“If you get caught, they will kill you.” He pauses. “They may be family, but they don’t know you. They won’t understand.”
“No one even knows I’m there.”
“The house knew I was there,” he says. “The house knows you, too.” She sees the effort he makes to calm himself. “You are not—we are not—meant to be.”
The words hurt her so much she can barely breathe. “You’ll never be safe off the mountain. Please don’t go, Aura. Please.”
“All right,” she whispers.
He hugs her. When he lets her go, he says, “You be a good girl and go find your brothers.”
The rage is back in her throat so quickly it burns. “I’m not a girl!” she shouts. “I’m not a girl, and you aren’t a man!”
He nods, stricken. “I won’t say it again.” But he leaves her, frightened by her anger.
She would cry, except that crying will make her think of the house again, and she can’t bear to be sad and scared anymore. Instead she runs and hides in the trees. Petrolio finds her, eventually.
“What happened to you?” he says, and he pulls her hair in the way that she hates. Like her, he is slim and blond, his four white feet always ready to run. When she chases him, she never wins.
Aura can catch Estajfan sometimes, but she’s pretty sure he lets her do it.
“Nothing. Leave me alone.”
But this is Petrolio, so of course he doesn’t. “What happened? Aura, what happened?” Whathappenedwhathappenedwhathappenedwhathappened. Aura, come onnnnn.
She can’t tell him. In the house, when her father let go of her hand, she understood that he was hoping the house would take him back, make him what he used to be. Or, failing that, make him nothing. We are not meant to be.
Her father still loves her, the blonde woman at the window. Their mother. He would be human again in an instant. He would rather be that than be all that they have.
Eventually, with no response from her, Petrolio gets bored and leaves her. She waits under the trees for some time, then heads for the treehouse and destroys it, tossing the pieces off the side of the mountain. When she’s done, the tree is bare and trembling, the ground littered with broken wood, the air menacing and silent. The tree will be angry at her for a long time.
She turns to see her brothers standing silent in the clearing. She doesn’t know how long they’ve been there. There is no fear in their faces, just curiosity and a mirroring grief. They feel her heartache without knowing what it is.
The next night, Aura dreams of the house and her mother again. She doesn’t tell her father. She walks right into the house. The flat-nosed man is with her mother and the sadness in her face is gone. Aura watches them, invisible in the corner. She screams, but no one hears a thing.
Many years later, when the meteors come, she is standing where the treehouse used to be. Petrolio and the other centaurs, the ones who were born from the mountain, have gathered in the clearing to watch. Her brother reaches for her hand. Estajfan is nowhere she can see.
The meteors fall on the city without mercy, without rhyme. They smash into the lowland trees. She watches fire hit the far-off river, imagines steam rising into the air, the riverbed dried up in an instant, all things lush and green burning away.
The mountain centaurs raise their arms and cry out with joy. Beneath her hooves, she realizes, the ground is rejoicing. Green things will grow again, tendril their way over human death. New seedlings will love the richer soil. They will love how much more space they have, the freedom to grow unchecked.
Petrolio squeezes her hand.
She doesn’t want to think about the people in the city, but she does. Estajfan has told her stories. That other daughter, the one that they met on the mountain. She is down there now, buried somewhere in the mess.
It’s been years since she dreamed of the house (she was a good daughter, in the end), but Aura thinks of it now as the world burns below them. Time passes differently here on the mountain; years since the last dream, longer than that since their mother grew old and died. Centuries? She isn’t sure.
The mountain centaurs begin to sing. They are many but when they sing they sound as one—eerie and sad, angry and beautiful and triumphant as the city far below them catches fire. Aura and Petrolio stay quiet. The other centaurs don’t care about what happens off the mountain. The mountain speaks to them in ways that it doesn’t speak to Aura and her brothers. They aren’t lonely, the original three—not exactly—but they’re alone.
She casts her mind toward her mother’s house, but doesn’t see it. She imagines a fiery piece of the sky coming down to claim it—a gaping crater where their birthplace used to be, the bleached room gone forever.
It’s a small, hard thing to be glad about.
THE DOCTOR AND THE MOUNTAIN
The doctor walks for days and weeks and months, stopping in a hundred little villages along the way, and gradually the mountains come into view on the horizon. She grew up by the sea—she’s never been to the mountains before. They seem higher than it is possible for anything to be, shimmering in layers of fog. Most of them are capped in white, but one mountain is green all the way into the clouds. The sea air tastes of salt. Here, the air tastes like the sky.
There is a city near the green mountain, nestled in its shadow. The doctor makes her way to one of its clinics and asks if they need help. The answer is yes. The answer is always yes. They give her a room in the physicians’ lodge. The city folk bring her flowers as a welcome—great red bursts of amaryllis and shining white lilies. She puts them in her window.
The people are happy and fit and superstitious. There are a few houses built closer to the mountain but not many. Almost everyone lives clustered together. The elders sprinkle salt across her doorstep early in the morning on the first day of spring. For wealth, they tell her. Wealth and prosperity and protection from death. For a family, a man.
The doctor has no money except what the world gives her. She has a twin sister whom she sees several times a year, and twin nieces. They are all the family she needs.
And protection from death? She herself is protection enough.
When she isn’t working, the doctor walks the streets and wanders out into the fields at the city’s edge. Sometimes she walks in the evening, even late at night, when there are no other souls around. No one else in the city goes where she goes.
“There’s something strange about that mountain,” another one of the doctors at the clinic confesses to her, late one night over drinks at the pub. He too has come from away. “The people here tell all kinds of strange stories. Monsters and ghosts. Animals that talk, that kind of thing.”
The doctor laughs. When her mother was thirty-seven years old, a man came to their house and called her a witch. His wife had run away with another man, and the husband was convinced the doctor’s mother had helped her do it.
“She wouldn’t have fallen in love if it hadn’t been for you,” he said. “She wouldn’t have done that on her own.”
The doctor’s mother was also a doctor, of sorts. She grew herbs in their backyard that she made into medicine, and she delivered babies when she needed to and got rid of pregnancies when that needed doing. Sometimes a heartbroken girl or boy would come to her and demand a love potion. The doctor’s mother would brew tea and sit down and tell them that you cannot make anyone fall in love with you. And sometimes people fall out of love, and there is nothing you can do about that, either. It will hurt. But while you can’t see it now, that hurt is building a mountain inside of you. One day you’ll climb that mountain. One day, your hurt will allow you to be and do great things.