The pencil is on the floor. In two separate pieces.
Broken!
Have I just broken it?
I scramble toward it so fast that I pitch clear out of bed and land on the hard floor. I pick up the two pieces. The end is broken off and dulled, the body snapped clear in two, and my heart pounds as I think of ways to fix it. Stick it back together. Glue the pieces. There must be a way….
The candle flickers, and another burst of color under the bed catches my eye. 845-CARMINE RED. Except it is only a tiny piece. The point of the pencil. With dread, I lift the quilt.
I almost cannot tell you what happens next.
It is too, too terrible.
The pencils. All of them. 849-TANGERINE ORANGE and 876-HELIOTROPE PURPLE and 867-SEA TURQUOISE. Broken. Shattered. They’ve been stomped on and splintered and stamped out. The candlelight flickers over them, illuminating the crime scene. And one of my drawings, crumpled. I pull it out with shaking fingers.
The horse’s wings have been crossed out with black pencil, hard enough to tear the paper.
TIME TO GROW UP, someone has written.
Someone.
Oh, I know who.
I want to race downstairs and throw myself on his bed and strangle his gangly neck while he sleeps. I want to rip his precious comic book to shreds. I want to stomp on him, splinter him, break him into pieces.
Thump, thump.
I gasp and pitch my head up. What’s that? The Black Horse—he’s back. His hooves stomp on the roof and suddenly it is him I want to break. He’s the cause of everything that is wrong, I know it.
The winged horses in the mirrors watch me as I sneak down the hall, slip on my coat and boots, and climb out the library window. Overhead, the moon is so very nearly full, and I hate it too. I drag my bare fingers through the snow, pressing it into balls, and hurl them at the roof as hard as I can.
“Get away!” I yell.
I throw another snowball. And another. But my arm is weak and they only hit the first-floor windows. It is too dark to see if the Black Horse is up there, or if it is just shadows. But it doesn’t matter. I know he is there.
He is always there.
A light comes on in one of the windows, and I drop my snowball. I drag myself toward the garden wall, forcing my weak limbs to climb up and over before anyone can look outside and see me. I hurry, winded, through the maze of gardens. Through the rose garden with the rotting trellises, around the broken fountains, past the overgrown azalea garden, until I reach the sundial garden. Foxfire swings her head at me, ears swiveling forward in anticipation of an apple.
I stomp straight up to her.
“The Horse Lord never should have sent you here!” I yell, fighting the tightness in my lungs. “This isn’t a protected place. Our world is no safer than yours. If the Black Horse can find you there, he can find you here. It’s just a matter of time! Bad things happen here, don’t you see? Anna is gone. My pencils are destroyed. And the Horse Lord won’t even write. He’s abandoned us both. There’s no point in fighting anymore, do you hear me? There’s no point!”
And it’s true. He hasn’t written. He’s forgotten about us. Anna died and left me. The Horse Lord left me too.
But I stop.
Wait.
There is a fresh note tucked into the sundial. The same creamy white paper. Tied in the same red ribbon.
With shaking hands, I pull it free.
Dear Emmaline May,
You must forgive me for the brief lapse in letters. I was struck with a minor illness that leaves a tremor in my hand; no doubt you will notice that my script is altered.
You asked how long the winged horses live. All I can say is that they live much longer than I. Perhaps a hundred years. Perhaps they never die at all. I quite believe that myself, and it is a comfort, don’t you think? That there is a place where no one ever grows old? You see, our worlds are more connected than you believe. Sometimes, when a special person in your world dies before his or her time, that person merely crosses over and becomes one of my horses, roaming the heavens on feathered wings.
Ride true,
The Horse Lord
I read the note again. The cold makes my nose run. I think of the broken colored pencils that Anna kept perfectly sharpened. I think of Anna’s empty bed. The Sisters haven’t changed anything about it but the sheets, though I heard Benny saying they were going to move out her big bed and replace it with three cots, for three new children who will come soon.
I think back to that time I hid behind the woodpile and watched Thomas bury the chicken that the foxes had killed. He touched its feathers before covering them with dirt. I wonder if he did the same when he helped bury Anna. If he presses his fingers against the pine boxes stacked in the barn that he built to bury those of us who die, and what he feels against his fingertips.
I wipe my nose.
“I have to go,” I say to Foxfire. “I’m sorry, but it’s important. Don’t worry, I’ll keep protecting you. I’ll find something orange before the full moon, I promise.”
Foxfire nuzzles my neck with her nose. I press my forehead to her spark blaze.
We understand each other, she and I.
And then I turn back to the wall, and climb.
I RUN THROUGH THE FROSTED FIELDS until I reach Thomas’s cottage next to the barn. Wisps of smoke come from the chimney.
Knock, knock.
Bog stirs first, growling low, but Thomas gives a ssss, and Bog is silent. There are footsteps. Then the door swings open.
Thomas’s head drops down, as though he was expecting someone taller. “Emmaline?” His empty sleeve is not carefully pinned now. It hangs loose and hollow as he rubs his sleepy eyes with his hand. “What’s wrong?” He looks around to see if I am alone. “You can’t keep sneaking out so late. It’s getting colder and you’re…” He pauses as I double over to cough. “You don’t want to get any worse,” he finishes.
“I need to show you something,” I cough out. “It’s important.”
He rubs the sleep from his eyes once more, and glances at the hospital as if he has half a mind to walk me back there and turn me in to Sister Constance. But he stifles a yawn, and opens the door wider.
I hesitate.
I have never been in Thomas’s cottage. None of us has. Benny says it is the place that he takes his victims to cage them until the witches eat them, but I see no children in cages. I see no swords or knives. I see only a rope bed with a straw mattress, like mine but bigger, and a woodstove with a coffeepot on top, and a few shirts hung in the rafters to dry.
There is a gnawed bone on the floor—but I think it belongs to Bog.
Thomas closes the door behind me to keep the heat in. He rubs his chin. “What is so important in the middle of the night?”
The heat from the woodstove makes my armpits damp. I fumble for the Horse Lord’s letter, starting to feel silly. Maybe this could have waited until the morning. Maybe it is childish to be here.
But no. Some things cannot wait.
I hand him the letter. “Read it.”
But he doesn’t take it.
“Well, go ahead.”
He clears his throat. He shakes his head, keeping his eyes on the woodstove. “Groundskeepers only read the weather.”
I’m a bit flustered—perhaps he cannot read and is embarrassed—and I take back the letter and read aloud the part about the special people who die before their time. When I’m finished, I look at him expectantly.
His brow is knit together like he doesn’t understand.
“That’s what I came to tell you,” I explain. “That certain special people who die before their time become winged horses. Your father, I mean. He was a great man who died before his time.” I tuck the letter back into my pocket. “Death isn’t the end for him. The Horse Lord says so.”
Thomas looks at the woodstove. Then he presses his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose, and takes a deep breath. He reaches down and rests his hand
on my head. His palm is broad. It’s clear he is a man of the land, of the soil, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a man of the heart, too.
“If the Horse Lord said it,” he says, “then it must be true.”
“And for Anna, too.”
He nods. “For Anna, too.”
“And for me, if I die from the stillwaters.”
His hand, patting my short hair, stops. Bog looks up from gnawing on the bone, and cocks his head. Thomas takes a deep breath. The Sisters get upset whenever we talk like this. Asking about what happens if we die. They say it is our duty to think about life, not death, and to eat our bread and leave such matters to God. Dr. Turner gets upset too. He says many children survive the stillwaters. He tells us we could very well go on to live long lives, and become wives and mothers and husbands and doctors.
Thomas gives a soft sort of smile. “If that happens,” he says, “then you’ll fly the fastest of all the horses, I know it.”
THE NEXT DAY, the snow turns to stinging little pellets. Sister Constance’s strained voice carries from the classroom; she is teaching the little ones how to do basic sums. In the residence hall, all the older children’s doors are halfway open as they study from dog-eared textbooks with small print and no pictures.
I make for the attic stairs. Maybe there is a trunk I missed in one of the storerooms. Some long-forgotten package, filled with dusty paper that I’ll lift with care, to find a vase gleaming the color of tangerine orange. There used to be orange all over the world, I remember. At Christmas, oranges in our stockings. The oak tree’s leaves in autumn. Marigolds in spring.
But it is not spring.
It is not autumn.
It is winter, and there are no tangerines this year, not even with ration booklets. And without the color orange, the spectral shield is not complete. It is not strong enough to keep the Black Horse away.
I turn the corner, and stop.
The weight of eyes is on my back. I spin.
The hall is empty.
The only sound is snoring coming from Rodger’s bedroom. But when I turn back toward the attic stairs, the sensation returns, and I spin around again, and then again, in a full circle. The hair on the back of my neck tingles and—and is that the smell of apples? Movement in the hall mirror catches my eye. One of the winged horses steps into view in the gilded frame. He has a gray snip on his nose. He presses his muzzle against his side of the glass so that it fogs with each breath from his nostrils.
He is looking right at me.
“Um…hello.” I take a slow step closer. I reach up toward the mirror, but he pulls away, and my first two fingers brush only cold glass.
He tosses his head, and then snorts once, twice, and prances away. The mirror is once again just my own plain face looking back, short tufts of hair and green eyes and two sticky fingerprints.
But then—there. Movement from the next mirror down the hall, back the way I’ve just come. The same winged horse with the gray snip on his nose is there now, shaking his head so the ropes of his mane fall in his eyes. I reach for him, but he tosses his head again and disappears. Just like the bakery horses used to do with my sister, Marjorie. Letting her come close, close, close…and then prancing away. It was a game they played.
I rest my hands on my hips.
“I don’t have time for games.”
But he tosses his head again and prances off. In another moment he appears in the next mirror down the hall. He taps his nose against the glass. When I don’t come closer, he taps it again, more insistently this time, and rubs so hard against the glass that I’m afraid it will break.
“You aren’t playing a game, are you?” I whisper. “You’re trying to tell me something.”
He disappears out of that mirror as well, and I can almost feel the brush of his wings in the air as he passes down the same hall, only in a different world. And then he’s at the last mirror. Almost as though he is beckoning me to follow. When I reach the mirror, he doesn’t leave this time. He tosses his head. Steam frosts his side of the mirror.
He nudges the glass. Again and again, as if trying to nuzzle me, though his black eyes are on something behind me. I turn around. Benny’s room is across the hall. The door is open halfway. There is no sign of Benny or the other boys. Probably sneaked off to smoke another cigarette.
“What do you see?” I whisper.
And then my eyes fall on Benny’s bed, and my heart forgets to beat, just once, just for a second. Right there on the gray wool blanket is Benny’s precious Popeye comic book. The cover is an explosion of bright orange ink.
849-TANGERINE ORANGE.
I tiptoe in for a closer look. Yes. This is exactly what I have been looking for! I pick it up and flip open the cover, hardly daring to believe my good luck, and find a note written in the margins of the first page.
Benny,
Found this at Blakeway Books—a Popeye we haven’t read yet!
Love,
Dad
I quickly drop the comic book on the bed and take a few steps backward. Benny’s father gave this to him. Benny has a father off fighting somewhere, just like I do. My stomach is doing flip-flops. This is why he reads and re-reads this comic so much, even though comic books are childish things. It is something to hold on to, something from before. And suddenly I miss my papa, my mama, and Marjorie, and the smell of apple pie on cold winter mornings.
I spin toward the mirror. “I don’t know if I can take this. It matters to him.”
But the horse is gone. Only my face looks back. Teeth a little uneven. Nose too red.
And then another face appears behind me, and I freeze. Unfortunately, this face is on my side of the mirror.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Benny snaps. He folds his arms, awaiting my answer.
I glance at the comic book from the corner of my eye, thankful that I put it back exactly where he left it. “None of your business.”
His expression darkens. “You’re supposed to be up in your room, not down here, snooping through…” He glances at his bed, and sees the book. “What are you up to, you little thief ?”
“I’m not a thief!”
But my cheeks flame with the lie as I think of Jack’s toy train, and the princess’s belongings in the attic, and Dr. Turner’s medicine bottle.
Benny reaches suddenly for my pocket and pulls out the Horse Lord’s latest letter. I gasp and snatch for it, but he holds it over my head.
“What’s this, then?”
“It’s addressed to me!”
His forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Who would write you a letter?” He unrolls it, reading it quickly.
“Give it back!”
But he holds me off with one bony hand while he finishes reading. Then he crumples it in his fist, turning to me with a sneer, and the rawboned hound is back. “The Horse Lord?” And then he starts laughing. I slap and claw at him, but he doesn’t seem to feel it. He laughs so hard he has to wipe a tear out of his eye. “Who wrote this? Dr. Turner?”
“The Horse Lord is real! We’ve been writing to each other for weeks. I told you about the winged horses in the mirrors and in the garden. You didn’t believe me, but it’s true.”
His eyes waver as though he’s almost afraid what I’m saying is true and that he’s going to look like the fool for teasing me. But then he blinks. “Someone is playing a joke on you, Emmaline.”
“No.”
“It’s probably Dr. Turner. Only he could get paper this nice. But then again, Sister Mary Grace does have all that ribbon….”
“Ask Thomas,” I snap. “He’s seen the winged horses too.”
Benny’s face lights up. “Thomas! Of course. You dolt, Thomas is the one writing these letters. Only it isn’t a joke at all. It’s a trap.” His eyes go wide, as he holds the letter high out of my reach. I strain on tiptoes for it, and we spin around and around as he drops his voice. “Didn’t you listen to the stories? He’s trying to lure you into his cottage so he can make you int
o shepherd’s pie!”
“That isn’t true!” I’m screaming now, and the other children peek at us through the cracks in their doors. “Thomas can’t even write!”
“There is no Horse Lord. There are no winged horses. They’re all in your head.”
The angry words on my lips die. I stop spinning, legs weak, and collapse against the wall. A door squeaks as one of the children accidentally bumps it too hard. Benny glances up and sees our audience. For a second, he doesn’t seem to know what to do. A dozen hallway mirrors reflect his raised hand in the air, the Horse Lord’s letter crumpled in it, the red ribbon dangling.
He lets the letter fall and stomps on it with his shoe.
“Get to your room,” Benny commands. “And the rest of you, stay away from Thomas. I warned you.”
He glares at me with that hound-face of his, and then struts into his room and flops on his bed. He snatches up the Popeye comic book, flipping through the pages deliberately.
So orange.
As orange as his hair. As orange as fire.
They are all in your head.
Some of the children snicker. I hear giggling about flying horses and make-believe princes. The mirrors are all empty now. But the horses were there. The one with the gray snip on his nose, who led me to Benny’s comic book. He was real. And the letter…No. It can’t be.
I fall to my knees and try to smooth the letter out the best I can, but the writing is smudged from Benny’s shoe. I feel the urge to cry. The red ribbon is torn. I eye it sidelong, wiping away the start of tears. Is it like the spools in Sister Mary Grace’s sewing kit? And the paper…is it like Dr. Turner’s prescription forms? But no, his forms are perforated. These have crisp edges.
Benny is wrong. Benny doesn’t know the first thing about winged horses.
I glance toward his open door. He flips another page and snickers at Popeye.
I almost want the Black Horse to come. I almost want to summon him myself so he will take Benny and all the children who are laughing. I want the Black Horse to tear through the hospital roof with midnight hooves and thorn-tangled tail and thunder down the hallways loud enough to break every mirror and catch Benny under his hooves until all that is left of Benny is as crumpled and broken as this letter.