A Gathering of Wings (23 page)

He tosses his head toward the place where the pony was.

“I know,” she says. “We have to get out of here.”

She leads him quickly out of the paddock, stopping to dig through the splintered sticks and find the dragon cane. There is only one way out of the Valley of the Beast: the path between the bluffs that Mather showed her. Sky noses her neck and shoves her into the side of the bluff. Laughing softly, she stops and turns. “Oh, my beautiful boy. I am so happy to see
you again. I have missed you so much,” she whispers into his mane.

Sky blows out, licks his lips, and fits his big head into its accustomed place: chin in the crook of her arm, muzzle bent toward her heart. For a short while, they stand this way, drawing strength from each other, reacquainting themselves with each other’s scents and pulses. She cannot believe she has him again, this horse who, day after day, year in and year out, wandered the plains with her. While the Silvermanes and Neal and Dock and West and Brion and Cylas and even Lume have all taken up places in her heart, this big black stallion occupies the place of honor.

Finally, Sky has had enough. He wrenches his head free and paws the ground:
let’s get going
.

“Patience,” she tells him.

Malora waits for the bonfire and the music and the sound of voices to die down. Sky wallows on his back in the sand, rocking from side to side. When he is finished, and coated with sand, he stands up and presents himself to her. Malora creates a scrub brush from dune grass and, rubbing his hide in a circular motion, scours away the layers of sand and dung and filth. Then she combs out his mane and tail with her fingers, picks the burs from his ears and the gunk from the corners of his eyes and nostril hairs, a grooming ritual that he never did more than tolerate. She does all this by feel, for the moon is just rising over the dunes. She glories in reacquainting herself with the swirls and eddies of his hide, with the long bands of powerful muscle that lie beneath, and with the Leatherwing-inflicted scars that stripe his back, radiating from his shoulders to his haunches, in perfect symmetry. It is
not surprising that the wild centaurs have such an affinity for her horse, given how they scar their own hides. She remembers what her mother said: “Scars tell the story of how you have lived your life.” Malora wonders whether the wild centaurs, scarring their bodies on purpose as they do, aren’t
contriving
their stories rather than
earning
them the way Sky or Neal or she has. She is struck anew by the change in her horse since she last saw him on the Ironbound plains. He is still a huge horse, and yet he seems smaller. Or is it lighter? Even the mighty dishes of his hooves are nearly transparent at the edges.

“Just wait till you taste the grass in our paddocks,” she whispers to him.

When she no longer sees the glow of the fire over the top of the bluff and silence has settled over the village, Malora walks swiftly, leading Sky. When she gets to the first pen, she stops. It had always been her intention to take Sky and leave Ixion. But that was before she had seen with her own eyes what is in store for these other horses. Now it is impossible to leave this place without taking the horses with her.

She hesitates, then looks at Sky and says, “I have to do this, don’t I?”

Sky grunts, as if he has no doubt of it.

Unlatching the gate, she swings it wide. The horses inside have sensed something afoot, because they are piled up, ready and waiting to leave. They exit in a long, steady stream. She counts nineteen of them: Lapithians, Magnesians, Athabanshees, and three dusty Ironbound Furies.

Ivory! Thunder! Stormy!

These are the three that jumped the city wall and ran away from Gift, the Apex’s incompetent wrangler in chief. If
she had any doubt about doing this before, she has none now. These are
her
horses! She and Sky allow themselves a brief moment of reunion. The Furies seem sound, although their ribs stick out. When one of the other mares takes a jealous nip at Stormy, Stormy lets out a muffled squeal. Malora hushes Stormy while Sky, ears pinned and eyes flashing, chases the mare off.

“No
nonsense
!” Malora whispers to the lot of them. They stare at her contritely and lick their lips.

Sky snorts and stomps, confirming the directive.

Then they are all off to the next pen to free another ten horses and the nine from the pen following that one. Malora is impressed with how quietly the horses all move. The three in the last pen are nothing but hide and bones, either sick or starved or aged or all of that. Nevertheless, they bound out of the pen like spring colts and take their place at the back of the herd, except for a bay mare with a deep swayback. She trots up to Sky and rubs noses with the stallion. Sky snorts and blows but his ears poke forward in a friendly fashion.

Malora runs her fingers through the old gal’s tangled mane. With her kind, limpid eyes and long bony head she is a female Max. The dowager mare takes her place beside Sky, slightly to the rear of him and just in front of the other three Furies, where no one disputes her place.

Malora leads the herd away from the village, retracing the steps she took with Mather, until she finds the spot where they met up. By moonlight, she follows the drag marks back to where Mather first roped her. She orients herself with the ocean at her back and raises both arms up, pointing west and east. Her nose points southwest, the direction they must travel
over the dunes. Then she walks back among the horses and arranges them, noses to the south, tails to the north, in a single long line.

She returns to the head of the line, to where Sky, Old Gal, Thunder, Stormy, and Ivory have been waiting patiently for her. She takes her place in front of Sky and starts to move forward. The horses follow at a walk. When the clay softens to sand, she raises her hand and calls out to the herd, “Whoa!”

She pokes the ground with the cane before setting her foot down. She makes a kissing sound to signal the horses to follow her. They proceed more slowly now as she leads them up the face of the first dune. The horses struggle, their slender legs sinking down into the sand, but she keeps them moving up one side of the dune and down the other until she is a few steps shy of the valley between this and the next dune, where she calls another halt.

“All right, Sky. The others will follow you, so do what I say and you’ll all be safe.” Placing both hands on his nose she tells him to stay. She backs away from him—frowning and wagging a finger to reinforce her command—then as quickly as she can, turns and leaps across the valley, landing safely on the other side.

“All right, Sky,” she says again, kissing and pointing up the dune with the sword cane. “Jump!”

Sky collects himself on his haunches and launches his body over the valley, landing on the other side.

“Good boy!”
she says. Malora clicks her tongue and points up the dune with the cane. Sky scrambles up the face of the dune. She commands Old Gal next to jump and she flies across. Thunder, Stormy, and Ivory follow suit. The next few
horses, like liquid poured from the same bottle, flow across. The horses that follow flail but manage to make it across. The horses who have already jumped the gap wait for the others in a clump on top of the dune. When all the horses have made it across, she resumes the lead and they follow her down the other side to the next valley. This goes on all night. Every so often, she stops at the top of a dune to sniff the air and make sure the ocean is still at her back. The sun, when it rises on her left, tells her that she has been moving in the right direction.

Under normal circumstances, it would be a welcome sight, but it is as if daylight has revealed to the horses that they are in a place that is without two things they require: something to chew on and something to drink.

Rebellion breaks out. The horses, hungry and thirsty and tired of staying in an obedient line, begin to jostle each other and mill about, to nip at each other’s tails and to break ranks. Malora works her way back, pushing and shoving and pounding them back into line, elbowing them hard and even punching them if they refuse to obey.

“Do you
want
to fall into a sinkhole and die?” she yells.

But they are not interested in what she has to say. They neither sense nor understand the danger. She watches as the gray mare three horses ahead of where she now stands cuts around the horse in front of her and runs down the embankment. Instead of jumping the valley, as she has all previous times, the mare staggers directly into it. Perhaps she thinks there is water there. She sinks in sand up to her shoulders until she disappears from sight, drowning in the sand. The three horses who are witnesses rear up, but this only sends them toppling and sliding down the side of the dune after the
mare, their forelegs flailing, their eyes wide and unbelieving as they, too, sink beneath the sand.

Malora loses six horses before she can calm the rest of them down. This is difficult to do, since every muscle in Malora’s body is screaming with tension. The thought of freeing all these horses only to lose them to the sinkholes is intolerable. But fear makes them now obedient. They do as they are told, and by midday they are once more meekly filing down the dunes, jumping over the valleys, and filing up the next.

When the River Neelah comes into view she has to shout and wave at them to keep to a walk. She herself wants to flit across the dunes toward the river, an inviting powdery blue in the near distance. But she manages to restrain herself over the last two dunes—keeping up the slow and steady pace she has set—until her feet touch the solid ground of the Dromadi caravan track. Then she breaks into a run, the horses overtaking her, Sky nipping at the ones who threaten to trample Malora.

Some of them wade into the river up to their withers. Others get down and wallow on their backs on the sandy banks. They shake out their manes and twitch their hides and bow their heads and tear up big fat mouthfuls of the plump green papyrus that grows on the bank and in the shallows. The air is alive with the sound of horses blowing. There is an air of celebration. Even the hide-and-bones horses have great mouthfuls of reeds sticking out of their snaggly teeth at all angles. Malora starts to strip off her clothes so she can join the bathers, but she remembers what happened when she took her last swim in this river and decides to stay in the shallows and keep her clothes on. Besides, she knows she needs to put
more distance between herself and the wild centaurs. Now that she and the horses are out of immediate danger, her need to get home is keen.

She grabs a handful of mane and heaves herself up on Sky’s back, calling out to the other horses, “Get up and get going, boys and girls! We’re not home safe yet! In Mount Kheiron there’ll be plenty of grass and water and oats with imported molasses!”

The horses lift their heads and stare at her, water dribbling from their lips. One by one, they crow-hop onto the bank, assembling themselves behind Sky.

When the last horses have taken their last pull of grass, they are off again at a lively trot. Sky’s gait feels smoother and more buoyant than she remembers it. Every so often, he breaks into a gallop that feels so light, it is as if he were floating above the ground. Behind them the other horses try to keep up but seem by comparison clumsy and earthbound. They follow the river until the sun is nearly behind the ragged rim of the bush. Malora decides to move on through the night, she and Sky patrolling the advancing perimeter of horses to make sure no predators are about.

They rest in the shade of trees during the heat of the next day. Just like in the old days, she makes a nest of cloud grass and sleeps next to Sky, the other horses wrapping themselves around the two of them in a tight circle. Before she closes her eyes, she looks down at the palm of her hand, where she is so used to seeing the gouge.

Her palm is smooth, without blemish or scar.

Malora has the horses up and moving again in the late afternoon. A hundred times, she swivels her head and reassures
herself that they are not being followed. Still, she is reluctant to stop for very long. The horses, oblivious to any danger, grab river grass on the move, but Malora isn’t so lucky. Hunger gnaws at her. The dragon cane’s blade is dull. It is useless except as a shovel to dig up roots. The tartness of the bush fruit she finds burns sores on the insides of her mouth. She remembers the meals in Kahiro she let sit partially uneaten on her plate and vows from now on always to clean her plate. In some ways, it is as if she has never left the bush, except that she is softer now. She longs for her canopied bed and her feather mattress and her malachite tub. Even Barley Surprise would taste good.

Fifteen days later, the golden dome shimmering at the top of Mount Kheiron appears on the horizon. The Flatlands, as she leads the horses across them later that same day, are curiously deserted.

Where is everyone? she wonders. Her alarm mounts as she passes her own paddocks and finds them empty. Could the wild centaurs have somehow overtaken her and arrived here already, plundering her paddocks and laying waste to the centaurs of Mount Kheiron? She tortures herself with visions of bloodshed and mayhem. Arriving at the gates of Kheiron, she draws to a halt. The horses pile up behind her.

She is infinitely relieved when Margus Piedhocks stumbles out of the guardhouse. His eyes bulge. “Malora Victorious!” he sputters. “You are
alive
!”

“Of course I’m alive,” she says.

“But—but—” he stammers, and points up at the mountain.

Malora looks up and sees, rounding one of the lower ring roads, a procession winding its way down toward the gate. The sound of flute music comes to her on the breeze along with the hollow thumping of drums.

“Oh,” she says.

Now she understands why the Flatlands and the paddocks are empty.

Everyone is up on the mount.

She is not sure whether to laugh or cry but doesn’t have time to decide because Margus is lifting his hand to clang the bell that signals that Mount Kheiron is under attack.

“Don’t do it!” she yells.