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 those 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.”