Beside her, she can see Annie struggling with the same thing. And if they find the bodies—what happens then?
“We’re leaving,” Annie says, as if she hears that last thought. “We get down from here, and we take what food we have left and go. We’ll find other people somewhere. There must be others who’ve survived.”
Others, Moira thinks. Others who met their grief and faced it, or knew what to do with it. She thinks again of Heather. Maybe we’ve always been ready.
“Heather and Estajfan have survived,” Elyse says, with a conviction none of them feel. “We made our way up here. It means something. Nothing else would make sense.”
Moira wants to laugh—What about this makes any kind of sense?—but she can’t.
The sun crawls down the sky.
And then she hears a cry from Aura, and an answering shout—from Petrolio, Moira thinks. Petrolio, and Tasha.
They stumble down and reach the overhang. They are alive, impossibly. Aura kneels and Moira and Annie lift Elyse from her back, then rest her between them. She seems barely there and yet brighter, somehow, than any of them. Dazed and tired and still surprised to find herself there at all. And triumphant, somehow, in the knowing. Annie lowers her gently to the ground and settles beside her.
Moira crouches near Heather, then reaches for her hand and squeezes tight.
“Heather.”
Heather. Darby. Joseph. Brian and Annie, Tasha and Elyse.
Aura. She whispers the names to herself. Aura, Estajfan, Petrolio.
Heather looks at her, eyes wide with fear.
“Heather,” Moira says again. “It’s going to be okay.”
When Tasha cuts into her belly, Heather screams, but they are holding her down, Petrolio and Aura on either side of her, Moira at her head, Elyse and Annie behind her like blonde ghosts. Another shadow behind them—the other woman, brown-haired and gentle. Estajfan, reaching silently for her through the waves of pain and terror. And then there is a great wrench and something dark that blocks her view of the sky—her son, tiny and screaming as Tasha pulls him from her belly and holds him up. Heather sees four dark legs but then the light shifts and he is only a dark-haired baby boy, crying loud enough for the whole world to hear.
Tasha passes the baby to Annie and then begins to sew Heather up. It hurts, but not as much as she expected it would. After Tasha snips off the thread, she spreads the salve from Aura’s bag over the wound and covers it in cloth, then Annie passes her son to her. He is still crying loud enough to fill the sky, and as Heather gathers him into her good arm she sees flashes of his life the way she saw her own fall from the mountain, the way she brought them to Estajfan, the way she saw Tasha and the flames. The long climb down, the even longer climb they will make to find food, to find others. The family they will become. The sudden blossoming of fruit trees and plants down below, a presence deep within the soil that she recognizes.
Her father has left the mountain too. He is waiting for her, down below.
Estajfan, she thinks. Estajfan beside her, around her, everywhere.
I survived, she thinks. I came out of the ground with the flowers.
The baby roots for her nipple like her girls did. Tasha cups his head and guides him to it, and Heather feels him suck at her as though he’s been waiting for this, only this, all these months. It’s an ordinary magic, but it’s stronger than the mountain.
He is so small, but that is all right—he is here now. He is hers.
EPILOGUE
In the morning the doctor wakes up early; the sun has barely risen, the sky is still tinged with pink. When she exhales, her breath mists in the air. She shakes out the blanket that kept her warm through the night and then bundles it up and tucks it in her bag. For breakfast, a handful of berries and some dried meat. Not fancy, but she’s survived on much less.
When she has eaten, she squares her shoulders and readies herself for the climb back up the mountain. Sleeping outside is not as nice for her bones as it once was, no matter how much mountain air she breathes.
As she climbs, she thinks about the babies. They had cried like all babies do, but in those dark moments when the wife was asleep and the husband stood in the corner of the room not knowing what to do, the babies’ eyes had followed her. They might not have known who she was but they knew she was somebody. By the time she’d finished stitching up the mother and had turned her attention again to the babies, they no longer seemed unusual. Like they’d been born into a spot that had already been waiting. Like the world, whatever the villagers might have said, had been ready for their arrival.
She picked each baby up in turn and sang to it—old lullabies and holiday carols and songs about sunshine and love—then she wrapped each of them into a blanket and laid them on the table beside their mother. Then she turned to the husband and told him he had to go, and take the babies with him.
As she climbs the mountain these years later, the doctor wonders if that was a mistake. Should she have stayed there, in the village, and protected the babies? Had she acted too quickly in sending the children and their father away? The mother might have come around. The children were beautiful. It wasn’t hard to see that.
They aren’t monsters, the doctor might have said to her. They’re only different. And perhaps the mother and her husband might have forged a way together. They might have had to move out of the village, but they could have done it, they could have survived.
Instead, this.
Higher, and higher still. The doctor pushes away the flowers that bob in front of her along the path. She thinks about the golden cuffs she brought him yesterday. An extravagant gift, but what was the harm—what was she going to do with golden bracelets anyway? When was the last time she’d had reason to adorn herself?
She’s not entirely sure that the centaur will find a use for them either. What’s the point of wearing golden cuffs if you live on the mountain and there’s no one to impress? But he did what she thought he would do—he saw the gold and how it shone. He had been impressed—the human part of him, the part that measured worth in things like gold. Sometimes he was so human she almost couldn’t stand it.
You are the best and most beautiful of creatures, she wants to tell him. The nobility of a horse and the sharp mind of a human, the strength of the mountain beating in each of his hearts. Be worthy of that. It isn’t hard.
She reaches the last bend in the path before it stops. Beyond that there’s a little hill; she’s never climbed it because the centaur was always here to greet her.
It’s so steep it’s a struggle, but then she is over the rise, and there they are. Two of them. The father, dark and tall, and the girl, golden in the sunlight. Her long blonde hair shines almost white; her arms are tanned and muscled, and her shoulders slope in the happy way that children’s do.
The girl turns and sees the doctor first. Her eyes are blue-green, like her mother’s.
Far away, the doctor imagines that the mother stands up and listens.
She looks like her mother, the girl—the same face, the same scattered golden freckles. The same tilt of neck and chin. The resemblance is so strong the doctor almost cries.
I have a secret, the doctor wants to say. I’ve been waiting all these years to tell you.