The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

She suddenly lurches forward in bed, coughing harder than ever. I pick up the colored pencils and my latest drawings, because they’re really the best drawings of Foxfire I’ve done, and I’d hate for them to get ruined. Anna’s whole body is shaking now each time she coughs, and her face has gone very white. Not white like snow, or Foxfire’s wings, but a translucent, greasy kind of white like the rancid lard Sister Mary Grace throws out.

Anna removes her handkerchief away from her mouth, and we stare at it, then at each other.

There’s a spot of red.

Blood.

“Fetch Sister Mary Grace,” she says.

Her voice wavers and there are tears in her eyes. I scramble off the bed with pages and pages of drawings in my arms, and think I should leave them, no, I should just go, and end up dropping everything in the hallway outside and tripping over it all as I run downstairs to the kitchen. Sister Mary Grace is just making our afternoon tea, and the kettle is starting to steam.

“It’s Anna!” I say. “I think she’s dying!”

Sister Mary Grace drops the butter knife and grabs a kitchen towel, then runs past me up the steps toward Anna’s room. The kettle is whistling now. I hear murmurs of the other children—they’ve probably heard the commotion and are popping their heads out of their rooms like birds peeking out of their nests, curious. The kettle is whistling louder. I should go back to Anna’s room, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to see the blood. I don’t want to hear that coughing, that coughing, mixed with her tears. In the hallway, my drawings are scattered like autumn leaves, half crumpled underfoot. Ruined, but I don’t care anymore.

Benny comes charging into the kitchen and jerks the screaming kettle off of the stove. I can smell metal burning. I expect him to yell at me for letting it boil clean dry of water, but he doesn’t. He sets it on a wooden trivet and gives me one long look, and then his eyes flick to the stairs, where we can both hear Anna’s bone-deep coughs.

“You should have left it,” I say. “You should have let it keep whistling.”

“Emmaline—” His voice, for once, isn’t a sneer.

He’s seen my tears. But I don’t want his pity! I shove past him and run outside into the frozen world of snow and ice. Cold stings my bare hands—I’ve forgotten my coat, but I can’t go back. I run and run though my lungs scream at me to stop. When the princess had this place built, did she imagine that one day children would die here, crying so loud you could hear it even over a screaming kettle? Did she think, while she threw open the doors and let music pour onto the back lawn, that one day a black winged horse would circle around and around the roof, tirelessly, always on the hunt?

I collapse in the snow. The coughing fit hits me hard.

The barn door is ajar. Steam is coming from the crack. I pull it open to investigate, cautiously, in case Thomas is there, but it is only the sheep. They are pressed so tightly together, and there are so many of them, that their heat makes the barn as warm as toast from the oven. I crawl over the stall gate and curl up in the middle of them, in the straw and wool and breathing bodies, and at last feel warm.

WHEN I WAKE, I am in my own bed.

My sheets are soaked with sweat. I don’t know who found me in the barn and brought me back. My dreams were coffee-scented, and Thomas is the only one who drinks coffee, though Benny takes a sip every now and then and pretends he likes it. But I can’t picture a one-armed man carrying me, even though I saw him pick up that lamb and throw it over the fence into its pasture. I wrap a blanket around my dress and shuffle down the stairs and hover outside of Anna’s room. The door is open a crack. Sister Mary Grace is there, tidying up spilled broth.

I can see the bedsheets rising and falling as Anna breathes. She is asleep. Alive. Voices come from downstairs. Sister Constance must be back with the medicine.

I’ve slept through supper, but the Sisters have left me some ham beneath a napkin. As I sit alone at the kitchen table and eat, something moves in the reflection of the copper teakettle. The angles of the kitchen are warped in its curving sides, so that the ceiling looks tiny, and the fireplace inflates into a roaring inferno behind me. My nose is the size of a swollen plum, my eyes unnaturally small. A gray winged horse is nosing around the table behind me, probably hungry for toast with jam. It snuffles against my mirror-chair, then against my mirror-shoulders. I shiver, even though my real shoulders have felt nothing. A stick cracks in the fire, and the horse turns toward it. Afraid of the flames or curious, I am not sure. It stretches its wings so suddenly that I duck.

“Be careful,” I whisper. “The fire could burn you.”

Does my voice carry to the world beyond the mirror? The gray horse swivels its head to the left, then to the right, then folds its wings and walks into the ground-floor hall.

I push away the kettle. I do not want to see my reflection. The hair that has grown back unevenly. My hand drifts up to untangle the tufts, and I taste ashes that don’t have anything to do with the kitchen fire. Even without the kettle’s distortions, Benny is right. I do look odd.

Can I tell you a secret?

This is not the first hospital I have been in. I have not always had the stillwaters. That came later, after the fire, after the bandages. After the horses kicking at their stall doors, and no one to let them out.

The kitchen door slams, and the three little mice come in with red cheeks. They’ve recruited a fourth into their ranks now: Arthur, the blond boy who never speaks and sucks his thumb. They’ve dressed him as a pirate prince and given him a shiny kitchen ladle as a sword, but he’s only gazing at his own reflection in it. Kitty, the leader of the mice, holds up two long black feathers. They look like crow feathers, except they have a sheen like wax and are the length of her arm.

“Look what we found on the terrace!”

She holds one feather in each hand, flapping her arms like a giant bird and cawing at the ceiling, and the girls giggle and run down the hall.

WHEN I WAS FIVE, my sister Marjorie found a wounded bird in the street. Our neighbor’s cat had gotten it and thrashed it about, before Marjorie chased it off. The bird didn’t move, though its heart flit-flit-flitted beneath our fingertips. Its body was so soft, as though just touching it might break something. Marjorie made a cage out of an old sieve and filled it with leaves. We dug through Mama’s garden for worms, and chopped them up, and fed them to the bird on the end of a small twig. Our neighbor said the bird would never survive, but Marjorie was patient. Every day, she dug for more worms. After three weeks, the little bird was flapping its wings around, trying to take off in the makeshift cage. We carried the cage to the edge of the empty building behind the bakery. Marjorie opened the door, and the bird flew away.

But Foxfire isn’t that little bird. I do not think worms and a bed of leaves will fix her.

She is waiting for me as I crawl over the garden wall. My spine tingles as I meet her eyes. I still can’t believe she’s real, but here she is, standing in front of me. The torn skin on her right wing is raw, and the dent in the bone looks painful. She tries to stretch out her wings. Her left one will extend, but the right one catches.

“I have something for you,” I say softly.