All the King's Horses (7 page)

Finally, Grandpa beckoned us over to where he was. ‘Now, you’re going to take the little poles first – see there? Then the bricks. Then the brush.’ He went on through six jumps, and I sat there, feeling my heart bang-bang-bang and wondering how I’d ever manage Fay, who got pretty excited when we jumped just two little poles.

Grandpa looked at me. ‘Sure and you’re not frightened, a fine jumper like you?’

‘Of course not!’ I said. And to prove it, I set Fay off at a trot towards the first jump, without even making a circle first. We made it over fine, but then Fay realized there were going to be more jumps, and she took off. I tried to pull her down, but she shook her head back and forth and tore on to the bricks, which seemed to grow as we got closer …

‘Hold it!’ called Grandpa after we’d shot over it. ‘That’ll never do!’

Fay slowed down when she heard his voice, and I trotted her over to him.

Grandpa wiped my eyes with his red bandana. ‘Tell me, what do I do when a horse goes too strong over jumps, not being able to hold him with only one good hand?’

‘I don’t know …’ I sniffled. But then I realized I did. ‘Oh. Is that when you sing?’

‘That’s m’girl. And how fast do I sing?’

I thought about it. ‘Sort of slowly, like a collected canter.’

He thumped me on the shoulder. ‘Now didn’t I tell you,’ he said to the air, ‘that this is the smartest six-year-old gal that ever rode a horse? You’ve hit right on it – you sing at the speed you want the horse to go. And she will.’

I looked sideways at Fay’s determined pony face. ‘You sure?’

‘Find out for yourself,’ he said. ‘I’ll sing with you, to start. Get a canter, now.’

I made a circle at a trot, then asked for a canter. Behind me, Grandpa started up:

When Irish eyes are smilin
’

Sure ’tis like a lark in spring …

There was no way you could
NOT
sing when Grandpa sang that, even when you were frozen
solid
with fear, so I joined in. My voice squeaked, but Fay must have heard it, because she settled into a nice canter, and we went over the first jump so smoothly I hardly felt it.

In the lilt of Irish laughter

You can hear the angels sing …

We took the second jump just right, and the third, and the fourth … and suddenly there was just the song, and Fay and me jumping fences in some green and wonderful place that went on and on, knowing we could jump for ever without getting hurt or scared.

When Irish eyes are happy
,

All the world is bright and gay
.

And when Irish eyes are smilin
’

Sure they’ll steal your heart away!

‘Very nice,’ said a dry voice from somewhere very near.

I opened my eyes and saw people standing by my bed, which meant I’d woken everybody up again by singing in my sleep. ‘I’m sorry, Mom. Sorry, Colin. Didn’t mean to—’ Then I realized it wasn’t Mom and Colin; there were three of them, one very tall, and two about my height.
They
were wearing cloaks with hoods, and the stuff around their eyes lit the room with a strange orange glow. I dived back under my covers, hoping I was still dreaming.

‘Are you afraid, Child of Lugh?’ said Cathbad’s voice. ‘I have brought two minions to help you continue your mission, but if you have decided that the dangers—’

‘—of course I’m not afraid!’ I said, jumping up and groping for my glasses. ‘Should I get dressed?’

‘It will make no difference,’ said Cathbad. ‘You will be out with night-elves, so you will have to clothe yourself in many different shapes.’

I pulled on my sweatshirt and made a sloppy pony-tail with the first rubber band my hand fell on. ‘I’ll have to what?’

One of the night-elves laughed. ‘You’ll have to do what we do. Watch.’ Suddenly, there wasn’t an elf where he was standing, but a bush. Then the bush changed into a cow, which got halfway changed into an elephant … the floor started to creak, and Cathbad said something in a language I couldn’t understand. The cow-elephant changed back into the elf.

‘Let’s go and find your brother,’ said Cathbad, stretching out his hand.

When I took it, the room suddenly got larger,
and
I was flying with three bugs, out my door and past the hall nightlight, which seemed much more beautiful and interesting than it ever had before. When we got to Colin’s door, we landed and crawled underneath it; then I was standing by his bed between the elves. One of them took my hand in his left hand and touched Colin’s shoulder with his right. All of a sudden, I could see Colin’s dream – not the way you see things in a movie, but in my head, as if I were dreaming, too.

Colin and I were in our car, with me in the front passenger seat and him in the back, which meant I’d won the toss. We started down a steep hill, with a curve by a tree – and he suddenly realized he was supposed to be driving. He leaned over the front seat and turned the wheel so we missed the tree, but we kept going down, and his feet were still in the back, so he couldn’t reach the brakes. He yanked on the hand-brake, but nothing happened, and we shot towards a brick wall, going faster and faster … the dream popped, and Colin turned over and hit out at the elf next to me.

‘Easy there, m’lad,’ said the elf, backing away.

Colin blinked at us in the light from the street lamp outside. ‘Sarah, is that you?’

‘I think so,’ I said, looking down – and so far
as
I could see, it was me, exactly as I’d been in my room. ‘Cathbad is here with two night-elves.’

‘Great,’ he muttered sleepily, grabbing his sweatshirt. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To the world of visions, eventually,’ said Cathbad. ‘I will not be with you; I have a ceremony to attend to. But the elves will accompany you. This one is Hob, and this one is Lob.’

‘Glad to meet you,’ we said, shaking hands. As soon as our fingers touched theirs, all four of us slipped through the crack at the side of Colin’s window and spun down into a pile of leaves. We lay there a moment, quivering; then a big puff of wind sent us whirling around the streetlight and spinning up over the warehouses. On the far side of the tracks, it dropped us, and we went scuttling through the used-car lots into a street filled with tumble-down houses, circled one of them a couple of times, and fluttered down lightly on its porch.

‘All right, little ones,’ said Hob’s voice. ‘Through the keyhole – here we go.’

Something pulled me up, and a tunnel whizzed by on all sides of me … then a long, strange-smelling hall tilted a few feet below me, then I zipped through another tunnel … and when I caught my breath, I was standing next to
Colin
in the shadows of a room lit by a TV and nothing else. It was supposed to be a living room, I think, but it was so full of unsorted laundry, half-eaten TV dinners, soda cans, bottles, and other junk, that you could hardly tell.

‘Sorry to be so quick,’ said Hob, ‘but I didn’t want to run into him.’

‘Her,’ corrected Colin, pointing to a woman asleep on the couch.

Hob looked at Lob, and they both smiled – not very nicely. ‘Oh, she’s no problem,’ he said. ‘State she’s in, she wouldn’t see us even if we were visible. No, it’s him that’s the—’

The door to the living room slammed back against the wall. Colin and I shrank into the corner as a man stumbled through it. The woman woke up and gave him a dirty look.

‘Shut it, can’t you?’

The man slammed the door shut. ‘The light’s on upstairs. Where’ve you been?’

‘Where’ve
you
been, is more like it?’ she said. ‘And where did you get the money to go drinking?’

‘From a cash register.’

‘Yeah? Whose?’

The man started up the creaking staircase without answering. That made her angry, and I thought she was going to run after him, but after
she
sat up, all she did was feel around the floor for the glass by the leg of the coffee table. When she found it, she pressed it against her forehead and shut her eyes.

Colin looked at me, and I knew what he was thinking, but Lob just laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’d never show visions like hers to beginners. We’re going upstairs. Slowly, now.’

He led the way, and we followed. About halfway up, we saw the man standing in an open doorway, huge and black against the light that came from inside.

‘Now, look,’ he said. ‘We talked it over. We agreed. Supper, homework, bed. No reading on school nights – right?’

If there was an answer, we couldn’t hear it.

‘So what are you doing?’ he demanded.

This time, I was sure there was no answer. How could there be? Questions like that aren’t really questions; they’re accusations with a question-mark at the end.

The man took a step further into the room and held out his hand. Somebody I couldn’t see slowly held out a book and whispered, ‘Don’t tear it up. Please. It’s from the library.’

The man looked at it foggily, then threw it on the floor and stumbled forward, grabbing for something. There was a yanking noise, and the
light
went out. A moment later, the man came out, carrying a bedside lamp.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That takes care of it.’ He stood there a minute longer with his free hand on the jamb and his head hanging down; then he shuffled through another door, and we heard the sort of muffled thump a bed makes when somebody lands on it hard.

Hob listened for a couple of minutes, then led the way up the rest of the stairs and into the little room. There wasn’t much in it: a bed, a little table (probably for the lamp), and a desk and chair under the dirty window. I expected the kid in there to be under the covers, crying, but the bed was empty. A girl was sitting cross-legged on the desk, shivering. Something about the way she looked out at the clouds that were blowing across the half-moon – watching them, but not seeing them – seemed awfully familiar.

‘Oh!’ I whispered suddenly. ‘It’s Tiffany!’ And I was just thinking, poor Tiffany – she lives
here
? when the elves each took our right hands in their right hands and touched Tiffany with their lefts. Suddenly there was light everywhere, as late afternoon sun shone on a deep green field with ancient trees standing here and there. The field was filled with horses – chestnuts, greys, blacks, bays – all with perfectly groomed, shining coats.
In
the middle of the herd stood Tiffany, patting mares, stroking little foals, talking, talking, talking to them all in the kind of murmur Grandpa used to use. They nuzzled her dark, curly hair and rubbed their heads against her shoulder, looking perfectly happy. As Tiffany patted them, I caught a glimpse of her face, and I thought, that’s funny, I never noticed Tiffany was so pretty …
Wham
. I was back in the room again, with lights blinking dizzily in my head the way they do when you stand up too fast. For a second, I couldn’t figure out what had happened; then I felt cheated, because Tiffany was still in her wonderful daydream, and Colin was there, too, because Lob was still connecting him, but Hob had dropped me. I was just about to grab his hand – I really wanted to know where Tiffany was – when he raised it and shook his fist.

‘Daydreams!’ he hissed. ‘Completely out of our area! And on top of it all –
us
, missing the ceremony!’

‘Outrageous, that’s what it is,’ said Lob, dropping Colin’s hand and raising both his fists. ‘Treat us like dogs, They do.’

Next to me, Colin shook his head, and I steadied him as he staggered. ‘Hey,’ he muttered, ‘it’s that mousy girl in your class, isn’t it? I didn’t know she liked horses!’

‘Sh!’ I whispered, pointing to the elves. ‘Something’s up. Look zonked and listen.’

That wasn’t hard; the elves were so excited it surprised me that Tiffany couldn’t feel them.

‘But the little ones?’ said Hob. ‘We can’t
leave
them. And mortals at a ceremony—!’

‘—They’re under Protection. Doesn’t that mean they’re safe in Faerie, for as long as their mission lasts?’

‘Surely. But remember what Cathbad said? Short journeys. A little way at a—’

‘That’s not
our
idea!’ blurted Colin.

The elves whirled around, smiling elvish smiles I didn’t like, but nothing stops Colin once he gets going. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Don’t think for a
minute
we wanted short journeys. We accepted them because that’s all Cathbad would offer, but we want to go to Faerie!’

Lob cocked an eyebrow over his orange-glowing eye. ‘Do you, now?’

He looked dangerous; but he also looked interested. Suddenly, I had an inspiration. ‘It’s not just that we
want
to go,’ I said. ‘It’s the Rules. They’re more powerful than Cathbad, aren’t they?’

‘To be sure,’ said Hob, looking shocked that somebody would ask.

‘Well then,’ I said. ‘Don’t you see what that
means?
The Rules say you faeries have to help us with our mission, and our mission is to go to Faerie! So if you take us there, you’re obeying the Rules even if you’re disobeying Cathbad.’

The elves’ eyes glowed fiercely as they looked at each other – so fiercely that they lit the room. On the desk, Tiffany stirred a little and looked around.

‘Ach!’ muttered Lob. ‘She’ll be seeing us soon if we’re not off.’

‘Quickly, then,’ said Lob. They pulled handkerchiefs out of their pockets and stepped towards us, leering. ‘We’ll have to take you by our route, so just for safety’s sake—’

‘Hey!’ said Colin, hitting out at Hob. ‘You don’t have to tie us!’

But the elves grew half-way to the ceiling, and before we could argue or struggle any more, they’d blindfolded us. A moment later, we were whooshing through another tunnel, only this one felt much larger than a keyhole, and in spite of the cloth over my ears, I could hear it was filled with strange noises: the roar of trucks on a faraway road, the clickety-click of a night train, the barking of dogs, the echo of voices drifting in from the street. They were such sleepy sounds that I thought maybe I was dreaming after all … but then we landed with a thump that
convinced
me I was awake. I slipped the blindfold off and straightened my glasses, looking around dizzily.