A Gathering of Wings (25 page)

“Yes, we all know what a big man you are,” she says, stroking his neck. She says to West, “I want you to put armed guards around the paddocks, day and night.”

“Yes, boss.” He has not asked her where she has been or why this is necessary. Nor has he asked her how she came upon all these horses.

“The Apex wants to see me. I should be back by midday,” she tells West.

As Malora rides Sky through the city gates, waving at Margus Piedhocks, it occurs to her that this is the first time she has ridden on horseback through the streets of Mount Kheiron. Sky trots blithely up the ring road, and centaurs hail them in passing, some handing her up small bouquets of flowers (blessedly not orange), which Sky promptly devours, reaching around and snatching them from her grasp. Others press Maxes upon her. Sky doesn’t seem to care for the spearmints any more than he does for their namesake. It seems Malora has a new title. No longer Malora Victorious, she is now Malora Resurrected. She smiles graciously down upon the centaurs when they call her this, even though she dislikes
it more than the last title. On Sky’s back, she towers over the centaurs.

When she arrives at Medon’s house, she dismounts. “You need to stay outside,” she tells Sky with a frown, wagging a finger and backing away, then turning to leave. She is halfway down the gallery when she hears a swift
clip-clop
and turns to see Sky following her at a jaunty jog. Malora doesn’t have the heart to scold him and send him back. “All right. Try not to leave any messy surprises behind you,” she tells him, just as he lifts his tail and pushes out a fluffy yellow-green cascade. “Sorry,” she says as a Twan rushes forward with shovel and scoop.

“Our pleasure,” says the Twan, as if he were scooping up nuggets of gold.

Ash stands at the double doors. “They are waiting for you inside,” he tells her, peering up at Sky through his eyeglass. “My, my, my, my, my, my, my—”

“My horse,” Malora says.

“A horse and a half, I’d say,” Ash declares. “The blue eyes are a bit unnerving.”

Sky reaches down with his nose and flips the glass from Ash’s eye. It swings on its black string.

“Oh well!” says Ash, fingers fluttering after the glass. “Better not to view you in sharp focus. Blurry is far more benign.” He pushes open the doors to the Hall of Mirrors and announces, “Miss Malora and Master Sky!”

They are all here: Zephele and Orion, Honus and Neal, standing in a tight half circle before the Apex and Herself. If they are surprised to see Sky, they don’t betray it. They do betray, however, with their guilty looks, that they have just
been talking about her. It must be a hard habit to break, she thinks.

“Good morning!” she says brightly.

They move to make room for her and Sky.

“I trust you are settled in and rested,” the Apex says. His eyes are on Sky. Beside her, Malora feels Sky basking in the Apex’s admiration. Or is he, like me when I first came in here, fascinated by his own reflection?

“Yes, I am,” she says. “Thank you. It’s good to be home.”

The Apex waits. When Malora doesn’t say anything more, he adds, “Then you are sufficiently fortified to tell us your story.”

Malora nods, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. How she wishes she had written down “the story” last night, the better to remember which bits she is going to tell and which she is withholding. She looks around at the others, dreading that something she doesn’t want them to know will slip out. She has no idea what her friends have already chosen to tell the Apex. She settles for starting with a half-truth.

“I’m sure the others told you that we heard in the marketplace of Kahiro that bands of wild centaurs living in the Downs were rustling horses.”

“They have,” says the Apex.

“We—or at least I—assumed they had Sky.”

Sky grunts.

The Apex makes a winding motion with his hand to tell Malora that he knows this already and wants to hear more.

“The Downs being riddled with deadly sinkholes, the others didn’t want to go in,” she says.

“I have already congratulated them on their levelheadedness,” the Apex says with an approving scowl.

“I know I was foolish, but I couldn’t come home knowing that my horse was captive to the wild centaurs. So I decided to go alone.”

The Apex’s brows bristle. “That was rash of you, Daughter.”

“I know it was,” Malora says. “But I had to get my horse back.” She runs a hand down Sky’s mane.

His eyes on Sky, the Apex says, “Understandably. He is a magnificent creature.”

Sky bows his head modestly and licks his lips.

“To get to the Downs, I had to swim across the River Neelah. But trappers had set a snare for hippos and crocs in the river bottom. I got tangled up in it halfway across the river. It pulled me down under the water. I struggled—”

“Malora!” Orion cries out. “You could have died!”

“Actually,” she says, with a wry smile, “I
did
die.”

They all stare at Malora in dumbfounded silence.

“Then it was all true!” Zephele bursts out. “Shrouk was right.”

“Who is Shrouk?” the Apex booms.

“This old Dromad we met with,” Zephele says dismissively. Then, turning an avid look on Malora, she says, “Do tell us how you died, Malora.”

“And came back to life,” Orion adds.

Malora continues to deliver her story in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I couldn’t escape from the net, and it wasn’t long before I ran out of breath. The last thing I saw was the crocodiles coming for me.”

“No!” Zephele brings her fingers to her mouth.

“I was unconscious when Lume rescued me. He tells me that he harried off the crocodiles, cut me loose from the net, and brought me up on the riverbank, where he breathed life into me.”

“Lume? Who is this
Lume
?” the Apex booms.

“A
ha
!” Zephele says, recognizing the name. “Lume is the man of her dreams, Father! And her dreams, it would seem, have come true, the lucky girl!”

“Actually,” Malora says, “it turns out Lume is an avian hibe called a Wonder.”

Zephele’s enthusiasm wilts. “Oh, my poor dear!” she says. “You must have been
ravaged
by disappointment.”

Malora feels a sudden irrational need to defend Lume. “I was happy to be alive. And Lume is very nice. He has very powerful eyes and ears and breath.”

“Apparently,” Orion says, laughing uneasily.

“But what about the blood?” Honus asks. “It was
everywhere
.”

She holds up her hand. “My old wound bled when I struggled against the trap.”

They all take a moment to stare at her hand, which is smooth and unscarred.

“You heal quickly,” says the Apex.

Orion and Honus confer in a whisper.

Zephele, ever willing to tease out the best in every situation, says, “Even if he is a hibe, I think it’s romantic that he breathed life into you.”

“I’m not familiar with this particular hibe,” Orion says.

“You wouldn’t be,” Malora says. “He is the last of his kind.”

“Just like you!” Zephele beams.

“He flew me to his home, high up on a sheared-off mountaintop,” Malora continues.

“Extraordinary!” Honus puts in. “Most avian hibes are earthbound. He
flew
you to his aerie, you say?”

“So I could recover,” Malora says.
And fight the Leatherwings with him
, she adds silently. Neither does she make any mention of his “watching her court death.”

Honus says, “Then, like your ancestors, who once rode the air currents in sleek metal contraptions, you now know what it is to fly.”

“I do,” Malora says, turning to Honus. “And I found it
terrifying
.”

“Terrifying or not, what I wouldn’t give to experience it!” Honus says.

“Did this Wonder accompany you into Ixion?” Orion asks.

“Ah, no,” Malora says. “He had something else he needed to do.” She goes on to tell about her journey through the Downs, minimizing the danger of the sinkholes because she knows it will upset everyone to hear how close she came to slipping into one. But Neal won’t let it go.

“You traveled into the Downs, without a guide, without a map, and without your Kavian serpent staff, and made it in and out of there alive?”

Malora nods. “With Sky and the other horses,” she says.

The Apex swings his head toward her. “The horses you came home with are the property of the wild centaurs?”

Malora nods reluctantly.

Honus bursts out. “You rustled the rustlers’ horses!” His face is alight with pride. “Good for you!”

The Apex’s brows lower like twin thunderclouds.
“This is
not
good!”
he says.

And now Malora must say what she has not wanted to say: “I freed the horses because the wild centaurs were going to destroy them.”

The Apex looks bewildered. “Why would they do that?”

“They sacrifice them,” she says, “to their god, the Beast from Below.” She doesn’t add that, unlike Kheiron and the Doctors Adam and Eve, this god is
real
.

Herself shudders. “Such savagery! In that case, you did well to rescue them, Malora.”

The Apex turns to his wife and snaps, “Did she now? Will you say that when those same savages come sweeping down from the north to retrieve their stolen horses?”

The Apex, having given voice to Malora’s deepest fears, strikes the room silent.

Finally, Malora says, “Knowing what was in store for those horses, I had to save them.” She looks around at her friends. “Don’t you see?”

They stare back at her in reproachful silence. Only Honus seems to approve of her actions. He raises a finger, and says, “ ‘Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he had destroyed the entire world; and whoever rescues a single life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the entire world.’ By any standard I can think of, Malora, you are a hero … many times over.”

“Hero or not,” Medon grumbles, “if the wild centaurs show up at the gate and demand their property, I shall have to return it to them.”

“Father!” Zephele cries out. “You
wouldn’t
!”

“You would do this,” Malora says, her anger flaring, “knowing what is in store for them?”

“Know this, all of you!” the Apex says as his eyes travel around the room and come to rest on Malora. “I will do anything,
anything
to keep the peace. I learned a lesson when I won the Hippodrome. And that is this: centaurs are more important than horses. Better sacrifice the lives of a hundred horses than lose a single centaur life.”

“The Apex has spoken,” Zephele says later that day, lounging on Malora’s porch and sharing the wedges of an orange with her. “I remained behind, after the rest of you left, and had a perfectly hideous row with him. I told him if ever there was a good reason to take up arms, this was it.”

“And what did he say to that?” Malora asks. Sky, poking his nose between the porch rails, rejects the peel of an orange Zephele offers him with an affronted snort.

“He said that when
I
became Apex, I could wage all the war I want,” Zephele says, tossing the orange peel.

“And you said …?” Malora prompts.

Zephele sets her chin. “I accused him of being afraid of the wild centaurs because he feared that very same wildness in himself. Rather than owning up to it, he denied it with his usual bombast. I told him that what he thinks of as his strength has grown into weakness and that I was deeply disappointed in him, both as father and as leader.” She deflates suddenly. “I suppose I will have to drag myself back in there and apologize. At least Herself and Orion tell me that I should. Neal agrees with me, by the way.”

“With what?” Malora asks. She reaches for the flowers Zephele brought for her and plucks one to feed to Sky. Sky
takes it in his mouth and chews. He pokes his nose back through the slats for more.

“Oh, really, Sky! You are too, too greedy. You haven’t even swallowed the first one.” Zephele feeds him the rest of the bouquet, one flower at a time, holding back the next flower until he has finished the last. “Has your horse
always
been this greedy?”

“A big horse has a big appetite,” Malora says. “You were saying about Neal?”

“She was saying that Neal is the most ruggedly handsome centaur she knows,” Neal says, ambling up onto the porch. He is off-duty, wearing his ragged impala vest.
Ruggedly handsome
is as good a description of Neal Featherhoof as any Malora can think of.

“I was saying no such thing,” Zephele says, her smile warm and welcoming. Neal’s eyes, when he looks at Zephele, have lost their hard glint. Things have changed between them, Malora thinks.

“Neal agrees,” Neal says, popping the last wedge of the orange into his mouth and chewing it, “that to return the horses to the wild centaurs would be an admission of weakness.” He spits a pit over the rail. Sky gives him an icy look.

“My brief impression of them,” Malora says, “is that they wouldn’t do us the courtesy of
asking
. They would be much more likely to
take
. And probably help themselves to the rest of the boys and girls while they were at it.”

“Of course they would,” Neal agrees, “which is why I have fortified your Twani paddock guard with a full compliment of
Peacekeepers. Not new recruits, either, but my most seasoned soldiers.”

“I hope they are well armed,” Malora says. “The wild centaurs carry swords that make yours look like toothpicks.”

“Is that so?” Neal says with a jovial grin.

Malora describes in detail the hacking, whacking swords of the wild centaurs.

Neal’s expression turns gloomy. “I’m familiar with the make. The southernmost Pantherian tribes forge them in fires fed from thousand-year-old trees. They are said to use them to slice off the horns of charging Cape buffalo.”

“A shame we didn’t pick up some of those buffalo-whackers while we were in the Arsenal,” Zephele says.

“It’s not as simple as that,” Neal says. “These swords are heavy. You have to have the stamina and muscle to wield them. I’d have to retrain my entire force. Malora isn’t joking when she calls them hackers and whackers. Brute force, rather than finesse, is called for.”