The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

  “Foxfire!”

  I sit up in a snowdrift, amid the churning flakes that aren’t shooting stars at all, and throw my arms around her neck. She smells of apples. I stroke her with shaking fingers, crying because she is still here.

  “I was so afraid.” I pull back, searching her eyes. “I—”

  A shadow passes overhead, and we both look up.

  A dark stain moves across the clouds, impossibly high, in precise circles. I catch my breath, holding it tight. My fingers knit against Foxfire’s muzzle as both our eyes follow the shadow.

  Volkrig’s black wings beat once, and then he veers sharply toward us. His circles spiral tighter and tighter, until he is just over the sundial garden.

  “He’s seen us!”

  I grapple for the comic book and collapse to my knees. Foxfire noses me around the neck, around my back, as though searching for a wound, but she’ll never find it in any of those places. My wounds run deeper.

  Volkrig’s shadow passes over us.

  And then, Foxfire lets out a snort. For a painful second, I think one of Volkrig’s sharp black feathers has sliced her just like in my dream about Papa. But no. Her eyes are alert, her ears swiveled forward. Her head lowers first and then one knobby knee, and then the other, and then her rump rolls down to the snow too. She looks over her shoulder at me.

  I gasp.

  If I cannot walk, then she will carry me.

  With numb fingers I grab ahold of the base of her mane. I use my last bit of strength to pull myself up until I’m lying half on her back. She stands slowly, one jerky movement at a time.

  “To the far wall,” I whisper. “To the spectral shield.”

  She moves in quick steps, as aware as I am of Volkrig circling above. A sudden shriek tears the night. No hawk is that loud. No owl is that full of rage. And then the pressure in the air changes. The snow is suddenly blowing in the wrong direction, away from us. In its place, black feathers rain down. Dozens of them, the length of my arm and sharp as blades. I cry out as one slices against my skin.

  When I look up, Volkrig is ten feet above us.

  “No!”

  I am so close. The protective shield is almost complete. As Foxfire nears the wall I stretch out as far as I can, the comic book clutched in my hand. Almost. I am five inches away. Three. So close—

  Foxfire lets out a cry as a black feather slices her. Her haunches bunch, and I know that any moment she is going to bolt. But the gate is closed. There is no place to run this time.

  I stretch farther. One inch away!

  But then the shadow lowers. The sound of his wings is deafening. One midnight-black hoof the size of my head kicks at my arm and I scream. The comic book falls facedown. Orange side down.

  No!

  I lean over as far as I can, but there’s no way I can reach it. Volkrig kicks his hooves again, and all I can smell is rot, as thick as putrid seaweed. Another shriek tears the sky.

  There is no place to run.

  Foxfire rears. I cry out, squeezing my legs as hard as I can to keep from falling off. The beating, beating, beating of Volkrig’s twenty-foot wings churn the snow around us. When I dare to look up, midnight hooves as sharp as knives and as strong as bludgeons paw the air. Nostrils rimmed in red flare.

  But his eyes. His eyes are not cruel.

  He has his place, I think. This is what he does. Foxfire’s muscles bunch beneath me, and my heart clenches. Maybe it isn’t his fault. Maybe he can’t be blamed. But this is what we do—we fight. And we will continue to fight until we can fight no longer.

  “Go!” I cry.

  Foxfire needs no more encouragement. I dig my bare ankles into her sides to hold on as she runs. She races amid the maze of gardens, her hooves throwing up snow behind us. Volkrig’s shadow follows. Foxfire turns sharply into the herb garden, and then the statuary. Each gate is sealed. Each wall too high to jump. The shadow follows. Sea and rot, right on top of us. His wings beat harder. His midnight hooves gnash at our backs. My nightgown rips, and I feel the sting of torn skin on my shoulder, but I don’t let go of Foxfire’s mane.

  There has to be a way out of the gardens.

  There has to.

  This is what I do. I do not give in.

  I dig my heels into her sides, and Foxfire weaves around a stone pond with a statue of Apollo. A crash sounds behind us. Volkrig’s hooves have slammed into it and broken off Apollo’s head. We reach the end of the garden and I guide Foxfire to the right, into the rose garden. It’s narrower here. Overgrown. Scraggly briars catch at us, but at least the domed branches slow Volkrig. The tunnel of winter-dead roses ends and we are spit out into a sudden wide expanse. Skeletons of azaleas flank the sides, but there is nothing overhead. No trellises. No overgrown vines.

  Only snow and a sinister shadow.

  Fear plunges deep in my chest. Is this how it ends?

  But Foxfire doesn’t stop running. I dig in my heels, nudging her to the left to circle back around to the sundial garden, but she ignores me. Her head is down, and her mane is whipping in my face, and her muscles are ice and steel. And then something rumbles beneath my knees.

  I gasp.

  She paws the earth one more time, and then leaps into the night. Twenty-foot wings sweep out on either side. I clutch her mane, wrapping my ankles tighter, as my heart stops with the thrill. Healed! At last, she is healed! Wind races by us. It tangles in my hair and it pushes at her wings and it lifts us.

  We

  are

  flying.

  We are flying.

  I FORGET ABOUT VOLKRIG. I forget about the stillwaters and the freezing wind.

  Foxfire’s body is so alive beneath me. Her white wings beat with the sound of thunder. Her shoulders ripple as she lunges for clouds, each one higher than the next.

  Dizzy, I look down to see the map of the overgrown garden beneath us. We fly above the barren rosebushes with their sharp briars. Above the broken fountain and hungry ivy. We fly above the hospital roof. We fly above the spectral shield that, without the comic book, shall never be quite finished, but that is okay. We are our own prism of light now.

  I press a hand to my chest, but up here, the air is so clear that I don’t feel the urge to cough. I can pull air into my lungs, and there are no murky stillwaters, not one drip. The next time I look down, we fly even above Volkrig.

  The Black Horse is nothing but a memory.

  Foxfire beats her wings, and takes us even higher. I want to go high, high, as high as the sky.

  I WONDER IF MARJORIE’S bird with the broken wings ever made it this high.

  I wonder if any living creature at all ever makes it this high, or if it is only the realm for floating gods.

  CAN I TELL YOU A SECRET?

  I know now why the Horse Lord crossed into our world and called himself Thomas and lived in a little cottage. It is because our world that stretches out below—the hills and the trees and the sun breaking over the rooftops—is more than just brown and gray. There is color there. There are greens and reds and blues as deep as the sea.

  You just have to know where to look.

  WHEN I WAKE, I am staring at white clouds.

  It takes a moment to recognize the painting on the ceiling of Anna’s room. My head aches in a dull way, and my throat is very dry, but I feel warm.

  I sit up.

  The windows are open, and fresh air drifts in. A tray of steaming tea sits on the bedside table. The silver bell to ring for the Sisters. A brand-new bottle filled with syrupy yellow medicine. Dr. Turner must have come.

  Little Arthur is sitting at the foot of my bed, drawing quietly, bent over a fan of loose pages. Anna’s broken pencils are scattered on the quilt, and he is trying to draw with the broken nub of the blue pencil.

  I look out the window. How many days have I been here, recovering? The last thing I remember is Foxfire’s wings beating the air as the sun rose above the horizon, casting the sky in shades of pinks and purples. And the sun was so beautiful, a soft ye
llow, the same yellow as the butter that is melting on a piece of toast next to the tea.

  Toast.

  I’m famished.

  I draw in a deep breath, hesitantly testing my lungs. I take a bite, and the toast slips down my sore throat. That clawing pain has lessened. I feel better.

  I whirl to look at my open door.

  The red ticket is gone.

  I spin toward Arthur. “What happened?” From the way my body aches, I must have fallen off of Foxfire and tumbled down to earth. “Did the Sisters find me in a snowdrift?”

  But Arthur never speaks, and he does not speak now.

  A strange worry creeps into my stomach and I whirl toward the side mirror. It is empty. I pick up the hand mirror that Thomas gave me—empty too. And so is the one above the dresser. I grab up the teaspoon and stare into it at my misshapen reflection.

  Nothing.

  Where are the winged horses?

  Where have they gone?

  I roll over and paper rumples. I pull out a wad of messy pages that someone has left beside me. The Popeye comic book! The last I saw, it had fallen in the snow. It is warped and dirty, but someone must have found it and tried to smooth out the pages. There is a note attached in Benny’s writing.

  I’m sorry I broke your pencils. I’m glad you’re getting well. I forgive you for stealing my comic book. You may borrow it, if you like.

  Sincerely,

  Benny

  (P.S.—but only until you feel better!)

  I stare at the inscription.

  Benny has shared his dearest object with me.

  Have I floated into a different world, a gentler one? I look around in a daze, but the same gods still float on the ceiling, the same wool blanket is pinned back by the window.

  And then Arthur sighs at the broken blue pencil that won’t draw, and I realize that I have done something magical. I have been to the heavens on the back of a winged horse—I am a real explorer, just like Anna said I was.

  An idea strikes me. I take out Anna’s sewing knife from the secret drawer, and the closest pencil, the orange one. It is snapped in two, the point broken. I press the blade against one of the halves and shave. I shave until it is sharpened into a point as fine as Anna kept them, and then I sharpen the other half, too.

  Now there are two orange pencils.

  I hand one to Arthur.

  “You may borrow this, if you like,” I say.

  Arthur blinks a few times, and then takes it and dives back into his pages, drawing faster now. In a flurry, I snatch up the other broken pieces of pencils. I sharpen the point of 868-LAPIS BLUE, and the broken shards of 876-HELIOTROPE PURPLE, until all the broken pencils are whole again. Now there are enough for Arthur and me and all the children in the hospital to have their own pieces of color.

  And then I look closer at Arthur’s drawing. It is rough and childlike. The back legs are bent the wrong way, but the wings…

  “Can I see that, Arthur?”

  He hands me the paper, and glances at the mirror on Anna’s wall, and then immediately starts in on another. There is a flicker of movement to my left, where I have placed the mirror that Thomas gave me.

  I whip my head in its direction, and she is there.

  Foxfire.

  She stands quietly to the side of the mirror-bed, gazing a little wistfully out the mirror-window, where the blanket is pinned back to let in light. There are traces of my tea on her muzzle.

  “Foxfire!”

  She turns. She has heard me. For once, my voice has carried through the mirror, and she blinks her soft brown eyes at me.

  Another horse joins her. It is brown and delicate and smells like lavender. I can just tell. And next to her—next to her are a gelding and two mares. Sandy with dark manes.

  “I knew you’d come back,” I tell them.

  Arthur has turned to face the mirror too. I peer closer at the paper in my hand. The horse in his drawing is white with a gray muzzle. Between her eyes is a blaze in the shape of a spark.

  My heart goes rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.

  I think of how Arthur is always gazing at reflective things—the kitchen ladle, the tin washtub, the Christmas ornaments—and realize maybe it isn’t just Thomas and me who see the horses.

  “Arthur,” I say slowly, “do you see those horses in the mirror?”

  “Arthur,” I say slowly, “do you see those horses in the mirror?”

  But Arthur says nothing.

  “You see them, don’t you?”

  And again, Arthur says nothing.

  But slowly, a smile spreads between his pink, pink cheeks.

  The first glimmer of an idea for The Secret Horses of Briar Hill came to me during a long drive to a librarian’s conference across my home state of North Carolina. My car radio was broken, and I found myself alone with a rare few hours of silence. As I drove past farms and horses, my mind wandered, and I thought about all the books that had deeply affected me as a child. I devoured books like The Secret Garden and the Chronicles of Narnia, which combined reality with dreams, history with fantasy, darkness with heart, and, most of all, contained true magic. I started to daydream about a magical place, and by the time I arrived at my destination, Emmaline felt as real to me as a sister.

  I began to work on this book by looking into childhood illnesses and World War II, and my research took a sudden personal turn. My grandfather passed away a few years ago, and while working on The Secret Horses of Briar Hill, I happened to find a collection of paperwork and memorabilia from his time serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. When he was only eighteen, his plane was shot down over Italy, and he was put into a German prisoner-of-war camp, from which he was fortunately freed a year later. The grim man in the black-and-white prisoner-of-war photo I discovered contrasted greatly with the warm, loving man I had known. My grandfather had run a farm and raised a family. He loved fishing, and regularly indulged in homemade apple pie. Among his things was a letter he’d written about the importance of finding beauty in the darkness of war, and this left a deep impact on me. I decided to convey this sense in my story through the eyes of someone small and alone, who had that rare ability to find such beauty.

  In order to capture the atmosphere of wartime Britain, where Emmaline lived, I turned to the BBC’s WWII People’s War project, a wealth of firsthand accounts from soldiers, nurses, civilians, and children who lived through this period. I read about a doctor who created a color-coded diagnosis system for children with tuberculosis, much like Dr. Turner does. I read about a nurse who fell in love with a soldier so ill that he could never be kissed—just like Anna. And as I researched tuberculosis, I thought about how for children, illness could be parallel to the battles adult soldiers were fighting.

  You might be curious to know what other parts of this book are based on historical fact. Though Briar Hill hospital is fictional, there were several children’s hospitals and tuberculosis wards operating during the war. Occasionally parents were allowed to visit their children, though they were often separated by glass partitions to prevent the spread of disease. Because of the crowded conditions and limited resources, tuberculosis was more prevalent during the war years, but due to medical advancements, by 1945 cases of tuberculosis were in decline (with a sharp drop in the 1950s after vaccines were developed). Today, though tuberculosis has been nearly eradicated in the United States and Great Britain, one-third of the world’s population is infected with this disease.

  Emmaline called tuberculosis the stillwaters after the Latin proverb “still waters run deep,” which means that quiet people are often hiding a deeper nature. To Emmaline, this saying meant that children may be overlooked as being simple, but they are often struggling with deeper battles, such as illnesses, that aren’t always visible on the surface.

  When Emmaline describes her neighbors leaving the major cities for the safety of the country, she is talking about Operation Pied Piper, part of a greater evacuation in Great Britain during which over 3.5 mil
lion people were relocated. Shropshire, the region where Briar Hill hospital is located, was a prime destination for children, as it was far from major cities or factories that might have been a target for bombings. Emmaline’s family’s bakery was inspired by a real building, the Co-op Bakery, located on Meadow Lane in Nottingham, which was badly bombed during the Nottingham Blitz in May of 1941.

  Thomas’s father, Sergeant Whatley, is fictitious, though inspired by true commanders such as Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, Major-General John Campbell, and Lieutenant General William Gott. The emblems on Thomas’s father’s war medal, along with the sayings Utrinque Paratus and Bellerophon et Pegasus, are real. The medal comes from the British First Airborne division and was also used by soldiers trained in the Special Air Services; its insignia of a winged horse and rider was rumored to have been designed by Browning’s wife, the celebrated author Daphne du Maurier (whose books happen to be among my favorites).

  Many readers ask me what exactly happened to Emmaline in this story. Some think she didn’t survive her illness, and the final chapters represent her dream of being at peace. Some believe she did survive and stayed at Briar Hill to help the other children. I do not think there is an answer, just as I cannot tell you if Thomas really is the Horse Lord, or if the winged horses were real or existed only in Emmaline’s imagination. I think each reader is entitled to believe what she or he wants to believe. Whatever Emmaline’s truth, I know for certain that darkness can be defeated by hope, and I know that one girl, no matter how small, can make her dreams come alive.

  Ride true,

  Megan Shepherd

  It is fitting that the idea for Emmaline’s story came to me on a road trip, because creating this book was its own journey, and I’m fortunate to have worked with such a special cast of real-life characters along the way.

  I knew Rebecca Weston was the perfect editor for this book when she sent me her own spectral shield complete with eight magical colored objects. As we worked together, I was deeply inspired by her dedication to craft, her keen insight, and her passion for timeless storytelling. In short, Rebecca, you made me believe in magic again.