Chicory’s vest was made of pale leather. Regan thought of the unicorns and swallowed bile. It wasn’t right to judge these people when she didn’t know anything about them. If they were eating unicorns—and oh, she hoped they weren’t eating unicorns—it would be more respectful to use every part they could, including the hides. Right? Right.
“Hi,” said Regan in a soft, shy voice. No matter how hard she tried to think of the centaurs as people, not storybook creatures, part of her still regarded them with almost overwhelming awe.
“Hi,” replied Chicory, and belched, as loudly as she did everything else. One of the other centaurs cuffed her in the back of the head, not hard, but casually, like she was swatting a fly. Chicory ducked her head and covered her mouth, giggling. Regan did the same, and for a moment, they were just two young girls surrounded by adults, united in a way that had been true since the beginning of time.
The adults were too preoccupied to notice when Regan backed away from Pansy’s side, beckoning Chicory to follow. Even being their precious human didn’t stop her from making her escape; like small, slight girls everywhere, she was well schooled in the ways of ducking under adult attention. They would notice her absence eventually, but in the meantime, she could get to know the only person here who might be unguarded enough to honestly answer her questions.
The voices of the adults masked the clopping of Chicory’s hooves. They weren’t shouting—quite—but they all seemed to be trying to drown each other out all the same. Life with centaurs was a noisy life, that much was obvious, and Regan had to swallow the urge to clap her hands over her ears. She moved as far away as she thought was safe, to the end of one of the long tables, and stopped there, casting uneasy glances at the door, like it might reach out and grab her at any moment.
Chicory noticed. She frowned and asked, “Did you see something outside? Or are doors dangerous where you come from? Do they grab people who get too close?”
“Sort of,” said Regan. “I was walking home from school, and I found a door in the woods that wasn’t supposed to be there. I went through it because I thought it was funny. I wound up here.”
Chicory blinked. “Don’t you want to be here?”
“My parents are going to be so mad,” said Regan. “I’m supposed to be home before sunset, unless I’ve already told them I’m having dinner at Laurel’s house.” She stopped, seeming to think about what she had just said, before bursting into silent tears.
Alarmed, Chicory looked over her shoulders at the adults. They were still talking amongst themselves, ignoring the girls. No one was going to yell at her for making the human cry. That helped a little. She’d never met a human before. She didn’t want to be forbidden to speak to the only one she had access to.
Turning back to Regan, she asked hesitantly, “Who’s Laurel? Is she with a different herd? We don’t have anyone here by that name, but if you tell me where she is, we can take you to her.” It would be sad to lose the human so quickly. It would be even sadder to keep the human against her will. Humans were people too, at least according to the stories Rose and Peony told, and she didn’t want to be cruel to someone who was a person. It wouldn’t be like keeping a unicorn penned for its own safety. It would be like someone putting a rope around her neck, and that thought was enough to make the flesh on her withers crawl.
Regan shook her head, crying harder.
“You don’t want to go where Laurel is?”
“N-no,” managed Regan. She took a gasping breath, inhaling snot and tears along with the air, and coughed before she said, “Laurel used to be my best friend. But I said something she didn’t like, and she doesn’t want to be my friend anymore.”
“Did you call her mother a swaybacked mule?” asked Chicory.
Regan sniffled and shook her head.
“Did you say she couldn’t have any apples anymore? Or call her careless in her husbandry? Or insult her hooves?”
The idea of Laurel with hooves was ridiculous enough that Regan laughed as she shook her head a third time.
Chicory shrugged. “Did you say anything mean about her at all?”
“No,” said Regan. “I told her a secret about myself. I can’t tell you what it was. I don’t know you well enough yet.” And it had been hard enough to tell Laurel, who knew her and supposedly cared about her and who shared a basic vocabulary with her. Trying to explain chromosomes to a centaur—who might not know anything about the idea—seemed too big and exhausting to undertake, and she didn’t think she could handle seeing revulsion in another person’s face right now. Not after the day she’d had.
To her relief, Chicory shrugged and said, “That’s fine. We just met. I’m not rushing to tell you all my secrets, either.” It was such a refreshing change from Laurel, who would have demanded to be told everything immediately, that Regan nearly started crying again. Chicory must have seen it in her expression, because she looked alarmed and leaned over to pat Regan awkwardly on the shoulder. “It’s fine. No one’s going to make you go where Laurel lives. I can’t promise you won’t have to go through any doors. You wouldn’t like being trapped inside forever. We go out during the day to herd the unicorns, and it would get really boring.”
“Heh. Yeah.” Regan wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “My parents are going to be upset when I don’t come home, was what I was trying to say. But the door I came through disappeared once I came through it, and I can’t be sure a different door would send me home. If I have to be somewhere I don’t belong, at least I can be somewhere that has unicorns.”
Chicory snorted. It was a surprisingly equine sound. “Unicorns aren’t anything special. They’d drown on a sunny day if we didn’t bring them inside. And sometimes they get their horns stuck in trees and can’t get loose, and we have to pull them free. Unicorn herding isn’t all hay and horseshoes, and if you think it is, you’re going to be real disappointed.”
“They’re beautiful,” said Regan. “Sometimes that’s enough.”
“Sometimes,” said Chicory, sounding doubtful. “Kirin are beautiful too, though, and they’re so much smarter. Kirin are people. Unicorns aren’t people.”
“Where I come from, all those things are fairy tales,” said Regan. “Centaurs too.”
“I’m not a story!” protested Chicory. “Stories don’t have to shovel unicorn poop.”
Regan giggled. “Maybe not,” she allowed. “But I’ve been shoveling horse poop since I was six, and it hasn’t hurt me any.”
Chicory blinked, frowning a little before she asked, “What’s a horse?”
“Um.” Regan hadn’t been anticipating that. Finally, she shook her head, and said, “It doesn’t matter. Are there really not humans here?”
“Not usually. Sometimes when something big and important is going to happen, a human shows up. Not always. When Queen Kagami grew up enough to take her family’s castle back from the Kelpie King who’d stolen it from her parents, a human came out of nowhere and summoned rainbows and lightning from the sky to help her fight for her rightful place. Everyone says that human was very heroic, and when he was finished with his quest, he disappeared, and Her Sunlit Majesty ascended to the throne. There hasn’t been a human since him.”