“Why didn’t you tell us?” Petrolio is the first to break the silence. Sharp, raw, betrayed.
“He was afraid for us,” Aura says. “I think that made him into something he didn’t want to be.”
“He forbade us to go down!” Petrolio cries. “But he went down because there were things there that he loved? He didn’t tell us any of these stories. How could he do that?”
Aura nods. “When I looked at him after that, all I could see was her face as she fell. And he knew it—I think he saw her face too. I went down and found her body. I carried her here, and buried her. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Your bag,” Tasha says. “That belonged to her.”
Aura’s hands go to the old satchel slung over her shoulder. “Yes,” she says. “I carry her with me wherever I go.”
“And you?” Estajfan says. He is not as angry as Petrolio, but the hurt in his voice is deep. “What were you afraid of, Aura? You’re the one who insisted we stay here.”
“People have died!” Aura points to the graves. “Every time humans and centaurs come together, something happens, Estajfan. Someone gets hurt. The doctor wanted to help, but she died. Our father only wanted to love, and the house that we were born in—it almost took him. I was there. I saw it.”
“You went down with him?” Petrolio says, betrayed.
“In a dream, or a vision, or—something.” Aura shakes her head and her eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t leave the mountain. We aren’t meant to be off the mountain. And humans aren’t meant to be up here.”
“We aren’t meant to be anywhere!” Estajfan cries. “We don’t belong below the mountain with the humans—but we don’t belong here, either, Aura, and you know it.”
“Yes, we do,” she whispers. “This is the home Da made for us. Da didn’t think we were monsters.”
“Da isn’t here anymore!” he shouts. “It was the mountain that made Da into an in-between thing, Aura. It was the mountain that made it so that Da didn’t belong.” Estajfan clenches his fists. “And the mountain did that because it knew that he wanted a different kind of life.”
“We’re safe here,” she says, stubbornly. “Look what just happened to you! We’re safer here than we’ll ever be down below.”
“Aura.” Petrolio steps closer to her. “The mountain centaurs—when we left, you know what they said—”
“I don’t want to leave the mountain only to get shot by the side of the road!” Aura is weeping in earnest now.
“Yes,” Annie says, surprising them all. “And I don’t want to be in a world that’s starving us to death. But it doesn’t seem to matter what we want, does it.”
“I don’t know,” says Elyse. She’s resting with her back against the peach tree. “I never thought I’d get up to the top of this mountain, and here we are.” She laughs, and then doubles over, wheezing. When she catches her breath again, she locks eyes with Aura. “Here we are,” she says, “no matter how hard the world tried to starve us. And you helped us up the mountain despite also saying that it tried hard to keep us away. Maybe Tasha’s right. Maybe there’s a reason we’re here. Us, and all of you, and no one else.”
Heather laughs then, unexpectedly. They turn to look at her. “Maybe you were ready to survive,” she quotes. She looks at Estajfan. “Maybe we’ve always been ready.”
In the silence that comes after this, Moira clears her throat. “There are two patches of bare earth,” she says. “What is the other one for?”
Heather closes her eyes. “My father,” she says. “This is my father’s grave.”
The world behind her eyelids is swirling red and orange; Heather bends her forehead to the ground again and breathes in the smell of the mountain.
“I brought him here to be with her,” Aura says.
Heather looks up. All around her is hazy sky and grey-brown stone and sturdy green lichens, fuzzy green moss. And the flowers. And yet there is no danger here that she can feel—only the colours, and love.
“He asked for help,” she says. “When we climbed up. He thought that you could help me, that you could make me into something other than what I am.”
Aura nods. “Yes,” she says. “I remember.”
“But I didn’t need help,” Heather says. “My body didn’t do everything that I might have wanted it to do, but it was mine. I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want him to want me to change.” She bites her lip. “I saw him stumble. I could have reached for him too, and I didn’t. Not in time.”
“Heather,” Estajfan begins, “that wasn’t your f—”
“I was so hurt,” she says, talking over him. Her voice is far away, remembering. “Hurt, and so angry—but only for a moment. And even that moment was too long.”
What if her father hadn’t encouraged her to climb the mountain at all? What if she’d never felt like she’d had something to prove?
“He belongs here now,” Aura says. “And so does she. The flowers wouldn’t have come to them otherwise.”
It’s been so long since Joseph has spoken that nearly all of them jump when he says, “What—your mountain only likes humans if they’re dead?”
“The mountain,” a strange voice says, and they look up to see two more centaurs above them on a knoll, “does not care about humans either way.” One male, one female. The female dark-haired, the male pale as Petrolio and Aura.
“We told you not to come back,” the female says. “Aura, you should not have brought them up here.”
“The humans in the ground?” Aura says. She places a hand on Heather’s shoulder. “Or these ones?”
“Any,” says the male. “Humans do not belong here. The mountain is only trying to keep us safe.”
Tasha hears the whisper of a high-pitched scream in her ears, the crazy tilt of a world thrown open to the sky. She realizes only then that it isn’t a memory. She reaches for Heather, understanding at last.
But Heather is not there. Instead it is the pale centaur, and Heather is in the air now, the centaur’s hands strong and terrible around her, lifting. There is no time for Heather to scream, to even be surprised. Bright-blue panic in Estajfan’s face, his outstretched fingers.
Sky over mountain over mountain over sky, and she goes over.
28
Estajfan reaches for Heather, misses, and then leaps over the side and is gone.
Petrolio crashes into the other pale centaur—they fall to the ground with a thud that shakes the trees. The dark centaur does not move.
Tasha, breathless, shouts to Aura. “Take me down. Take me down now.”
Petrolio scrambles to his feet again. “I’ll take you,” he rasps. “Aura—get the others away from here.” He bends and Tasha climbs onto his back—they turn to go but Aura shoots out a hand and grabs Petrolio’s arm.
“Wait,” she says. She pulls off her bag and gives it to Tasha. Then they are leaping over the knoll and down the path.
Elyse is on her knees, clutching her chest, her breathing hard and ragged. Annie bends over her, while Moira and Joseph stand terrified, still. The two mountain centaurs’ brown eyes sweep them all.
“Leave now,” the male centaur says as he climbs to his feet. “Leave now, or the rest of you will follow.”
Aura goes to Elyse and kneels. Moira and Annie help the girl onto her back.
“The world is more than the mountain,” Aura says, and she faces the mountain centaurs as she stands. “Green things grew around the graves here, even if the mountain didn’t want the bodies. Change comes to the mountain, too, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.”