“I know what I saw,” Elyse insists. “And it wasn’t a horse.”
“What did you see?” It’s B, on their doorstep, coming out to meet them.
Heather shrugs. She lifts Greta out of the sling and passes her over so that B’s attention shifts to the baby. “Nothing,” she says. “A trick of the light in the forest. That’s all.”
Elyse laughs. “The only one with tricks around here is you.” She looks at B. “Did you see it too? Do you know about the creature in the forest?”
B pauses only for an instant, but it’s enough. “What creature?” he says.
“Half man, half horse,” Elyse gasps. “It was—Brendan, it was like something from a dream. Like the stories we used to hear when we were kids! But it was real. I swear.”
“If there are magical creatures in the mountains,” Heather says, trying to sound weary, not panicked, “don’t you think someone would have talked about them before?”
“You did,” B says. Low and unmistakable.
She glances at him. “What? I did not.”
“Right after you came down, when your father died. You told the doctors there were creatures on the mountain. And no one believed you, so you stopped talking.”
Heather swallows. “How would you know?”
“I went to school with you, remember? People talked. Everyone knew about your time in the hospital. Everyone said you were crazy. I said it too, once.”
She looks away from him. The sting is so old it doesn’t even hurt, but the panic building in her chest is something altogether different. “I barely remember you from school.”
“Why would you?” he says, still in that strange voice. “You didn’t talk to anybody.”
She laughs. “And everyone remembered me anyway—because they said I was crazy? Because I walked funny?”
He doesn’t deny it.
“They’re up on the mountain,” Elyse interjects. She has B now—soon she’ll have the whole city. “Brendan—they have food up on the mountain. We have to go up.”
He hasn’t stopped looking at Heather. “Is that where the fruit came from? And the flowers?”
She doesn’t meet his eyes. “There is nothing on the mountain,” she says, again. “If we go up there, people will die.”
“People have already died!” Elyse shouts. She takes one more step closer to Heather. “If you aren’t going to do what needs to be done, then I will.” She turns and starts to walk to the town.
Heather lunges after Elyse, all her careful resolve disintegrating in panic. B’s hand on her arm is the only thing that stops her. He has Greta on his hip; Jilly, still in the sling, looks up at her, confused.
“You need to tell me everything,” he says.
“You’re hurting me,” she says. She watches Elyse hurry away from them, then glances at his hand on her arm. He doesn’t let go.
The ground rumbles beneath her feet.
“We can’t go up the mountain,” she whispers to B. “It isn’t safe.”
“Why isn’t it safe, Heather?”
“It just isn’t.”
She finally wrenches her arm away, and he laughs—a short, sharp bark at the sky. “You can’t really be serious. Half man, half horse? What kind of joke is this?”
“It isn’t a joke,” she says, dully. “But it doesn’t matter. We can’t go up there.”
“Tell me,” he says, and she knows what he means. “Tell me all of it.”
And so she does—standing there in front of their house as the sky begins to darken and the breeze rustles through the trees. The day her father took her up the mountain. The songs he sang. The beasts in the trees and her father’s explosive joy. The way he touched the palomino. His sudden stumble and fall.
“How could he do that?” B interrupts.
“How could he fall?”
“No—how could he take you up the mountain? On a path he didn’t know was safe? A child like you who couldn’t even walk straight on normal ground?”
“He helped me.”
“What if you’d fallen? What if you’d gotten hurt? Would he have left you there with God knows what while he went down for help? Didn’t he think about that?”
“He believed in me,” she retorts. A reflex, her loyalty so deep it splits her in two. “I wanted to believe in myself too. To know that I could do it.”
Help us, she remembers him saying. Help my daughter.
B shakes his head. “So—what—your father fell and this—creature—carried you back down the mountain? And then what?”
She thinks of it—night after night of hushed escape from the house. Estajfan, smiling as she drew him on the paper. Estajfan, telling her a thousand stories.
“I had no one else to talk to,” she says, eventually.
“You had people to talk to!” he cries. “You didn’t want to talk to anybody else.”
“People wouldn’t have understood,” she says. “You don’t know because you weren’t there.”
“I’m here now,” he says. “I’ve been here for almost two years. And you’ve never told me any of this.” B looks away, for a moment. He doesn’t believe her entirely, she can tell. But who can blame him? They are all malnourished, weakened, beaten down by this disaster. What’s easier to believe in—magic or despair?
“I’ve tried so hard to be good to you,” B says. “But you never let me in. You’d rather believe in the stories you tell yourself instead.”
“This isn’t a story,” she says, softly. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Not just this,” he says, surprising her. “Everything you believe about yourself is a story.”
She blinks. “What?”
He sighs. “Everything. The mountain. These—centaurs. The way that everyone treated you at school.” She opens her mouth to protest; he just shakes his head. “I know we weren’t perfect. I know I haven’t been perfect. But—people change, Heather. I’ve tried. Tasha has tried, and tried, and tried. And all you show us is a wall.”
She swallows. She’d expected anger, not this.
“You might as well be up on that mountain already,” he says. “You’d rather be in a fantasy world than here.”
“Can you blame me?”
His face hardens. “I can, a little. It’s like you believe that the only person who can change is you. You went into the forest while everyone else tried to keep the city alive.”
“I had the girls,” she protests. “I kept the girls alive.”
“You did,” he admits. “That’s true.” They stare at each other, and then he sighs again, and says, “So. These—centaurs—on the mountain. Is there food? Like Elyse said? Can we go up there and get it?”
“We can’t go up,” she says. “B—it isn’t safe. People will die.”
“People are already dying,” he says, echoing Elyse. “If there is food up there, we have to try.”
“B,” she whispers, “no one can go.”
“So that’s it, then? They’re going to let all of us starve?”
She doesn’t say anything—her face says it for her. She watches the realization slide over his face with something like horror.
“Not all of us,” he says, eventually. “Not you.”
Heather swallows, puts a hand against his arm. “He said he could take me up. I said—”
He leans over and plucks Jilly out of the sling. “Go, then,” he says. “Get the fuck up the mountain and leave us alone.”