Not in time.”

  “Heather,” Estajfan begins, “that wasn’t your f—”

  “I was so hurt,” she says, talking over him. Her voice is far away, remembering. “Hurt, and so angry—but only for a moment. And even that moment was too long.”

  What if her father hadn’t encouraged her to climb the mountain at all? What if she’d never felt like she’d had something to prove?

  “He belongs here now,” Aura says. “And so does she. The flowers wouldn’t have come to them otherwise.”

  It’s been so long since Joseph has spoken that nearly all of them jump when he says, “What—your mountain only likes humans if they’re dead?”

  “The mountain,” a strange voice says, and they look up to see two more centaurs above them on a knoll, “does not care about humans either way.” One male, one female. The female dark-haired, the male pale as Petrolio and Aura.

  “We told you not to come back,” the female says. “Aura, you should not have brought them up here.”

  “The humans in the ground?” Aura says. She places a hand on Heather’s shoulder. “Or these ones?”

  “Any,” says the male. “Humans do not belong here. The mountain is only trying to keep us safe.”

  Tasha hears the whisper of a high-pitched scream in her ears, the crazy tilt of a world thrown open to the sky. She realizes only then that it isn’t a memory. She reaches for Heather, understanding at last.

  But Heather is not there. Instead it is the pale centaur, and Heather is in the air now, the centaur’s hands strong and terrible around her, lifting. There is no time for Heather to scream, to even be surprised. Bright-blue panic in Estajfan’s face, his outstretched fingers.

  Sky over mountain over mountain over sky, and she goes over.

  28

  Estajfan reaches for Heather, misses, and then leaps over the side and is gone.

  Petroli
o crashes into the other pale centaur—they fall to the ground with a thud that shakes the trees. The dark centaur does not move.

  Tasha, breathless, shouts to Aura. “Take me down. Take me down now.”

  Petrolio scrambles to his feet again. “I’ll take you,” he rasps. “Aura—get the others away from here.” He bends and Tasha climbs onto his back—they turn to go but Aura shoots out a hand and grabs Petrolio’s arm.

  “Wait,” she says. She pulls off her bag and gives it to Tasha. Then they are leaping over the knoll and down the path.

  Elyse is on her knees, clutching her chest, her breathing hard and ragged. Annie bends over her, while Moira and Joseph stand terrified, still. The two mountain centaurs’ brown eyes sweep them all.

  “Leave now,” the male centaur says as he climbs to his feet. “Leave now, or the rest of you will follow.”

  Aura goes to Elyse and kneels. Moira and Annie help the girl onto her back.

  “The world is more than the mountain,” Aura says, and she faces the mountain centaurs as she stands. “Green things grew around the graves here, even if the mountain didn’t want the bodies. Change comes to the mountain, too, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.”

  She can’t see him, but she knows that he’s there—a small, slight man with dark hair, an easy smile, his fingers long and slender and stained with dirt. She buried him here all these years ago and he sank into the mountain. His bones became the dirt. His hands became the grass and trees, the flowers that grew up and blossomed. The vines that stretch up now and wind around the mountain centaurs’ legs, shimmying up and rooting them to the spot.

  The vines thread the mountain centaurs with green, shoot up their shoulders and around their necks, choke them, blind their eyes. Swift and greedy. The female centaur yells once in rage before she is silenced. In the space that was her mouth, a red flower blooms.