Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

The centaur says, “Thank you. They’re very beautiful.”

He is very beautiful, the doctor thinks—the cuffs look ridiculous on her thin wrists, but on the centaur they are an adornment for a king.

“I want to see them,” she says. “I want to know that they’re all right. I want to know that they are happy.”

“They’re happy,” he says.

The doctor shakes her head. “I don’t believe you,” she says.

His face darkens; he looms over her, fists clenched. “ I am not lying. ”

The doctor stands her ground. In her head is a darkened room and a woman drugged and terrified on the table, three versions of a secret suddenly there before them all, screaming. “Maybe they are happy. But I would like to see. I brought them into the world; I deserve to know how they’re faring.”

The centaur is silent for so long that the doctor doesn’t know what to do; she’s hurt him, she thinks. All she meant to do was push. She wants to apologize but the words won’t come out.

“If you feel that way,” he says at last, “then perhaps you shouldn’t have sent them— us— away in the first place.”

“I was trying to save them! And you!” the doctor cries. “Surely you can understand that.”

But the centaur turns from her. “Do not come back,” he says. “I thought you were a friend, but you are no friend at all.”

She watches him walk away from her. She doesn’t follow him; she wants to, but she doesn’t. As she makes her way back down the mountain, her head is full of sadness, her eyes blurry with tears.

On the descent it starts to rain. When she was younger, the doctor would have kept walking, but she worries about slipping now, so she shelters under a large overhang and sets up camp for the night. In the morning, the sky is clear and the warmth of the sun soon dries her clothes. As she makes her way down, she ponders his words over and over.

You are no friend at all.

In the mountain city, she stops and writes a letter to her sister. I will be late, she writes. I have something to attend to here. Please give the girls my love.

Is it a betrayal to want to see the children, to know that they’re all right?

I only care about you, she wants to tell the centaur. I only want to see you happy.

She posts the letter and makes her way back to the mountain.

When Tasha finishes her story, Heather doesn’t know what to say. She can tell that Estajfan and Petrolio don’t know what to say either. Aura might know, but it’s hard to look at her. There’s too much in her face.

Finally, Annie clears her throat. “You knew,” she says to Tasha, incredulous. “You’ve been lying to us this whole time. You knew about the mountain. You knew about—them.”

“I didn’t think it was real, Annie—I thought they were only stories.”

“Stories are never only stories,” Heather says. “Remember?”

Tasha shakes her head. “My mother told me stories about the mountain when I was small—she made them up, Heather, to try to help me sleep. Not because she thought that they were real.” And then she is telling them all about her family’s stories, fables passed down from mother to daughter, all the way back to twin sisters, and an aunt who was beloved. The doctor and her sister. The nieces, rapt in bed and listening to the words.

Estajfan says, “We never met the doctor. Our father never said anything—are you sure this is true?”

Tasha throws out her hands. “I don’t know if any of it is true. But I thought you weren’t real, and here you are.”

Heather moves to stand beside Estajfan. “How does it end? The story with the doctor.”

Tasha glances at Annie, and Annie looks away. “I have no idea,” she says. “One year she went up the mountain and that was the last anyone ever saw of her.”

Aura reaches for Tasha’s hand. “I can tell you.” In her voice is Tasha’s sadness, magnified over and over. And beneath that, the resignation, the deep fear of facing that thing one hates the most.

Grief is inevitable. That doesn’t make it any easier.

“Aura,” Estajfan says. “What happened?”

“I need to take you up the mountain,” Aura says to Tasha. “You deserve to see it—I will show you where she is.”

And so it comes to pass that the centaurs and the humans make their way up the mountain after all. Aura leads them herself, following the path that her father carved into the mountainside—the same path that Heather and her father climbed those years ago. It is overgrown, but not difficult. They’ve left Brian back down in the clinic, with Darby standing guard.

As Moira climbs, she feels her anger at the centaurs dissipate. The light on the mountain trees is its own kind of knife, slicing her open. Jaime would have loved this—the clean air, the wildflowers that bloom at their feet. She sees the shadow of her sister everywhere—there her quick, slender hand, there the flash of her bright smile and face. It is so painful she almost can’t breathe, and so beautiful she doesn’t think of stopping.

There she is, just ahead, smiling at the centaurs.

Jaime’s voice in her ear, or maybe just Moira’s own. They’re impossible, I know, but here they are.

Yes , she thinks. Yes, they are.

As they climb higher, she sees shadows coalesce around them that might be clouds but also might be people. A black-haired, black-skinned man, a woman with dark hair and a blue satchel. Another man who hovers over Heather and hums her a song. Moira wants to call to Heather to tell her to look, but the magic overwhelms her. Instead she looks to the others—to Joseph, who climbs with a face cracked with awe, to Elyse, who had been sitting warily on the back of the female centaur but is now silent and watching the sky. To Annie, grim and silent, who climbs beside Tasha as though she’s stomping on her own heart.

She has no idea what to call this feeling that she has. It feels like waking up.

As Tasha climbs, she thinks of that long-ago doctor who was a witness to another kind of magic. The other doctor, who carried the birth of these babies with her through the years, and one year told the story to her sister late at night. A magical tale that was real.

The other doctor, she imagines, would have told Annie the story right away.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers as Annie climbs beside her.

Annie doesn’t reply, just puts one foot in front of the other.

Estajfan, the largest of them all, brings up the rear. Heather in front of him, limping and cautious but determined to climb.

Up the mountain, down the mountain, up and down and up again. The longest of goodbyes.

The world below them is a place he barely knows. He’s only stolen from it—human things, human stories. He has been told his whole life that he doesn’t belong there. And yet without the world below the mountain there would be no Heather; without the world below the mountain the centaurs wouldn’t be at all.

They will leave. He and Heather. He isn’t sorry.

He will run for her, he will go beyond the sea to find food if that is what she needs.

Wherever , he thinks. Wherever you will go.

Heather climbs, and her father climbs beside her, breathing out of every leaf and twig.