Pegasi and Prefects (11 page)

“Yes. I suppose so.” She tugs at a lock of hair that has come loose under her hat, twirling it around her finger. “Shall we?”

We make our way up the cliff school path, which is wide enough to ride abreast. It’s forbidden to go too far off the paths; Cornwall still has, according to rumour, full dragons somewhere in the caves by the waters, and there are other things to worry about. Pixies, of course, and reports of other malicious things I’ve never sensed for myself. There’s also a lot of hunting here, mostly of unicorns and dragonlings, and the pointed-eared beast-hunting folk around here object strenuously to schoolgirls trampling over nests or disturbing wild magical horses. Pointy-eared beast-hunting folk like Rosalind’s people. Taking in the girl riding behind me, self-contained and obviously enchanted with her steed, it’s a curious thought that she belongs to the same community as the hunters I loathe.

I have to admit keeping to the paths, or I suppose flying along them, is a rule I habitually ignore. Miss Roberts knows I can be trusted, and I will sense any perilous fabled beasts long before I disturb them. Flying sedately above a path seems silly, on days with sunlight sparkling off the waves or warming the downs.

Ember is a little annoyed at being kept entirely to the ground. Fortunately he loves to work his legs sometimes, so I nudge and soothe him with my mind, promising him a good fly as soon as I can manage it. He folds his wings up less sulkily than I feared.

I’m not sure how experienced Rosalind is, so I take the ride at a fairly gentle pace. It’s splendid up here, the dying sunlight sparkling on the waves far below, the cliffs grey and lovely, the air fresh and salty. I wish we didn’t spend so much time cooped up in classrooms. It’s nice having someone to ride with, too. Miss Roberts comes with me sometimes, or Cecily. They are both so busy, though.

We jog along gently together, for a while, and then Rosalind tips me a grin over her shoulder. “Miss Roberts did say Sunshine needs a good run.” Without further warning, she lets loose, without so much as kicking her heels to send Sunshine into a full gallop.

I shout in surprise and urge Ember into full speed, too. I don’t have a hope. A unicorn is fast, much faster than an earthly horse, and this girl rides as if she is part of her steed. Together, they take the twists and turns of the path as if they barely exist.

Ember pelts after her as fast as he can, hampered by his folded wings. Through my laughter, I can feel the injury to Ember’s pride growing. Finally, in direct disobedience to me, he unfolds his wings and lets them lift him up. He falls back even further as he sorts himself out, then he swoops ahead of Sunshine, still running his heart out. Rosalind shouts something, laughing, that I am sure is about cheating.

I know I shouldn’t let Ember get away with being so wilful, but it’s hard to impress discipline on him when he can feel my happiness. I can feel Sunshine, too, his pleasure at being at a free gallop with a Fable Empath on his back combined with an impossible determination to outrun Ember, now wheeling insolently above him.

After a while, I can feel something else entirely.

I gather up Ember, now more docile, and bring him down to the path. By the time we alight, Rosalind is already slipping from the saddle.

“You feel it too, don’t you?”

It’s not really a question. Rosalind nods anyway, her face taut with pain and concern. “It’s this way.” She points inland.

We bind the steeds with our minds to wait on the path. They snort and toss their heads, reluctant, as we head away from the path, pushing through the gorse, unheeding of the prickles. The feeling becomes stronger as we go forward. Pain, terror, sickness, loneliness. . . above all, pain. It’s unendurable.

A hand slips into mine. I look down, surprised, to meet Rosalind’s tear-filled gaze, mutely appealing to me for comfort. I squeeze her hand, hard, needing comfort just as much. The projected feelings are almost overwhelming. What’s worse is trying to imagine the cause. My mind fills with horror and my fingers clench and unclench on Rosalind’s smaller ones.

In the end, we nearly stumble over it, hidden in a depression in the gorge. A cloud of fairies sparkle up into the air around it as we approach, marking where it lies. An alicorn filly.

It’s been there a long time, I think. I don’t really know how to tell. What is obvious is that it doesn’t look good. There’s a terrible gash at the base of one wing, and it’s oozing blood. I can’t tell in the fading light if it is oozing anything else. I’m terribly afraid.

“The poor darling—the poor darling,” Rosalind says incoherently, dropping to her knees. I’m afraid for one moment that the poor creature will bite her in fear. To my relief it gives one great shudder and lets her draw its head onto her lap. Rosalind strokes its neck, very gently.

“There, there, baby,” she croons. In the same caressing voice, so as not to disturb the foal, she says to me, “Charley, will you have a look at the wing?” It doesn’t feel strange, somehow, to have the little mouse of a Rosalind telling me what to do. She so clearly understands what she’s doing, and oddly enough she seems less frightened than I am.

I inspect the gash, in some fear. It’s a little better than I expected; I was afraid, seeing all the blood matting the feathers, that the wing would be nearly severed. It’s still in one piece, but I don’t know for how much longer. I reach out to touch it next to the wound, gently; the alicorn jolts, but Rosalind is soothing it with voice and mind, and I am sending out love and comfort to it for all I am worth. In the end, it relaxes and lets me examine the wound in an exhausted, docile way. The skin, beneath hair and feathers, is swollen and hot to the touch around the wound. I touch elsewhere on its body to compare, then sit back to give Rosalind the bad news.

I expect her, given her fragile appearance, to break down into useless girlish tears. They never come. She sets her jaw in a business-like fashion. “You’ve been at this school longer than me. How can we get help?”

“Miss Roberts will organise a rescue, I suppose. She’ll have to inform the authorities.” It’s the law that injured fabled beats must be reported. For a foal found without its dam, the likelihood is that it’s owned by a human and has escaped. That brings the terrible, inevitable thought that what it will be returned to won’t be anything wonderful. Pegasi of all kinds are loyal beasts; they don’t try to escape unless they are really desperate. Suffering and terrified for their lives. And this little girl is so small. It’s a miracle it hasn’t been found by a dragonling or gryphon, or something worse. Perhaps the fairies were protecting it in some way; I don’t really understand what those strange little things do or the choices they make, or if they make choices at all. If they were, surely it wasn’t so it could be handed back to abuse.

The alternative is nearly as horrid. I don’t need to tell Rosalind that wild fabled beasts revert to the Crown, and if it survives, this little beauty will probably end up raised somewhere until it’s stronger, and released on royal estates when it’s grown big enough to consider it sporting to hunt it.

Rosalind looks directly at me. In this light, her eyes look more black than blue, and larger still, great dark pools in a face that is becoming blurred and white, either from evening fall or from the tears in my own eyes. “Will she hide it if we ask?” Her voice is crisp and matter-of-fact.

The tears are choking my breath rather than spilling out. Perhaps, after all, Miss Roberts would. She loves horse-like creatures of all breeds.

If she’s caught, it’s all up for her. She will lose her license to keep fabled beasts, lose Briar Stables, and her livelihood, and possibly be prosecuted, lose everything she cherished, all because we went for a ride on the cliff paths when we should have been returning to school for supper.

Somehow, looking at the little injured thing, lying here dying alone, I can’t regret choosing to go riding this afternoon. I just don’t know what to do about it.

I try to explain this to Rosalind, stumbling over my words. She listens quietly.

“Right. First things first, in any case. We need shelter for it, saline, a needle and strong thread, gauze, surgical tape. Petroleum jelly might be a good idea too, I suppose.” She says all this very simply, as if stating the obvious.

“Where do we get them?” I ask, barely conscious that I am leaning on her for answers and help.

“It depends. If your Miss Roberts will give them to us without question, we can get them from her. If not—well, you’re right. I don’t want to drag her into this. We must steal them from the San.” She is obviously trying to say this bravely, but her voice trembles a little. The alicorn reacts to her fear and whinnies a little in distress. She hushes it with hands and, I know, mind. “We should be able to manage it. Or you can. I’m supposed to be delicate, after all. I could complain to Matron that I feel unwell, and you could come with me for support, and…. You’ll think of something, I know, Charley.” There is complete faith in her expression, faith I don’t feel like I’ve been living up to at all.

“We are really going to do this, aren’t we? Break the law, I mean.”

She nods, slow and sure and confident. “We are.”

There’s a shack I’ve flown over often. From the ground, you would follow a little winding, mostly overgrown track off the main paths. I have no idea what it was once used for, or why it exists—itinerant workers? Some other purpose that has long since been abandoned? The important thing is that it is in disrepair and obviously has not been entered, let alone used, for years.

By the time we get the wee baby up there, it’s dark, and I feel ten years older. Ember accepts the two of us on his back to make our way back to the alicorn, leaving a very annoyed Sunshine behind.

The trouble lies in getting the alicorn filly up on Ember without damaging it more badly. In the end, we settle on Rosalind sitting up on Ember’s back, as I clearly have more strength with which to hoist the alicorn up. It’s frightened and struggling, despite our best efforts to calm it, and I can’t help it without hurting it. I’ve never felt so clumsy. Every jolt of pain the alicorn endures goes straight through me, and I can tell that Rosalind is damp with sweat and suffering. I offer up prayers of gratitude that the baby is at least not a fire alicorn, but I have a terrible fear that Ember will become displeased enough to flame off himself.

We finally get it settled, but the worst is yet to come. The actual flight to the shack is hell on earth. Rosalind clings to the filly, I hang onto Rosalind like grim death, and Ember is overburdened and exhausted and angry, and the battering of emotion from both the fabled beasts is enough to almost make me want to let go and fall, just to make it stop. The scratches I would sustain from the gorse would almost be a relief. It seems I have no courage in a crisis.

It could only be a few minutes, really, but it seems like hours before Ember lands, fortunately fairly lightly, and I slip off and reach up to take Rosalind’s burden from her. We get inside the shack, somehow, and finally settle our precious charge down. I sit on the floor of the shack and bury my face in my hands for a long while.

When I finally come to a little, I’m conscious of Rosalind’s hand stroking my hair. There is a strange sense of warmth and wellbeing flooding through me, and my exhaustion is ebbing. I raise my head and see that she has one hand on Sunshine, one on me, giving us both the same firm, soothing strokes.

“Better, Charley?”

I manage to nod. “You?”

“Yes.” Rosalind sounds so tired that I feel guilty for my own collapse. I am much stronger, now. “We can’t stay here forever, Charley. I’ll stay with her. Can you manage to go for help?”

I catch the hand that was stroking my hair and crush it in a tight, grateful grip for a moment. I release it and haul myself to my feet. “I’ll be as quick as I can.” On impulse, I stoop and drop a light kiss on her cheek. Such demonstrativeness is quite unlike me, but I feel like we have spent several years together, although it could not have been more than an hour.

It’s entirely dark by the time Ember and I find Sunlight again. I bless every power in the world for being a Fable Empath; if I had to lead the unicorn back, it would take forever. Instead, I wrap him up with my mind and we go as fast as I dare take a non-flying horse in the dark.

“Charlotte! What on earth?” Miss Roberts is running up the cliff path. “Where’s Rosalind?” I can see her horror at the thought that she has sent two schoolgirls out after dark and one has met with a serious accident. Her first care would be for Rosalind’s safety, naturally, not her own reputation. That wouldn’t change the fact that the consequences for her would be dreadful. I know I can’t drag her into the matter of the alicorn, not at well as causing her this trouble.

I shake my head, wearily. “Rosalind’s fine. I’ll bring her back soon. Miss Roberts, I need some things from you, and I need you not to ask questions. Please.” I rattle off my requirements as if being fast enough will forestall any objections. Then I wait.

I’m terribly afraid, for a moment, that Miss Roberts and I aren’t as alike as I think, that she won’t trust me, that the friendship between a schoolgirl and a grownup can never be quite enough and she will drag the story out of me and everything will go wrong. I could cry with relief when she nods, curtly.

“Come inside while I get the things together. I have hot milk on the stove, waiting against you two coming back. I didn’t expect just the one of you.”

I pour myself a mug while I wait and add cocoa and sugar. My hands are shaking and it’s an effort to drink it. I’m glad I do. The sweetness and warmth are surprisingly comforting.

“Finish up, old girl. And put more sugar in. It won’t do you any harm in the circumstances. Make sure your friend drinks some, too.” Miss Roberts is standing behind me, with a rucksack full of supplies. She fills a flask for Rosalind. “I’ll telephone Miss Carroll and let her know you two are spending the night in my spare bedroom. I’ll tell her I was afraid you were coming down with chills and didn’t want to send you back in the cold and dark. Thank God she won’t be able to Sense what I’m feeling over the telephone, or she’d be down here in an instant, probably after calling the police.” She pauses. “Charley, I don’t lie often. Not often at all, let alone to one of my oldest friends, and there’s not many people I would do it for. Give me your word of honour that I’m right to do so.”