Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“He’s alive.” Dark silence, pressure against Estajfan’s wrists and legs. He can’t move. He’s hurt. Around him, the reek of bodies that haven’t been washed.

“Heather,” Petrolio says, and she opens her eyes.

“He’s in a truck,” she says. “There are people with him. I think they’re heading this way, but I’m not sure.” She grabs Petrolio’s hand. “We’ll find him. I can help you find him. But we have to go down.”

“Estajfan chose to go down.” A new voice behind them. They stiffen in surprise, then turn to see a mountain centaur, tall and stern. Behind him, others in the trees. How long have they been watching? “Centaurs do not belong off the mountain. No one is to go down except for the human.”

“I’m not abandoning my brother!” Petrolio cries, his eyes wild.

The centaur only watches him. “Then you make the same choice he made,” he says. “And the mountain will dismiss you too.”

Aura offers a hand to Heather, who takes it and scrambles up onto Aura’s back. She wraps her arms around Aura’s slender torso, then buries her face in Aura’s hair.

Then Aura’s hooves leave the ground, and they are running.

When they reach the bottom of the mountain, Aura pauses for the tiniest of seconds.

“Where is he?” Aura shouts back to her. “Where do we need to go?”

The warm smell of metal; the tang of fear and fire inside her mouth. He still can’t move, but they are moving. Heading north, toward the mountains. She was right.

“They’re on the road,” Heather says. “Turn south, and we’ll meet them.”

They run for what feels like hours—through the dawn and into the morning. When the road is blocked by sudden mounds of tangled vines—a buried car or two or three—Aura leaps over them, Heather clutching hard in panic, Petrolio at their heels.

As they get closer to Estajfan, a wave of pain rises behind Heather’s eyes. She can feel him moving against his restraints, his fingers curling, his body flexing, getting ready.

The humans don’t see it. They have no idea.

Snug on the bed in their townhouse, nestled between Tasha and Annie, Elyse is weak, but alive. They feed her carefully—canned beans, rice, tuna—until colour comes back into her face. The day slides into night. They sleep. They wake. They sleep again and dream.

“What happened?” she asks them, when the night has turned to day again. “What happened, outside, with the flowers?”

They tell her what they know, which isn’t much. The scream. The long standoff with Annie.

When they get to the part about the grief and the despair, Elyse nods. “I was ready to give up,” she says. “If it hadn’t been for the coughing, I’d just be another body on the street. The breathing was the only thing that saved me.” She told them about this when she’d recovered enough to speak—the scream of the flowers rising around her just before she reached their townhouse, the panic that had driven her to the house next door, which was closer, and then the default mechanism that had kicked in, the thing she knew to do when the air overwhelmed her, when breathing was hard. She’d learned it as a child. It went even deeper, now, than madness.

Breathe in until her lungs were three-quarters full. Then hold. Then out. Breathe in. Then hold. Then out.

Again. Again. Again.

Thinking back on it now, she manages a wry chuckle. “My banged-up lungs kept me alive, I guess. That’s definitely a first. What saved the two of you?”

Tasha hears the brief whisper of wings. “I’d been around the flowers all winter,” she says. “The greenhouse—I went there alone. It made me”—and she thinks back to those moments, her knees against the dirt—“delirious. Mad. I don’t know. I felt the grief then too. But the more I went to the greenhouse, the less it affected me. Like I was becoming immune.”

Elyse looks over at Annie. “Was it the same for you?”

Annie flushes, clears her throat. “I wasn’t immune, or whatever you want to call it. If it hadn’t been for Tasha”—she swallows hard, looks at her hands—“I don’t know what would have happened.”

Silence settles over them, broken by Elyse’s ragged lungs. “Maybe Tasha was your breathing,” she says. “The thing that kept you afloat—the way that the rhythm of my breathing saved me.”

They sit with this, all of them, for a moment. Annie is the one who asks it first. “Do you think this means that other people survived too?”

“I hope so,” Tasha says.

There is only one way to find out for sure. They do not talk about this, not yet.

The third night they are together, Elyse sits up in the middle of the bed so suddenly Tasha thinks she’s having an attack.

“The creature,” she says. “The creature on the mountain. We can go there, to get food.” She coughs. “I should have told you that first thing.”

“Elyse,” Tasha says, carefully, “what creature?”

“The one I saw by the greenhouse. With Heather. It was part man, part horse.”

Tasha and Annie look at each other over her blonde head.

Annie clears her throat. “Elyse, we’ve all had such a shock. Why don’t you just lie back down and rest—”

“I should have said it first thing,” Elyse repeats, frantically. “It’s just—I was just—I was so tired! I saw Heather, in the forest. Just before the scream came. She was talking to a—a creature. Part man and part horse. I was on my way back to tell you when the scream came.”

“Elyse,” Tasha says. “This has been hard on all of us, and—”

Elyse shakes her head. “I know what I saw. Tasha—remember, the flowers screamed, and vines moved across the ground. You saw it too! Why couldn’t there be such a creature?”

“We all tell ourselves stories,” Tasha says. “Maybe it was just a man, someone who lives near the mountain. Someone we don’t know, someone who’s been living in the forest all this time.”

“I know what I saw!” Elyse cries, again, setting off her terrible wracking cough.

They sit with her, in silence, until the coughing subsides.

“All right,” Tasha says. She looks at Annie, who shrugs a little. “Elyse—okay. Maybe there is someone—some thing— on the mountain. Some person or creature or something that no one else has seen. But you can’t climb the mountain. You wouldn’t have been able to do it months ago—you definitely can’t do it now.”

“Then I’ll stay,” Elyse presses, “and you can go. The two of you.”

Annie shakes her head. Her voice is low and soft. “We can’t leave you alone.”

“I’ll be fine! I was by myself for days before you ca—”

“What would have happened if we hadn’t heard you—if no one had come? You would have died on that floor, Elyse, and you know it,” Annie says.

“So what happens when the food runs out here?” Elyse says. “You survived, I survived—only to shrivel away here in this house? This can’t be how it ends.”

Annie sighs, and Tasha knows what she’s going to say in the instant before the words come out of her mouth. “I’ll go. I can go up the mountain. Tasha—you stay here with Elyse.”

Tasha shakes her head. “No one is going,” she says. “Elyse—there’s no path. We don’t know what might be up there. It’s too dangerous.”

“So that’s it,” Elyse says. “We just stay here, and starve.”

“No one said anything about starving,” Tasha says, and the others look to her. She spreads her hands. “We find whatever food is left in any of the houses, and then we leave this godforsaken city. We go.”