A Gathering of Wings (3 page)

Malora continues on toward Cylas Longshanks’s storefront. Outside the doors, the cobbler has displayed on racks the usual sumptuous offering of skins. As she enters the shop, Malora savors the scents of lemon oil and cured leather. She walks past the array of boots, displayed on wooden poles carved in the shapes of centaur hooves and legs. The pair made from bright red kid lined with zebra skin strikes Malora as perfect for Zephele. Zephele might deplore the killing of wild animals, but she is not above draping her body in all manner of their skins.

“Good afternoon, Cylas,” she says. “I need a favor.”

A pony-sized centaur with piebald flanks, ebony skin, and a gleaming bald pate stands behind a long stone counter buried in skins three and four deep. Cylas blinks at her from behind his spectacles and says, “No favor is too great for Malora Victorious.”

Malora wonders briefly if she can ask him as an additional favor to stop calling her Victorious but then puts it out of her mind. As Honus has said, “Centaurs need to have their heroes.”

Malora ducks her head and hunches her shoulders, minimizing her height for Cylas’s benefit. She unwinds the knife from its burlap shroud and sets it down on the counter between them. Human and centaur stare at it for a long silent moment. If Cylas is surprised or repelled, he gives no indication.

Malora has decided in advance on the explanation she will offer. “It’s not a weapon,” she tells him. “It’s a tool, for cutting twine or fruit or cheese.”

“But of course,” he replies, his face inscrutable. “It goes without saying that you would never violate the Third Edict.”

Gingerly, Cylas picks up the knife by its bare handle and turns it in his hands, the blade glinting in the lantern light. “I imagine that you would like me to wrap the handle of this object in leather,” he says.

“The hilt,” she says. “Yes.”

Cylas ponders, then says, “In a medium-weight kidskin, rough side out, I am thinking, so it won’t slip from your grasp … when you are cutting twine or fruit or cheese,” he adds carefully.

“Exactly,” Malora says.

“You’d like just enough of it to cushion your grip but not so much that you lose the feel of the hilt, is it?”

“Correct.”

“Color?”

“Oh! Anything you like,” Malora says with a wave of her hand.

Cylas gives her a look over the top of his spectacles that says this response is unacceptable.

“Undyed,” she says quickly. “And I’d like you to make a sheath, also undyed. An ankle sheath built into the lining of a boot. The outer side of the right boot.”

“An
ankle sheath
?” He raises a quizzical eyebrow. Not only do centaurs not possess weapons, but they lack the vocabulary of weaponry.

When he continues to look perplexed, she glances around. There is scrap leather lying on the counter that Cylas uses to jot down measurements in chalk. She picks up the chalk and points to a clear space on the scrap. “May I?” she asks.

“By all means,” Cylas says, and then watches as she sketches a sheath with the knife in it, and the boot around the sheath. “The leather of the sheath must be sturdy enough so that the blade doesn’t poke through the bottom and the sides and cut my leg,” Malora says, “but light enough so that it doesn’t throw me off-balance. The sheath must be sewn tightly into the inside of my boot so that the knife is concealed.”

The sheath will be the knife’s home during the day. At night it will live on the table next to her bed and serve to fend off the Night Demons. When she asks herself why she would need the knife during the day, she can offer no answer, other than that the Demons have put her on guard.

“You wish the knife to be a secret. In case you want to catch the piece of fruit by surprise?” he says blandly.

“Exactly,” she says with a smile, thinking: His sense of
humor is so like mine. Dry to the point of sour. “Make the boots natural, too, so as not to draw the eye to my feet.”

“With reinforced toes?” Cylas asks.

“Yes, please,” she says.

“When do you require this fascinating item?” he asks.

“As soon as possible,” she says with a smile.

“Are you planning to leave us?” he asks. His dark eyes gleam with suspicion.

Malora stares at him. First Brion and now Cylas.

“No,” she answers, “my plan is to stay in Mount Kheiron for as long as you will have me. But I am eager to have the use of my new tool.” She rummages through the Maxes in her purse to find the nubs to advance him for the job.

Cylas stops her with a raised hand. “Your nubs are not welcome here,” he tells her. “Your order will be ready in two days. I will see you then.”

Knowing that arguing with Cylas will only offend the old centaur, Malora thanks him and starts for home. It is dark by the time she arrives at the city gate, where the watchman is just lighting the lantern. She is pleased to see her old friend back on duty. Farin has red flanks and a matching mustache, which he waxes and twirls at the ends, giving him a perpetually cheery look that belies his steadfast gloominess.

“Malora Ironbound!” he calls out when he sees her.

“Farin Whitewithers!” she calls back to him. “Where were you this morning?”

“Alas, this is my new shift,” Farin says dolefully. “A Flatlander has replaced me, of all things. Life won’t be the same without our morning chats over tea.” He shakes his head.
“Everything is changing. Every time I turn around these days, there’s an order for change. Up is down and down is up. Flatlanders in the Heights and Highlanders on the Flats. But if that’s what the Apex mandates, then I will comply.”

“As will we all!” Malora agrees as she passes through the gates out onto the road that leads to the nearest bridge. Across the Lower Neelah lie her paddocks and her camp. The crowds have dispersed on the flats, the centaurs having stopped work and returned to their homes, whose firelights shine like warm beacons. A Twani nurse, herding four kits before her, scurries toward the gate, raising her pink-palmed, short-fingered hand and hailing Malora as she passes.

“Good evening, Malora Victorious!” the Twan says, and the kits echo her. Two of the kits are female, their furry tails poking out from the bottom of their tunics. When Malora saw her first Twan, not long after she saw her first centaur, they reminded her of the picture of Puss in Boots—or “Pussemboos,” as she called him—that she saw in a book in the Grandparents’ box of treasures at the Settlement. Orion, familiar with the story, had laughed when Malora called the Twani Pussemboos and had hastened to correct her. A hibe of cat and human, walking upright on two legs but with flat faces coated with fur and dominated by large eyes, the Twani have served the centaurs for generations. They took refuge in Mount Kheiron when a volcanic eruption buried their city in the Hills of Melea. The Twani serve the centaurs not as slaves, as Malora assumed at first, but freely, out of eternal gratitude.

When she arrives at the larger of the two paddocks, which contains most of the herd, she walks along the fence toward
camp. Shadow is the first to notice her. Her head comes up from the grass, and she calls out a shrill whinny of greeting, then trots over. Malora climbs the rails and embraces the mare’s long black head, breathing into her nostrils. The mare pulls back at first, offended by the vaguely dangerous smell of smoke.

“I’m sorry I haven’t bathed yet. You’ll just have to take me as I am,” Malora says, her voice low and calm.

Not a day passes that Malora doesn’t miss Sky, the coal-black stallion that was once her father’s and became the leader of her herd. Beast has taken over as the lead horse, and Sky and Shadow’s daughter Lightning is the lead mare.

Beast comes along and, ears flattened to his skull, chases Shadow off so he can have Malora to himself. But before long, the horses are all gathered in a clump, jostling each other and snorting and nudging with their noses the pouch at her waist. Laughing, she opens the pouch and doles out Maxes to Beast and Lightning and Shadow, to Ember and Cloud and Raven, to Coal and Star and Charcoal and Butte. She gives them gentle smacks on the nose when their velvety, quivering lips reach out for seconds.

“You boys and girls are so greedy! I have to save some for the Noble Champion, don’t I?”

They snort and shake their heads in disgust at the very idea of
Max the Noble Champion
. Max’s having won the Golden Horse means less to them than the dirt that wedges into the frogs of their hooves. As far as they are concerned, Max is still—and will always be—the lowest of the low.

Malora drops down from the fence and makes her way
toward the smaller paddock closer to her camp. These two paddocks of horses are all that remain of her original herd.

Max comes galloping across the smaller paddock to greet her. He might be Noble Champion to the centaurs, but he will always be the Horse of Her Heart. In the old days, whenever the loneliness of life in the bush brought her down, Max would sense her sadness, come up to her, and place his head over her heart. This gesture of sympathy never failed to bring on a cloudburst of tears, after which she always felt much better. These days, Malora scarcely recognizes the Horse of Her Heart. His chest is expanded with pride, and his once-heavy head is high, his sparse mane streaming behind him. Now that the other horses don’t chase him off his feed, he has begun to put on weight. His ribs no longer poke out, and his swayback has begun to fill in. And since the wranglers have taken to bathing him in the river once a day in lavender-scented suds, he now smells much less like the carcass of a kudu rotting in the midday sun. As if attached to him by invisible ropes, Light Rain and Bolt stream in his wake. Max’s tail and croup bear the foamy marks of their slobber.

“And how goes it for our Champion this evening?” Malora asks. Max smacks his lips and shows her the hodgepodge of his remaining teeth as if to say,
You know how it is, Malora, day in and day out, eating tender green grass, munching on oats and molasses, and getting my butt polished by these two beauties
.

“It’s a rough life, isn’t it, Maxie, old boy?” Malora says as she gives him six lumps of spearmint, doubting that even these will be enough to sweeten his rancid breath. Max then gallantly moves aside to let each of his ladies have some. “The
centaurs are right, Max. You really are noble,” Malora tells him.

A bright bay with two white feet and a blaze, Bolt is an Athabanshee mare from the far-off deserts of the Sha Haro. Bolt once belonged to Anders Thunderheart, the Flatlander who heads up what was, until Malora’s victory, the stable with the longest Hippodrome winning streak in Mount Kheiron’s history. Dividing up the last of her stash of Maxes among the three horses, she climbs down from the fence and makes her way toward the lantern burning at the entrance to her tent.

The house the Apex is building for Malora is shrouded in darkness. She has not kept track of its progress, trusting the work to the finest builders in Mount Kheiron. Malora finds the idea of anyone building her a house embarrassing. She would be just as happy to stay in the tent, but the Apex will not hear of Malora Victorious sleeping outdoors and, as Honus has counseled her, one doesn’t turn down a gift from the Apex.

Malora looks around for West, her chief wrangler. By the time she gets back from the shop, he and his crew of Twani have already watered and fed the horses. She wonders where West is. He is usually here to greet her with a full report on the horses, along with a fleece robe and a cake of soap. Not only does she miss Honus, but she also misses his bathtub, the only one in Mount Kheiron. Cold river water is a poor substitute, but she won’t let West rig a shower with heated water for her, however often he has begged her to let him. If the river is good enough for her horses, it will serve her as well.

“West!” she calls out.

The sound of a familiar high-pitched giggle comes from the direction of the darkened construction site, followed by the lilting notes of Honus’s pipe. Suddenly, the house leaps into lantern light as her friends come pouring out the front door, across the portico, and down the wide steps toward her.

“Surprise, my friend!” Orion Silvermane calls out, grinning.

Honus takes the pipe from his lips and beams. “Welcome to your new home!”

“I hope we didn’t startle you, boss,” West says, with a bashful swipe of his paw over his head.

“Didn’t I say you had nothing to worry about, little brother?” Theon says. “Zephele kept your secret.”

Zephele catches Malora’s eye and winks. She has succeeded in keeping the bigger secret—that Malora’s house is ready for her to move into—and about this Malora has no need to act surprised.

With Zephele at one elbow and Orion at the other, Malora finds herself being ushered up the wide, centaur-friendly steps and under the generous portico. The house is small only by centaurean standards. By human standards, it is bigger than the home she shared with her parents in the Settlement. Where that house had been made of baked clay with skins
covering the entryways, this one is built of stout timbers, with a thatched roof and wide hinged doors flanked by arched windows overlooking the paddocks. On the tiled portico, there are three chairs, for her and Honus and West, and benches stout enough to accommodate her centaur guests. Inside, there is a shelf for her books, a scrivening desk beneath one window, and a large table beneath the other. Malora sees that the table is already set for the evening meal.

In a daze, she walks through a wide archway into the separate sleeping chamber, which occupies the rear half of the house. There is the bed that the Apex had commissioned for Honus, with its cloud-soft mattress and its star-spangled canopy. It has a new coverlet made of patches of many different colors and patterns.

Recognizing the style behind the rainbow coverlet, Malora turns to Theon. “Thank you,” she says.

Theon smiles. His gray eyes, so like his mother’s, gleam with pride. “It’s a bit flamboyant, I know, but I hope you like it all the same. I pieced it together from remnants of fabrics I have woven over the years. It was Zephele’s idea. I was going to weave you something with a large rearing horse on it, but Zephie says you have a sufficiency of
real
horses rearing up in your life and to adhere to an abstract pattern. I hope it won’t keep you awake at night.”