When the husband came to her, the doctor’s mother told him this same thing. But he refused to listen.
“I don’t want a mountain,” he said. “I just want my wife back. I deserve my wife back!” He was shouting like a madman, and the neighbours came to wrestle him away. When they were gone, the doctor’s mother closed her front door and let out a long sigh of relief.
That would have been the end of the story except that a few days later, the man came back to their house in the night and burned it to the ground with the doctor’s mother inside it.
The doctor had been ten years old at the time. She and her sister had been sleeping over at a friend’s house. Her father had managed to get out of the house in time and never forgave himself for it. The guilt was its own kind of ghost.
So when other people warn her about ghosts on the mountain, about animals that hide in the trees—the trickster foxes, the river sprites that wait to drown you—the doctor shrugs and makes her plans. Ghosts don’t lurk in the shadows, or in the places people are afraid to go.
One day, after she is finished her shift, the doctor packs her life into her satchel once again and makes her way to the foot of the mountain.
The climb is hard and slow, but the doctor is used to hard journeys. Heights don’t scare her and she’s slept in the rain countless times; she rests when she’s tired. She hacks a little path as she climbs, switchbacking slowly up the mountainside. It’s relatively easy—someone has been this way before.
When the centaur comes to greet her, she’s only halfway up the mountain.
The centaur seems at once exactly the same and more alien than she remembers—like he belongs to the mountain and she does not. For the first time in her life the doctor feels bedraggled and foolish.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
How long has it been since that night at the house in the village—a year? Impossible, but yes. Weeks wandering away from the village, months spent in the city at the base of the mountain. It feels like no time at all.
“I wanted to see you,” she says.
“How did you know I was here?” he says.
She has no real answer. “I don’t know.”
“No one comes up this mountain,” the centaur says. “No one dares.”
“Fear and strange stories won’t keep people away forever,” she says. “Humans climb. Don’t you remember?”
“This is my home. Humans do not deserve to be here at all.”
“Well, I’m here,” the doctor says.
There’s a loneliness in his face that she remembers from the last time she saw him. “Your children,” she says. “Are they all right?”
Unexpectedly, he smiles. “They are beautiful. More beautiful here than they would be anywhere else.”
“I’d love to meet them,” the doctor says. It’s been two years since they were born, but horses would be on their way to fully grown by now. Perhaps centaurs, too.
The centaur frowns. “Perhaps,” he says. “One day.”
“I could teach them, if you wanted,” she says.
The centaur considers her for a long time, then shakes his head. “Not yet. They won’t trust you. Give me time.”
“They won’t trust me?” she says. “Or you won’t?”
“I could use your help,” the centaur admits. “But not with the children.”
“Anything.” She feels—not sorry for him, but something.
“I want to teach them all I can about the world that they’ve come from, and their history,” he says. “I want them to know about the things that the humans have made far below. I’ve been building a collection.”
The doctor remembers the first time she saw him in this form, so striking and terrifying in that godforsaken room. He was beautiful then, but he is even more beautiful now, set against the backdrop of the mountain.
“I can teach them about the human world,” she says.
“No,” he says, his voice fierce. “I was human once. I remember. I do not need your help with that.”
The doctor looks at the ground and then nods. “I could bring you things,” she says, after a moment. “For your collection.”
“I would like that.” He looks down at her. “My children,” he allows, “are rambunctious.”
The doctor laughs. “Most children are.”
“I worry about them. I’m afraid that they’ll tumble down the mountain and hurt themselves. I’m afraid that they’ll get tired of the mountain and run down to the land below and somebody will see them.”
“You run down to the land below,” she reminds him.
“That’s different,” he says. “I know human ways. I know how to hide. I am careful. They are… not.”
“They could learn,” she says.
“Yes,” he says, that fierce anger back in his voice, “but the world will not learn, will it?”
She closes her eyes and feels the wind cool on her face. “Even so,” she says. “You shouldn’t hide them away.”
“I’m not hiding them,” the centaur says. “I’m keeping them safe.”
It occurs to her—not for the first time—that the babies might have died after all. Maybe they died on the journey. Is she ever going to know? “Tell me what you need and I will bring it.”
The centaur stares at her for so long the doctor wonders if she’s hallucinating. Has she been dreaming this whole time? Then he nods.
“Thank you,” he says. “I would like that. Bring me things that I can use to teach the children, and I will look forward to seeing you when you come back.”
He doesn’t say goodbye—he only turns from her, his black tail fanning the air, and jumps up the steep mountainside. The doctor stands listening to his absence for who knows how long. When she is absolutely sure he’s not coming back, she turns and makes her way back down the mountain.
12
Petrolio and Aura are in the mountain clearing when Estajfan reaches them, Heather curled and silent in his arms. The mountain centaurs immediately gather around them, wary and stiff.
A mountain centaur with brown hair and their father’s brown-green eyes confronts him. “She should not be here. You put us all in danger.”
“In danger of what?” Estajfan looks at the mountain centaurs, who know, and his siblings, who do not. “What danger could humans possibly pose for us? They’re all dead.”
His brother and sister jump in shock. In his arms, Heather whimpers, and seems to come to, then moves to climb down from Estajfan’s arms. Aura reaches out to her as Estajfan lets her down gently, until she is on her feet, her belly protruding in front of her. The other centaurs hiss.
“She should be down with the others,” the mountain centaur says. “The world has decided—the time of humans is no more.”
“Aura.” Heather’s voice is ragged with grief. If she hears the other centaurs standing around them, she doesn’t let on.
“Are you hurt?” his sister says.
Estajfan sees the bleak mirth in Petrolio’s eyes—Of course she’s hurt, he can almost hear his brother saying—and addresses the question, and the other centaurs, at the same time. “She’s alone,” he says. “What do you think, Aura?”
Aura flinches again and balls her fists. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Heather—I didn’t know.”
She didn’t know, and neither did he—not until that moment of the scream, the sudden unleashed power of the vines and flowers, the world gone green and terrible. But he should have known. He should have suspected.