The Secret Horses of Briar Hill

It lets out another snort, breaking the standoff, and lurches forward. I clutch the willow branch like a sword, but it doesn’t attack. Its neck bends. It noses the fountain. Again. And again.

I lower the branch.

No, it is not a bloodthirsty creature out of one of Benny’s stories.

It is only trying to drink.

It looks at me, and I see more clearly this time. It is a girl. It’s something in her eyes, a gentleness. I can just tell.

The fountain doesn’t flow anymore, but frozen rainwater fills the basin. The horse paws, paws, paws, with her quicksilver hoof. There’s a blaze of dark hair between her eyes in the pattern of a star—no, a spark. A tingling feeling spreads through me. All this time, Sister Constance and Dr. Turner were wrong. The winged horses weren’t in my imagination. They’re real. She’s real. I want to run back to the hospital on winged feet and tell them all, yell it out, and bring them here….

But no.

No.

I remember Sister Constance’s face. Dr. Turner’s, too. And the whispers of the other children.

They did not believe me before, and they will not believe me now. That is okay. I am very good at keeping secrets, never mind what Benny says. And this secret—this horse—is my secret. Something just for me.

The horse paws again, muzzle nosing anxiously against ice. I take a step forward, cautiously, and raise the willow branch. The horse steps back, wary, like a deer at the edge of a wood. I use the branch to bust up the ice in the fountain, chop, chop, chop as hard as I can, and then step back quickly to the wall. My heart thunk-thunks. When I look at the horse, my mouth fills with the slightest, barely there taste of ash.

She takes a step forward. And another. Cautious. And then she lowers her head and drinks long and deep from the water beneath the ice. I think she is very thirsty, and that it has been a long time since she has drunk her fill.

I LIE AWAKE ALL night wishing there were no such things as schoolwork and supper and silent prayer so I could have stayed with the winged horse.

At first I wonder: How did the horse get into the sundial garden?

And then I remember: She has wings, you dolt, she flew in.

But then I think: Why doesn’t she fly away again?

And I start to worry that maybe she has.

So I get up just after dawn and sneak out, even though I know God sees everything and might tell Sister Constance, and I climb over the garden wall with a mealy turnip from the larder in my coat pocket. I’m more and more afraid the winged horse won’t be there again, but she is. She is standing by the golden sundial, which is being slowly disappeared by briars, like everything else.

She hears me coming. She stops scratching. She turns her beautiful gray muzzle and looks at me through the mist. She is even more miraculous than I remembered.

“I brought you a treat.” My words turn to clouds of mist in the air. I hold out the turnip, but my hand is shaking. I taste ashes in my mouth. The horse is so very beautiful. She’s small for a horse, but small things can be lovely, too. Her wings are as white as sugar, and I bet they feel soft and warm, like the chickens.

“Emmaline?”

Someone is calling my name from the hospital. Sister Mary Grace, I think.

The winged horse’s eyes go wide and wild. Papa tells stories of horses like this, untamed ones of the plains. He says in America there are whole valleys of horses that have never even seen a person before. The cowboys round them up into giant wooden pens that they keep moving closer and closer, until the horses suddenly find themselves caught. Some are happy to be tamed and pull carts and carry saddles on their backs. But others never are.

“Do you have a name?” I ask.

The winged horse’s nostrils flare.

And I notice how she is holding one wing close to her body. I take a step forward, cautiously. The wing’s feathers are each the length of my entire arm, the width of my hand. They are packed tightly together, like a shield, and coated with a waxy substance that would make rain roll right off of them. They grow out of the horse’s shoulder, and where they meet the bone, the skin is red and swollen.

“What happened to you?”

The horse pauses. Her ears turn back, and then she swivels her beautiful long neck around and swats at a fly on her haunch with her tail. I try to memorize the shape of her back legs—the smooth arcs and long, straight shanks—so that I can draw them later with Anna’s colored pencils.

I realize something. “I know why you have come,” I tell her. “I think you belong with the other horses, the ones that live in the mirrors, but you’ve come into our world somehow. Because you’re hurt, and you know this is a place of healing. It’s okay. No one comes here but me. You can stay as long as you like.”

“Emmaline?” Sister Mary Grace calls again. “Are you out here?”