“I don’t think you’re limited,” she said, stepping around the pile of unicorn poop as she continued to follow. In a softer, shyer voice, she added, “I think you’re beautiful.”
Pansy’s laugh was as large as the rest of her. It boomed. The unicorn made a small bleating noise that sounded almost like an objection. Pansy laughed harder. “I can be beautiful and limited at the same time,” she said. “Take unicorns. They’re as beautiful as it gets, and they don’t have the brains to come in out of the rain. They’ll just stand there trying to figure out why they’re getting wet and wait for someone to come along and fix it for them. There’s nothing wrong with being limited, as long as you have people around to make sure those limitations don’t get you hurt. Or drenched.”
“Oh,” said Regan, who had never thought of it that way. “I guess that’s true.”
“You know it’s true,” said Pansy. “Come on.” She swept a curtain of branches aside and cantered through, leaving room for Regan to follow.
On the other side of the trees was a meadow that Regan knew didn’t exist; it was too large, for one thing, vast and rolling off toward the horizon, covered in lush grass that was a shade of blue-green she was reasonably sure couldn’t be natural. Patches of clover and buttery yellow flowers dotted the grass, but those were nowhere near as enthralling as the other things roaming the field.
Unicorns.
Dozens upon dozens of unicorns, in all shades of silver from cloud-pale to mercury-bright, their horns gleaming and their tails flicking away insects brazen enough to land on their glittering flanks. Most moved on their own, but there were a few small groups of three to six individuals, and even a few—Regan gasped aloud—a few babies. Their coats were more pearl than silvery, and their horns were short, stubby things, sharp as needles and ready to pierce the world.
Pansy shoved the unicorn she’d been leading away from her, giving it a slap on one perfectly sculpted flank. It shot her a reproachful look before trotting to the nearest patch of yellow flowers and lowering its head, beginning to delicately crop at the petals.
“They wander,” said Pansy. “Especially the yearlings. Think they know everything there is about staying alive in the woods, when the kelpies and the hippogriffs will rip them to bits as soon as look at them. Nothing territorial likes having unicorns in their backyard. Too much potential for stabbing.” She laughed again, startling some of the nearby unicorns, which trotted away. “But here I am, running my mouth like a filly, when you want to meet the others. Feel up to an adventure, human Regan?”
“Sure,” said Regan, trying to sound as brave as she didn’t feel. “Lead the way.”
Pansy smiled, and clapped a hand on Regan’s shoulder, and tugged her across the field, guiding her the same way she’d previously guided the unicorn. As for Regan, she went willingly, having no idea what else was left for her to do. They crossed the field of unicorns to a stone-and-timber building that Regan hadn’t noticed before, sheltered as it was in the shadow of a copse of pines. Pansy opened the door, and both of them stepped inside, and were gone.
7
WHERE THE CENTAURS GO
PART OF REGAN WAS honestly surprised when she passed through the doorway and found herself in a long, smoky room instead of disappearing back to her own world. Doorways were suddenly untrustworthy; any one of them could be a portal into someplace altogether different, someplace as strange compared to this world of centaurs and unicorns as it was compared to where she’d come from. Her mind balked at attempting to imagine such a world, and so she abandoned the attempt in favor of gawking at her surroundings.
The room was easily twice the length of the stable where her riding horse spent his days, and similar in construction, with a beamed roof and rough wooden floor. Hooks on the walls held tack and sacks of grain and various tools, most of which she recognized, but a few of which she didn’t. There were no stalls. Instead, the whole space was open, filled with smoke from the oil lamps burning on the long tables set up down the middle of the room, their surfaces laden with bowls of salad and platters of roast meat. Regan’s stomach did a flip as she tried to figure out what animals that meat could have come from. Given Pansy’s casual handling of the unicorn, and the fact that the creature was apparently part of a flock to be herded, she could be looking at roast unicorn right now.
And then there were the centaurs.
It was almost difficult for her to focus on them; her mind kept trying to skip over them and go to the more familiar details, like the mud and straw on the floor and the faint scent of horse manure in the air. Those were things she understood. Even Pansy was a thing she understood at this point; she had encountered Pansy on her own, as a singular entity, and an exception was always easier to grasp than a category—but the others? They were too much.
There were eight of them, all female, all built on the same massive scale as Pansy herself, their breasts covered by laced vests, their arms bare and powerful, with biceps bigger around than Regan’s thighs. Their coats came in every color of the equine rainbow, dapple and bay, chestnut and a silvery-gray that would have seemed luminous if not for the unicorns outside, reminding the world what “luminous” really meant. The oldest looked like she could have been Pansy’s grandmother, with wrinkles and lines worked in the soft skin of her face and hair as white as a swan’s wing. The youngest looked to be about Regan’s age, smaller and lither than the others, with a gawky dun filly’s body. She was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first to drop the carrot she’d been idly munching, and point a trembling finger at Pansy and Regan.
“Human,” she said, in an awed voice that was probably intended as a whisper, but which boomed through the room, as proportionately loud as Pansy’s. “Pansy found a human. Mom! Pansy found a human!”
A dark chestnut centaur with elaborately braided hair walked over to the young one, clamping a hand down on her shoulder like the pressure enough would be a command to silence. “I see that, Chicory,” she said, and unlike her daughter, she kept her voice low enough not to hurt Regan’s ears. “Humans can speak. She heard you. I taught you better manners than that.”
Regan’s cheeks flushed and her ears burned with secondhand embarrassment as the young centaur drooped, pinned by her mother’s hand. She shot Regan a look filled with shame, and it was so familiar, so essentially human, that Regan relaxed. These people might be centaurs, creatures out of myth and storybook, but they were people. They could be embarrassed by their own actions and by their overbearing parents. They weren’t awe-inspiring. They were just people.
Regan reached deep enough to find a smile and pull it to the surface, offering it to Chicory. The young centaur blinked large brown eyes in evident surprise before smiling back, then grinning, her lips stretching wide to expose square, sturdy teeth as large as the rest of her.
A hand clapped hard on Regan’s shoulder as Pansy boomed, “Her name is Regan. One of the wayward unicorns found her by the water, and I found the unicorn, and now she’s here, with us! We have a human!”
The centaurs cheered, the noise so large in the enclosed space that it virtually had physical form. Then they rushed forward, surrounding Regan with the hot equine scent of their bodies as they bombarded Pansy with questions about where she’d found the human, had it been frightening, had there been any warnings before it happened. Chicory inched closer and closer, until she was close enough that Regan could have reached out and touched her, if that wouldn’t have been impossibly rude.