Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

Heather closes her eyes. “My father,” she says. “This is my father’s grave.”

The world behind her eyelids is swirling red and orange; Heather bends her forehead to the ground again and breathes in the smell of the mountain.

“I brought him here to be with her,” Aura says.

Heather looks up. All around her is hazy sky and grey-brown stone and sturdy green lichens, fuzzy green moss. And the flowers. And yet there is no danger here that she can feel—only the colours, and love.

“He asked for help,” she says. “When we climbed up. He thought that you could help me, that you could make me into something other than what I am.”

Aura nods. “Yes,” she says. “I remember.”

“But I didn’t need help,” Heather says. “My body didn’t do everything that I might have wanted it to do, but it was mine . I didn’t want to change. I didn’t want him to want me to change.” She bites her lip. “I saw him stumble. I could have reached for him too, and I didn’t. Not in time.”

“Heather,” Estajfan begins, “that wasn’t your f—”

“I was so hurt,” she says, talking over him. Her voice is far away, remembering. “Hurt, and so angry—but only for a moment. And even that moment was too long.”

What if her father hadn’t encouraged her to climb the mountain at all? What if she’d never felt like she’d had something to prove?

“He belongs here now,” Aura says. “And so does she. The flowers wouldn’t have come to them otherwise.”

It’s been so long since Joseph has spoken that nearly all of them jump when he says, “What—your mountain only likes humans if they’re dead?”

“The mountain,” a strange voice says, and they look up to see two more centaurs above them on a knoll, “does not care about humans either way.” One male, one female. The female dark-haired, the male pale as Petrolio and Aura.

“We told you not to come back,” the female says. “Aura, you should not have brought them up here.”

“The humans in the ground?” Aura says. She places a hand on Heather’s shoulder. “Or these ones?”

“Any,” says the male. “Humans do not belong here. The mountain is only trying to keep us safe.”

Tasha hears the whisper of a high-pitched scream in her ears, the crazy tilt of a world thrown open to the sky. She realizes only then that it isn’t a memory. She reaches for Heather, understanding at last.

But Heather is not there. Instead it is the pale centaur, and Heather is in the air now, the centaur’s hands strong and terrible around her, lifting. There is no time for Heather to scream, to even be surprised. Bright-blue panic in Estajfan’s face, his outstretched fingers.

Sky over mountain over mountain over sky, and she goes over.

Estajfan reaches for Heather, misses, and then leaps over the side and is gone.

Petrolio crashes into the other pale centaur—they fall to the ground with a thud that shakes the trees. The dark centaur does not move.

Tasha, breathless, shouts to Aura. “Take me down. Take me down now. ”

Petrolio scrambles to his feet again. “I’ll take you,” he rasps. “Aura—get the others away from here.” He bends and Tasha climbs onto his back—they turn to go but Aura shoots out a hand and grabs Petrolio’s arm.

“Wait,” she says. She pulls off her bag and gives it to Tasha. Then they are leaping over the knoll and down the path.

Elyse is on her knees, clutching her chest, her breathing hard and ragged. Annie bends over her, while Moira and Joseph stand terrified, still. The two mountain centaurs’ brown eyes sweep them all.

“Leave now,” the male centaur says as he climbs to his feet. “Leave now, or the rest of you will follow.”

Aura goes to Elyse and kneels. Moira and Annie help the girl onto her back.

“The world is more than the mountain,” Aura says, and she faces the mountain centaurs as she stands. “Green things grew around the graves here, even if the mountain didn’t want the bodies. Change comes to the mountain, too, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.”

She can’t see him, but she knows that he’s there—a small, slight man with dark hair, an easy smile, his fingers long and slender and stained with dirt. She buried him here all these years ago and he sank into the mountain. His bones became the dirt. His hands became the grass and trees, the flowers that grew up and blossomed. The vines that stretch up now and wind around the mountain centaurs’ legs, shimmying up and rooting them to the spot.

The vines thread the mountain centaurs with green, shoot up their shoulders and around their necks, choke them, blind their eyes. Swift and greedy. The female centaur yells once in rage before she is silenced. In the space that was her mouth, a red flower blooms.

The humans stand frozen in horror.

Aura feels the unseen man smile at her, and ready himself. He has become part of the mountain but he, too, does not belong here. He is ready to go home, to follow his daughter back to the world below, now that she’s come up to find him. Aura feels him sink back into the soil once more, and this time he is a river that runs through mountain rock, a starburst of energy that travels all the way down the mountain and back to the city.

He will be there, waiting for them, when they go back down. His unseen hands back in the soil again, coaxing the human gardens to grow. Already she can feel his hands brimming with seeds. The time for starving is over.

“Come,” she says softly. There will be time to mourn her mountain home, but that time is not now. “We must go down.” She makes her way back to the edge of the meadow and over the knoll.

The humans follow.

Heather is flying, falling, a great dizzied tumble. The same sequence that has haunted her dreams all these years.

Not her father’s fall. Her own.

Then she slams into the earth—only it isn’t earth, it’s warm and close around her, Estajfan, his arms frantic to hold her.

The wind keening all around them.

He flails as he tries to right himself, get purchase on the mountainside.

The space around them endless and huge.

They tumble, they fall, they crash against the mountain. She feels him hit the mountainside and strain against the incline. A loud crack beneath them and he screams, and lets go. She hits spongy, leafy ground. Estajfan sails over her head, lands with an impact that shudders deep into the mountain.

The silence that follows is absolute. She can’t hear her heart pounding, she can’t see the sky. Her body is one long bell of pain.

But she’s alive. She tries to breathe—it hurts, but she can do it. Vicious cramps hit her abdomen and she moans.

“Heather?” Estajfan calls. He’s alive too. How can this be? “ Heather. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she answers. Another cramp comes, and she whimpers. “Where are you?”

He cries out as he tries to move.

Another cramp, and another. Another. Another. It’s too soon. It’s too soon.

No, she thinks. No, no.

A face in front of her, calm dark eyes, dark hair. “You’re all right,” the face says. “You’re all right.”

Heather blinks. “Tasha?”

The woman shakes her head. “No.” She puts a hand against Heather’s forehead and takes a deep breath. The fresh scent of leaves flows into Heather’s lungs.

“It’s too soon,” Heather says. She can’t move her arm, she can’t move her legs. Are they broken? Beside her, Estajfan moans.