Changer's Daughter (7 page)

“I think,” the Wanderer says softly to the Changer, “that she intends to call them ‘Lunch’ and ‘dinner.’”

Certainly Shahrazad’s expression, her red tongue lapping out to lick her muzzle, is in keeping with the Wanderer’s assessment.

“She has met jackalopes before,” the Changer says, “during the Lustrum Review and again at the later September meeting. However, she has grown a great deal, even in the six weeks or so that have passed since the latter meeting, and she has become quite cocky. She may have forgotten what she learned of them before, or she may simply believe that she now exceeds her puppy limitations.”

“And you’re going to leave her to find out on her own.”

“That is correct. Frank knows that I want her both tested and taught. If he chooses as his intermediaries two athanor herbivores, I shall trust his judgment.”

The Wanderer turns to study him. “Are you leaving her here, then, like sending her off to summer camp?”

“Autumn into winter camp,” the Changer corrects. “Not immediately, no, but once she adjusts somewhat I will take a few jaunts. She has always been able to depend on me. I want her to learn to rely on herself as well.”

“Necessary,” the Wanderer says, “although not always pleasant for the child.”

“Nor for the parent,” the Changer says. “I am closer to this little one than I have been to any of my get for a long, long time, but I do her no favors if I am overprotective.”

“She is athanor,” the Wanderer says. “The Harmony Dance proved that. Is she anything more? Did she inherit any of your other gifts?”

“I don’t know,” the Changer says, “and I don’t really know how to find out. She may simply be an immortal coyote.”

“That’s not bad,” the Wanderer says, thinking of the various athanor animals she has known over the years.

“No,” the Changer agrees. “Sometimes, being a coyote is a very fine thing indeed.”

Introductions completed, Shahrazad tears away from the house, daring her “chaperons” to keep up with her. She knows that, whatever she thinks of them, it would be bad manners to eat Frank’s friends in front of him. In any case, there is so much that she wants to see and smell.

The evening before, when she had arrived, she had gotten the impression that all of this land was hers to roam. Today, with youthful enthusiasm, she plans not only to roam it, but to claim it as her domain. Here the air is cleaner than even in the forested reaches of the Sandia Mountains where she had lived with her father. There are no great roads, no low buzz of tires against asphalt, just space and grass and low trees and wonderful, heady smells.

Skipping the area immediately around the ranch house—it is far too lived in for her wild tastes—she lopes outward, away from the dirt road they had driven in on, away from the pastures where odd-smelling horses graze (raising their heads to study her as she runs by), out to grassy reaches that hint of rabbits and mice and other tasty things.

Shahrazad is so absorbed in her explorations that she doesn’t notice the raven who soars above, joyriding on the winds. She forgets the jackalopes who trail her, stopping to graze when she slows. She forgets everything except the caution her father has schooled into her and her delight.

Mice, fat with grass seed, make a good lunch. Grasshoppers, slowing down as summer moves into winter, are easier to catch, and fun, too. Springing into the air from a standstill to come down on a single point, like a ballet dancer on her toe, wears her out after a while, and Shahrazad drowses on a sun-warmed rock. When she awakens, she doesn’t realize that her nearly invisible guides have steered her back toward the house until she crosses her own trail.

By then, evening is falling and the lights of the ranch house and the memory of how warm a fire can be and how her father’s strong fingers feel when they rub her neck and shoulders lure her back to domesticated ground. Unlike a wild coyote, human houses hold no special terror for her, especially one where her father is dwelling. Shahrazad spent much of her young life within the walls of Arthur Pendragon’s hacienda. Houses can mean food and the pleasant drone of human conversation to lull her to sleep.

Her pace increases as she draws closer, picking up her feet in something like a trot, her head held high, her bushy tail in a line straight behind her. Hearing conversation from the outbuildings, she turns that way as the one voice that means home draws her in.

In a large horse barn, Frank MacDonald, assisted by the Changer and the Wanderer, is doling out grain and hay to the eager residents, mostly horses with a small intermingling of unicorns. This is Shahrazad’s first close encounter with one of the creatures she had mentally tabled as “odd” horses, and she halts as a unicorn turns to face her.

As in most artistic depictions, the mare’s coat is a pale, bluish white. She is small, hardly larger than a pony, with a build delicate enough to make the daintiest Arabian look chunky. Her slim legs end in feathered hocks over cloven hooves. Although the unicorn’s mane is a fall of snowy silk, her tail is like a lion’s (or a donkey’s), tufted only on the end. China blue eyes beneath a spiraling nacreous horn study the young coyote with unblinking interest, and the unicorn’s beard waggles as she chews a stray bit of hay.

Frank, apparently, hears more than chewing, for he says aloud: “Yes, that’s right, Pearl, this is the Changer’s daughter, Shahrazad. Shahrazad, this is Pearl, the senior unicorn of our community here.”

Shahrazad backs off a step, her bushy tail low, not at all certain that she likes this horse with a sword on its brow. She knows what swords are: Eddie and Arthur have several and she had watched them fence before her father had taken her back into the mountains. It does not seems fair that an herbivore should be so well equipped to defend itself. Her experience with deer has been limited (and jackalopes still do not count in her assessment), so perhaps her shock is greater than it might otherwise have been.

“Pearl,” Frank says, returning to tearing flakes off the hay bales, “was born in France—or what is France today—about the time that the Romans were expanding that direction. It’s a wonder she survived, but... Well, that’s a story for another day.”

Shahrazad sidles to where she can press herself against her father’s legs, very carefully avoiding Pearl and her sword.

“I don’t think”—the Changer chuckles—“that you’ve convinced Shahrazad that the unicorn is friendly.”

“Good,” Frank says. “She may just survive her visit here.”

A muffled stamping on the sawdust-covered floor of an open box stall draws his attention.

“I’m sorry,” Frank says, glancing over. “I have been remiss in my introductions. Shahrazad, the husky fellow glowering at me from the stall at the end of the row is Sun. He’s Pearl’s current favorite, originally from the Harz Mountains. Along with a dragon who was killed in the fourteenth century, he made life hell for the residents of the area. They called him the Golden Warrior, and kings offered enormous fortunes and lofty titles to the one who would capture him. Needless to say, no one ever managed the trick.”

“Husky” seems an understatement when used to describe the unicorn who steps forth to acknowledge this introduction. Easily seventeen hands at the shoulder, deep-chested and muscular, the unicorn stallion seems wrought from molten gold. His coat is a glowing palomino, but where a palomino might have white points or a pale mane, Sun’s mane and tail are the same brilliant gold. Even the horn that spirals from his forehead is metallic gold, and the irises of his golden eyes seem pupilless.

Shahrazad simultaneously backs away and clings more closely to the shelter of her father’s legs, a course of action that bumps her into the horse in the stall behind her. Panicked, she crumples, rolling onto her back in a plea for mercy, even before her slitted eyes and flared nostrils bring her the information that this creature is just a horse. Then she collapses in embarrassment, certain that she can hear piping laughter from the jackalopes, who have followed her into the stable, and snickering from the cats lounging in the rafters.

Frank MacDonald’s easy tones penetrate her shame: “The gelding at whose hooves you are reclining, my dear, is an old friend of the Wanderer’s. In fact, the Wanderer is responsible for Tugger not accidentally giving away the athanor secret to his owners.”

Shahrazad rolls onto her feet, trying (and failing) to give the impression that her wilderness-honed reflexes rather than fear had dictated her surrender before the dapple gray plow horse who now studies her with his mild brown eyes.

The Wanderer pours grain into a horse’s feed bin and takes up the story: “Back in the mid-eighteen hundreds, I had a tinker’s route up through New England. That was in a male incarnation, of course. In Massachusetts, I always stayed with a particular farming family, descendants of a French mercenary and a local Boston girl. They’d done well for themselves, mostly through hard work and perseverance, but as the years went on they started giving more and more credit for their luck to the fact that one of their plow horses never had an off day.

“When some sickness wiped out a quarter of the horses in the area and ruined about half of the survivors, Tugger didn’t even sniffle. The worst that ever happened to him was a bout with colic and—funny thing—he seemed to understand what had made him sick. I think it was an overindulgence in clover.”

“Apples,” Frank corrects in response to a “brr-hmm-pph” from Tugger.

“Apples, then. He stayed away from them afterward.” The Wanderer leans back against a partition, her eyes half-closed as she remembers. “Tugger was smart, too. Learned how to draw a plow real steady, and would stop as soon as the blade hit something that had to be grubbed out by hand. Though he wasn’t pretty—sorry fellow, but you’re not a carriage horse—the Beaumonts got so fond of him they’d tie ribbons in his mane and have him pull the family to church on Sundays. Mistress Beaumont swore he liked the hymn singing.

“All this was fine at first. Tugger had been bought at a public market, and the fellow selling him had been a shady type who hadn’t been too certain about his age. From his teeth, they’d figured him for a young horse, though. The thing was, Shahrazad, Tugger stayed a young horse—a horse in his prime. At first the family just regretted that he’d been cut so they couldn’t breed him. After a while, when the children who had ridden him were starting to have children of their own, some folks started to comment on this horse that didn’t age.

“The Beaumonts weren’t stupid, and they were fond of Tugger. They stopped bringing him to church, saying that he was too old for that sort of work, but they couldn’t bear not to use him for the spring plowing. By then he was so savvy he could plow twice what any other horse could do. And people noticed.

“Now, Massachusetts was past its days of witch burning—or so it claimed—but it was still pretty nervous about things that weren’t normal. The Beaumonts were torn. On the one hand, they didn’t like the way their neighbors were looking at them and shying from them when they met at the market or in church. They didn’t like the whispers that followed them either, or the fact that no one was coming to court their two younger daughters, even though they were as pretty as any girls in the land.

“On the other hand, Tugger was their luck. They felt that deep down inside. They couldn’t just sell him, and they certainly couldn’t send him to the knacker, but it was beginning to look like they couldn’t keep him either.

“Well, I’d been watching this situation develop, and I suspected that Tugger was like me, but that, being a horse, he didn’t have the smarts to hide it.”

This brings an indignant snort from the dapple grey gelding, which Frank refuses to translate.

The Wanderer grins and continues: “Now, I had a lucky charm that I’d bought from a wisewoman who lived in the region that’s now Bangladesh. I knew it was lucky, but it was small enough to fit in a small box or be hidden somewhere in a house where no one could see it. Privately, I spoke with Madame Beaumont and offered to buy Tugger, saying that I’d throw in this lucky charm and that she should hide it away, but that she should let no one, not even her own children or husband, know of it until her death.