MIGHTY LONG RIVER
Anthea was on a boat, drifting, drifting, drifting down a river. Sometimes the current ran fast and jolted her, other times it was slow and smooth. She wanted to lie back and let the boat carry her along while she slept, but it didn’t seem possible.
Noises kept intruding: guns firing, or perhaps that was thunder. Was there a storm? In this hot weather? No, it was raining Then why was she so hot?
Leonidas kept prodding her with his nose, and Arthur landed on her head and bit her ear several times. She swatted them away. She needed to sleep, couldn’t they leave her alone for one minute to sleep?
She was terribly thirsty, too, but couldn’t seem to reach over the side of the boat and dip out a handful of water. Whenever she summoned the strength to do so, Leonidas shoved her arm back. Awful animal! Why did he hate her so?
This went on for months, or years. It was hard to be sure. There was no night or day, only an endless twilight, golden and gray and always peaceful.
She was slipping away at last: Florian’s thoughts had quieted and Leonidas had stopped pestering her. The boat was rocking so gently that she was floating like a leaf. The twilight began to darken, shading her eyes, and she sighed with pleasure.
A loud voice cut across the darkness.
“More of them? Running around loose? Filthy things!”
“Don’t be an old fool! You just— Here, now!”
There was stamping and a thud. Anthea’s boat stopped moving.
“What is it?”
“There’s a dead girl on this one!”
“It’s the plague!”
“That’s a myth!”
“Don’t touch her!”
Anthea longed to tell them to be quiet but she couldn’t move or talk. She could only lie there in her boat.
Was it a boat?
“Stay away from her!”
It was a voice she knew, but Anthea could not have said why. There was a thudding sound, was that thunder or … hooves?
“Whoa, there, Florian! It’s all right, big man!”
The voice belonged to a nice person, she knew that, but he shouldn’t stop the river. The river had to keep flowing.
“Let me just grab the reins … Stop it, Con!”
Her boat heaved as the river churned. There were strange cries. Anthea hoped she wasn’t the one making them.
“Fine then! I’ll lead the mares, and you follow me, Florian. We’re almost there.”
“Who are you?” The first voice was demanding or perhaps scared, Anthea couldn’t tell.
“I’m the king of Leana,” the familiar voice said. “I have business with your queen. Let us pass.”
The river began to flow again, and Anthea let herself drift with it. She was so light. She didn’t even worry that she couldn’t move. She was a dry leaf, a dandelion puff, a feather.
She was nothing.
“There they are! There they are!”
Another familiar voice, a girl this time.
“Wait! Finn? Is that … Constantine? What are you …? Anthea!”
“Let them through, Sergeant,” said a woman’s cool, commanding voice. “These are the rest of my guests.”
“Guests, Your Majesty?”
“Thank you so much, Your Majesty.”
“Thea, Thea, are you all right?”
“Of course she’s not! Look at the state of her! I found her a ways down the road. Florian’s half-mad, Jilly, don’t touch them!”
Anthea tried to float away but she couldn’t. Familiar voices battered at her. And then there were hands, too: prodding and poking; she uttered an involuntary shriek when someone tried to pull her out of her boat.
“Her arms are wrapped in the reins,” said the girl’s voice. “Oh, I think we’ll have to cut his mane to get her fingers loose.”
“Goodness,” said the calm voice. “What a mess! Let’s just take everyone to the little barn, Jillian, and sort them out there.”
The boat rocked wildly, and Anthea whimpered. Everything hurt, from the tips of her fingers to her scalp to the bottoms of her feet.
“Oh no! Finn, look at Florian!”
“I saw,” came the grim reply.
“How is he still on his feet?”
Jilly’s voice pierced Anthea’s heart.
She was not on a boat; she was on Florian’s back. That girl was Jilly. The boy who had found her on the road was Finn.
“Florian,” she whispered. Florian.
Once more, she felt herself moving forward, bobbing as though on the water. She knew now that it was because something was wrong: there was pain in Florian’s mind. He lurched from side to side when he walked.
She refused to open her eyes and look.
They stepped into golden light. The rain stopped.
“Let her go now,” Finn said, very close to Anthea. “Florian, let her go.”
Warm, strong hands took hold of Anthea. Florian shuddered. He could not take another step.
“Thank you,” Anthea whispered. She unclenched her fists from his mane with difficulty. Thank you, my Beloved.
It all went dark again.
30
HORSE MAIDEN
“You see, my dear Gareth, it’s just as I’ve tried to tell you,” Queen Josephine was saying. “The Way is hardly superstition! It’s a real gift, and one that may prove to be very useful.”
“Now that there are horses,” King Gareth said.
He did not sound at all happy about it. But then, he hadn’t sounded happy about anything, in the short time he had been at Bell Hyde.
“Oh, there have always been horses,” Jilly said airily, giving her head a little shake to make the plumes in her hair flutter.
Jilly wore a pale-green gown that one of the princesses had given her, but Jilly being Jilly, she had removed the sleeves and cut away the front of the skirt so that it arced to her knees. She’d wound a dark green ribbon around her waist and tied more of the ribbon around her upper arms. Her short curls were pomaded until they were stiff and shiny, and she had taken the silk that had been the front hem of her gown and wrapped it around her brow, with two ostrich plumes and a pearl brooch above her right ear. The glittering powder on her eyelids was green, and her lips were dark cherry.
She looked magnificent, and much more suited to going to a ball than having tea with the king. Or so Anthea had tried to tell her.
“Perhaps I shall ask His Majesty to dance,” she had joked.
Seeing the look on Anthea’s face, she had sobered, and she helped Anthea finish getting dressed.
Anthea’s borrowed dress was a white silk column, the high-waisted bodice embroidered with green vines and scarlet roses. Fluttering sleeves fell to her elbows, making her arms look slender and elegant rather than too thin, and the square neckline was very flattering. Her hair was pinned in a loose chignon, adorned with garnet-studded combs from the queen’s own jewel box. A small bit of silver chain could be seen along the side of her neck, but when Jilly had tried to pull it free, Anthea had flinched away.
Now, stiffly seated in the queen’s favorite parlor at Bell Hyde, Anthea wished she had let Jilly make some outrageous change to her gown. Or that she had worn trousers and boots. Anything to convince herself that the king kept looking at her because of her clothes, and not because she was … what? The girl who had shown up half-dead last week, with a string of injured horses?
Did he know she was the daughter of his chief spy?
“I am not comfortable with the idea that this Last Farm has existed so many years within my own borders,” the king said, his mouth twisting at the name of the farm, “and without my—”
“If I may interrupt, Your Majesty?” Finn said.
King Gareth made a sharp gesture with one of his thick-fingered hands. He was a stocky man who looked rather more like a farmer than a king, Anthea thought. Finn, meanwhile, was wearing a suit that the queen had found for him, which fit him perfectly. His blond hair caught the light from the large windows and made him almost glow.
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He looked like the only real king in the room, Anthea thought.
She also thought it interesting that the queen’s curly blond hair was almost exactly the same shade. She was taller than her husband, with a buxom figure and bright blue eyes. Also rather like Finn’s.
Anthea self-consciously pulled the chain out of her bodice and let her own silver horseshoe charm hang over her breast. The queen noticed, and her smile broadened.
Her Majesty fiddled with one of her earrings. They were roses like the ones on her personal crest … rosebuds, actually, in a perfect U-shape with a tiny crown above them.
“My family’s understanding when Kalabar built his wall was that the land north of it was ours,” Finn was saying. “We were told that the Wall was to keep us safe. And our horses.” He paused. “Unless that was a lie?”
King Gareth blustered for a moment and then finally ended with, “Well, I can hardly speak for my ancestor! Kalabar’s been dead for nearly three centuries!”
“And for nearly three centuries my family has carried on, with the help of the Thornleys, raising the horses that are our only legacy,” Finn said. His voice was firm, but Anthea could see his hands were shaking where he gripped the arms of his chair. “I fail to see how we, or the horses, are at fault if you forgot to send someone to find out if we were all dead.”
“But you have to admit, the fact that no one has mentioned this farm and these animals for hundreds of years is highly suspicious.” The king gave Jilly a narrow look. “Does your father bribe people for their silence, or are there threats involved? And where is Thornley, anyway?”
“My father had to stay at Last Farm to take care of the rest of the horses, and the people who depend on him,” Jilly said, her voice so cold it could have frosted the windows.
Both Anthea and Jilly had gotten letters from him, however, letters passionately informing them that they were to be punished the moment they set foot back on the farm, and that said punishment would last until they were thirty. This was undercut by the tears that blurred some of the handwriting, and Finn had told them that when he had left Last Farm, Andrew had been hugging Dr. Hewett and Nurse Shannon and shouting, “They’re still alive!” over and over again.
“Huh, so Thornley’s afraid to face me,” King Gareth said with a smirk. “Taking care of his horses, indeed.” He snorted.
“Gareth! How rude!” Queen Josephine said.
Anthea felt a hot surge of anger. She squeezed Arthur, who was sitting on her knees, a little too tight, and he flapped up to sit on the arm of her chair, digging into the brocade with his claws.
“Quite the menagerie,” the king muttered.
Anthea clenched her hands in her skirts. She heard her mother’s voice in her ears, coolly mocking her animals, coolly talking about their lives not mattering.
Coolly talking about how the king wanted Anthea to work for him. But then this morning Anthea had met the king, and he had given no sign that he even recognized Anthea’s name when they were introduced.
“Gareth, did you never think that your own family’s insistence that the poor horses carry disease might contribute?” The queen had kept going. “Who wants to admit they’ve been near a horse, if they are shunned for it?” She shook her head, and her earrings swung. Anthea saw Jilly notice them, and her cousin’s eyes widened.
“My mother knew,” Anthea said, speaking for the first time since she had been introduced to the king.
Her voice sounded rusty, but that might have been because she was still recovering. This was the most time she had spent out of bed since her arrival. She took a deep breath and her bandaged side twinged.
“My mother knew all along,” she said. “She lived at Last Farm. She could have told you at any time, and she did not.”
“Your mother?” The king looked at Anthea and blinked rapidly. “But I don’t know your mother, do I?” he asked pointedly.
“You’ve met her once or twice,” the queen said, a hard edge to her voice. “She used to be one of my Maidens.”
“Was she that redhead?” The king tapped his lower lip.
“Hardly,” the queen retorted.
Jilly and Finn both looked like they might explode. They had heard the whole story, in short bursts, from Anthea. So had the queen, who had been completely unsurprised by anything Anthea’s mother had said or done.
“Well, how disappointing that she didn’t tell me,” the king said. “I do so hate it when people disappoint me.”
The threat underlying his casual tone raised the hairs on the back of Anthea’s neck. Was this where her mother had learned to speak so calmly of such horrible things? Or had she taught the king? Jilly cleared her throat and Anthea quickly forced herself to focus.
“The point,” she said, before someone said something regrettable, “is that now you do know. I don’t know why you didn’t bother to look before.”
Jilly gasped. Maybe Anthea would be the one to say something regrettable, she mused. She was tempted to ask, bluntly, if her mother would be fired as the king’s spy for not telling him about Last Farm.
“And I don’t know why my mother didn’t tell … anyone,” she added.
“She did love your father very much,” the queen said, with great sincerity. “Though she was never really cut out for life on a farm.”
“More like life in a mansion with a private car and train included,” Jilly muttered.
Anthea took another painful breath, shaking her head a little at her cousin. “But now we have to decide how to proceed. Finn and Jilly and I had the idea of bringing some mares here for Her Majesty, the queen, as a gift, and that is still what we would like to do.
“Right, Finn?”
“That’s right,” he said immediately. “Campanula, Holly, and Juniper are yours, Your Majesty.” He gave a little seated bow.
“Oh, how delightful! Thank you!”
The queen clapped her hands in surprise, exactly as if she hadn’t spent all week sitting beside Anthea’s sickbed with Jilly and Finn, hearing every detail of what they were planning. As if she hadn’t already ridden Holly the day before, been thrown, and gotten back on.
“Would you mind terribly lending us a stallion, too?” she asked.
As if that hadn’t already been discussed.
“Then we could start our own southern herd,” she added to her husband, who looked horrified.
“Now, see here,” he began. “It’s one thing for me to look the other way about what goes on beyond the Wall—”
“And here at my private estate,” the queen put in.
The king ignored that. Anthea had noticed that he was good at ignoring what he didn’t like.
“But if we start a herd …” He frowned. “How many more do we need of these curiosities?”
He said “curiosities” the same way the hunters had said “monsters” as they chased Anthea and her little herd. She clenched her hands in her skirt again. Finn reached over and put a hand, gently, on hers until she relaxed.
“Don’t you understand that they’re more than curiosities?” Jilly said. “They’re a part of the land!”
“They’re useful,” Anthea said, with a little cough to clear her suddenly clogged throat. “They can be more useful, I mean.”
“We have oxen, motorcars, trains—” The king ticked these off on his fingers.
Anthea shook her head and the king stopped, astonished. Then he realized that he was letting a girl scold him, and he scowled at her.
Anthea refused to back down.
“The Way,” she said quietly. “If Your Majesty has messages that need to be sent. Sensitive messages. By trusted couriers.” She refused to use the word “spy” but had a feeling they were all thinking it.
“Two weeks ago I was all the way north of the Wall, at Last Farm,” Finn chimed in. “Constantine, the king of all the horses, broke free of his paddock and came to get me. He communicated to me that there was danger to the south, that horses had been injured, that Anthea needed
me. That we had to go. I got here in less time than if I had taken the train.”
“Even when I was ill,” Anthea said. “My Florian continued the mission. He brought me right to the gates of Bell Hyde, as instructed, even though we have never been here.”
The king’s scowl faded to a thoughtful look. “Horses, a network across the country …”
“Exactly,” Queen Josephine said, beaming.
“Exactly,” Finn echoed. He looked less pleased.
Anthea put her other hand atop his and gave it a little squeeze. “Do we have a choice?” she whispered.
“Now, why don’t we go have a look at them?” the queen said. “They are magnificent creatures!”
She was the first to stand, but of course the king led the way out of the palace. Finn had to take over, then, and show the king to the croquet lawn that had been hastily fenced off so that the horses could use it.
Constantine had even agreed to play nice and be penned with the others. It helped that the croquet lawn was right outside the windows of the bedrooms they had been given. Finn kept his windows open so that he could yell at Constantine from time to time.
“What’s wrong with that one?” the king asked immediately upon seeing Caesar.
“He ran afoul of a tractor, poor dear,” Jilly said, her teeth gritted. She went at once to rub his nose, her posture softening when she reached him. “Didn’t you, silly boy?”
“And the spotty one?”
“They’re called dapples,” Finn said coolly. “Bluebell was shot by some men who tried to capture her.”
“Leonidas was caught in a snare,” Anthea said, before the king could point to the newly contrite stallion.
Leonidas came slowly to the fence, his legs shining with ointment, and Anthea pulled his ears. He snorted wetly on her bodice.
You’re awful, she said lovingly to him.
“And this is Florian,” Anthea went on, her voice choking just a little. “My Florian.”
She reached out an arm to him, one hand still on Leonidas’s forehead, and Florian came. Where branches had scraped him, his hair seemed to be growing back in the opposite direction. He was far too thin, and worst of all, there was a thick bandage across his shoulder, covering a deep gash. Anthea didn’t even know where or when he had gotten it, or how.