“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 delivery 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.”