“What happens if a door catches me?” asked Regan, voice suddenly small.
Daisy sighed, putting one large hand on the girl’s shoulder. “They’re not predators, child, not like the kelpies. They won’t chase you down to break your bones and rend your flesh. When your time to return to where you came from arrives, the door will find you and it’ll be up to you whether or not you go through.”
“But everyone says humans disappear after they do whatever they came here to do,” protested Regan, voice getting louder. The centaurs never scolded her for yelling. Her normal speaking voice was soft enough compared to theirs that they heard almost everything she said as if it was a whisper. “I don’t want to be your apprentice and then disappear on you! That’s not fair!”
“Peace, child, peace.” Daisy offered her a smile. “Any of us could disappear at any time. Landslides, predators, even illness, they come for us all if age doesn’t get there first. So you can be my apprentice, and I’ll teach you as much as I can before you leave us, and when you do leave us, I’ll find someone else who wants the things I have to offer. It won’t be Chicory. She has no grace for it, and no desire to be tied to the herd for all her days. Maybe at the Fair we can barter for another girl who’s interested in the healing arts, if you feel it necessary.”
“The Fair?” asked Regan.
“We’ll go there as the year turns, before you and Pansy travel to the Queen,” said Daisy, picking up her basket of herbs and balancing it on her withers. “We’ll bring the stock to sell what we can, since the flock can’t be allowed to get too large. We’ll visit our husbands, those of us who have them, or the local boys, if we don’t. And some herds will have grown too large, and may be looking to send their daughters off to learn honest trades. We could sustain a few more mouths.”
Regan blinked. This was the first she’d heard of husbands, and while she’d wondered why all the centaurs were female, she had never felt she could ask before. “Husbands?” she asked.
Daisy clucked her tongue. “Go tell Pansy the foal’s out, and the mare survived. You’re too young to speak of husbands. Go now, go.”
Regan, who was generally obedient when she lacked reason not to be, turned and ran for the longhouse. The more time she spent with the centaurs, whose walking pace was her jog, the harder she found it to do anything slowly. So she ran, and Daisy smiled, watching the girl go.
It had been so long since there was a human in the Hooflands. She didn’t like to consider what might be ahead of them that was bad enough to require human intervention. Humans were heroes and lightning rods for disaster, and none of the stories she’d heard about them when she was a filly had ended gently for them, or for the people around them. Aster had always been careful to tell Chicory the most hopeful of the human stories, the ones where the humans did their grand deeds and disappeared, presumably going back where they came from, but Daisy’s own mother had been less circumspect, and she knew where most of the humans had gone when their battle ended—into the ground. She couldn’t possibly say whether the same fate waited for Regan—it was too soon for that, and she’d never heard of a human hero as young as Regan was, or as eager to please—but the girl was more likely to find her own doom than a doorway home. In the meantime, the herd would care for and tend to her, and part of that caring was keeping her busy enough that her thoughts didn’t devour themselves alive. She was a child, far from home, surrounded by members of a species that wasn’t hers. It would have been understandable for her to fall into despair. The fact that she hadn’t was barely shy of a miracle, and one more piece of proof that humans could do anything when they put their minds to it.
Daisy sighed, one hand stabilizing her basket, and started plodding toward the longhouse. They were going to protect and nurture the girl as long as they could, keeping her safe from a world that would have happily destroyed her. Regan still viewed anything with hooves as a potential friend, looking on them with joy and wonder, no matter how many times she was warned about the kelpies and the perytons and the bat-winged pterippus. It made Daisy wonder how many humans they had missed, children who had stumbled through a door without someone like Pansy nearby to save them from their own adventure. Regan could have been lost before she was ever found, if the kelpies had been only a little bit hungrier on the day she’d crossed over.
It was the sort of thought that benefitted no one. Daisy shook it off and walked faster, following Regan’s tracks to the longhouse.
Inside, Regan and Chicory were playing an elaborate game of tag, both laughing. Chicory was faster, but Regan was nimbler, and managed to evade being tagged by jumping off a table and grabbing the lowest of the ceiling beams, dangling. Chicory squealed and grabbed at her legs while Regan thrashed.
Daisy cast an indulgent smile at the girls as she trotted to where Aster, Rose, and Lily were repairing one of the nets they used to subdue the stallions when they grew too aggressive. “Foal’s here,” she said. “Good, strong colt. He’ll be a fine stallion someday.”
“Regan told us,” said Aster, and tied another careful knot in her mending. “She said you’ve asked her to serve as your apprentice.”
“So I have,” said Daisy.
“I always thought Chicory—”
“Chicory is a fine, clever girl, and you should have all the pride in her that you can carry. Take her to meet her sire when we go to the Fair. She’s earned the right.” Daisy scowled as Aster turned her face away. “If you didn’t want him to be a father, you shouldn’t have chosen him.”
“It wasn’t his fatherhood potential she was looking at,” murmured Rose. Lily snickered, stopping only when Daisy turned her scowl on the pair.
“And you! Neither of you has an aversion to men or motherhood, and you’re both young. The herd needs replenishing.”
“So we take apprentice contracts,” said Rose.
“Or you take husbands at the Fair and you foal in the spring,” said Daisy. “We won’t have a human forever, however much we might wish we would. Humans don’t work that way.” She cast a mournful glance at the two children chasing each other around the beam. “Soon she’ll be gone, and her clever hands with the rest of her. We need to build the herd, or Chicory will be an elder surrounded by the foals of strangers one day. That isn’t fair to her.”
The other women were briefly quiet, considering their own childhoods, and how lonely they would have been if they’d had no one but adults and apprentices to share them with. Finally, Lily nodded.
“Come the Fair, we’ll go courting,” she said.
“Good,” said Daisy, and the children played, and the time passed, and it was far too late to take any of it back.
9
OFF TO THE FAIR WITH BANGLES AND BEADS
ANOTHER SEASON PASSED, ONE day at a time, so quickly that Regan forgot she was meant to be worrying about her parents, far away from her and probably worried about where she was. Getting to them would mean risking a door, if a door could even be found, and she was still leery of those, even when they were solid, ordinary, and familiar, like the doors of the longhouses that provided safe haven for the herd as they moved closer to what she now recognized as the Fair.