The Horses of Winter: A Short Christmas Novella

  The Horses of Winter

  Genevieve Mckay

  Copyright©2017 Genevieve Mckay.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Acknowledgments

  Infinite gratitude to the many horses in my life that have shaped me, both as a rider and as a person; I hope I repaid you many times over in carrots.

  The horses of winter are at my cabin door

  Gaunt-ribbed, tangle-maned

  They paw the frozen forest floor.

  -Elliot Lawson

  “Sarah, there’s a unicorn in Cecily’s greenhouse!”

  Amy stood panting in the doorway, the wild December wind tearing at her new scarf and winter coat. Her hat was gone and blonde curls whipped around her face in a tangled halo.

  “Shut the door,” I said automatically, dropping my gaze back to the poem I’d been working on. I edged closer toward the stone hearth and the crackling fire. “You’ll let the heat out.”

  The ever-present wind nipped at my cheeks and I nudged the thick, scratchy blanket tighter around my shoulders. The big farmhouse was always drafty and today the only warm spot seemed to be practically inside the dancing flames themselves.

  “But, Sarah…” Amy’s voice pitched sharply upward, “it’s a real live unicorn.”

  “Do you want Cecily to kick us out before Christmas?” I said without looking up. “Then shut the door.”

  Amy heaved a big sigh and I heard her turn to wrestle the door closed with a reluctant thud. She was silent for approximately three seconds before she began bouncing up and down on the welcome mat again, working herself up.

  “Sarah,” she begged, “could you puh-lease come and see the unicorn? I promise you it’s not pretend.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said, slamming my book shut. Amy was clearly not going to give this up and let me work in peace. My homework wasn’t going well anyway. I was supposed to pull a poem apart and write an analysis for my creative writing class. It should have been easy but, on a whim, I’d picked one of Dad’s old poems, The Horses of Winter, and it wasn’t giving up its secrets easily.

  I stood to stretch my cramped muscles, then carefully folded the blanket into a precise square and set it neatly at one end of the sagging couch. “I’ll come outside with you for just a few minutes, but then we have to help get dinner ready. Okay?”

  Amy danced up and down and flung open the front door again so hard that it hit the wall with a bang, making the window pane rattle. “Come on!” she cried, plunging into the knee-high snow, not even caring that she would be a soaking wet mess when it melted.

  Her boots had dropped chunks of dirty snow inside the door. I used my bare fingers to toss them outside and then prodded the watery trail left on the wood floor with my sock, wondering if I should go get a dish towel or something to dry it with. We hadn’t lived here long enough to learn the rules, and while our foster mom, Cecily, seemed nice, she was also a little strange. And she hadn’t wanted to take us in a month before Christmas; not at all. It was more important than ever that we, or at least Amy, stay on our best behaviour.

  I’ll leave it until we get back, I decided, carefully slipping on my new blue coat and matching gloves and scarf. We’ll just make more of a mess when we come back in.

  The coat was warm and puffy, wrapping me instantly in a protective cocoon. I felt a mixture of guilt and delight every single time I put the thing on. Outdoor wear wasn’t cheap, especially when it was brand new and not from the thrift store. We’d always lived closer to the ocean so we’d hardly needed winter clothes before, but Cecily’s farmhouse sat right up against the mountains where cold air loaded with snow swooped down from the peak to poke constantly at us with sharp fingers. That whole first week had been almost unbearable; we’d stayed holed up in the house with our teeth chattering and finally, Cecily had taken us shopping.

  “Amy, you forgot your gloves,” I called into the swirling snow, catching sight of her mitts balled up in a corner by the front door. There was no answer.

  I pocketed the gloves, pulled on my boots, and followed my sister’s tiny boot tracks through the rapidly falling snow. The prints didn’t go in a straight line. Every few feet they’d leap off to the side of the path or disappear altogether. Here, a tiny snowman abandoned without a head; there, a flock of snow angels side by side in the snow. Amy was a sparrow flitting from one idea to the next.

  I carefully pushed open the greenhouse door and peeked inside. “Amy?”

  It was warmer inside and I shrugged back my hood so I could get a better look around.

  The greenhouse looked like a cross between a barn and a big tent. The ceiling wasn’t solid; it was covered in plastic, too thick to see out of, but thin enough to let the faint winter light stream in. The center was full of long, wooden tables piled with empty pots and dried up, spilled soil. Cecily had told us she started her young plants here in early spring; they were kept safe until they were strong enough to go outside. Her eyes had lit up when she’d described it, all green and fragrant and full of young, living things. It made me wish that I could be around long enough to see it in action. At least Amy had a chance of seeing it.

  When I’m older, I reminded myself, I’ll have a small house just big enough for me and Amy and I’ll have a garden of my own that nobody can take away.

  “Amy?” I called again, my new boots crunching across some dried up, discarded stalks that had been knocked to the floor. A few broken pots lay scattered beside them as if this end of the table had been swept clean, tumbling half its contents. There was a strong smell in the air, too; familiar and not entirely unpleasant, but I couldn’t place it. “Where are you?”

  “Over here,” came my sister’s despondent voice. “He’s gone.”

  I glanced nervously back at the closed door, feeling like a criminal even though Cecily had told us we were free to explore the property as much as we liked. That didn’t necessarily mean we could break into her greenhouse and go poking around, though. People were funny sometimes and there were invisible rules that could be broken without you even noticing. All it would take was one wrong move, one line crossed, and you could be sent away again.

  “Amy?” I called, making my voice sound like Mom’s used to when she was serious. “Tell me where you are.”

  “Over here.”

  I peered around the last table to see my little sister hunched down against the wall, knees pulled tight up against her chest.

  “For heavens’ sake,” I said, kneeling beside her. “What’s the matter?”

  I didn’t really need her to tell me, though; this was pure Amy all over. She’d get excited over an idea or story she’d dreamed up in her imagination, and then there’d be tears when she came crashing down to earth again.

  “No unicorn, huh?” I said kindly.

  “He’s gone,” she sniffled, “but he really was here. I wasn’t making it up this time. I promise. Please don’t get me in trouble.”

  “You’re not in trouble,” I said firmly, smoothing a tangle of hair behind her ear. Our last foster parents hadn’t liked Amy at all and had punished her for pretty much everything she did. Who grounds an eight-year-old child for making up imagina
ry stories? I’d watched her spirit wilt day by day until I’d decided it was time to go. It had taken me months to convince Dee to get us out of there, but I’d done it.

  “I believe you,” I said, even though I didn’t, and it was worth it to see her tear-stained face light up into a trembling smile. “Come on, let’s get warmed up and have dinner ready for Cecily. She’s in the studio and you know what that means.”

  Cecily was the most interesting foster parent we’d had so far. She didn’t go out to work; in the summer, she grew organic vegetables for the farmer’s market, and in the winter, she made the most beautiful pottery I’d ever seen. She made normal stuff like plates and mugs in all sorts of colours, but she also did these strange, abstract sculptures that she sold through a local gallery. She must have been pretty famous because she was always getting calls from people wanting to buy stuff from her.

  Cecily was nice enough when she was around, but often she’d stay holed up in her studio for hours at a time and when she came out she’d have this far-off dazed expression on her face as if she were thinking about something else entirely. She hadn’t even wanted to open the door when Dee had shown up with us out of the blue; she’d long forgotten that she’d signed up to be a foster parent at all.

  “I’m sorry, I’m too busy,” she’d called, peering at us through the window. “This is not a good time. Try again in Spring.”

  It had taken everything Dee had to persuade Cecily to take us in, but there was nowhere else for us to go and in the end, she’d let us stay.

  “There are his hoof prints,” Amy said, pointing at some deer tracks that led past the greenhouse to the woods. “I wonder why he went away. He said he wanted to meet you.”

  “Oh, he talked to you, did he?” I laughed, nudging her shoulder. “And why would he want to meet me?”

  I glanced down and froze, leaning forward so I could see the tracks better. There were dozens of deer living in the woods behind the empty barn. They tip-toed out early each morning, thin and nervous, long ears swiveling to catch any sign of danger, pawing holes in the thick snow on the barren hay fields to get at the grass beneath. I’d seen their tracks crisscrossing the entire property in their search for food, but these tracks were different. They were bigger and instead of pointy, cloven hooves they were oval shaped, the middle part printed with a heart-shaped “V.”

  “Hey, Amy, look at that. I think those are horse prints.”

  “Unicorn,” she corrected. “He was a white unicorn and he said his name was Sam.”

  “That’s a pretty plain name for a unicorn.” I raised an eyebrow at her. “Shouldn’t he be named Moonbeam Sprinkle Pants or something?”

  “Sarah,” Amy groaned. “You’re being crazy.”

  “That’s right, you’re having conversations with unicorns named Sam but I’m the crazy one,” I said, winking at her so she knew I wasn’t serious. Sometimes she took things way too literally.

  “Can we follow the tracks?” she said. “Puuhleease?”

  “Yeah.” I glanced back at the house. “For a bit, anyway. We have a few minutes to spare. Here, put your mitts on.”

  She stood still long enough for me to work the mittens down over each of her cold, wet hands, and then she spun away, racing across the snow in a lurching gait, following the horse prints up the little hill we’d sledded down yesterday. We hadn’t had a real sled of course but we’d done it anyway, sitting on slippery black garbage bags that rocketed us down the hill at top speed; better than any fancy store-bought toboggan.

  “I’m cantering!” she yelled back over her shoulder. “Like a unicorn.”

  “Okay,” I called out, “good job.”

  “Now I’m galloping!” she squealed, pushing herself harder until she inevitably tripped and face-planted halfway up the bank.

  I held my breath, waiting for the tears, but she was in a good mood and she merely started rolling backward; a snow-suit wrapped log propelling down the hill until she lay panting at my feet, eyes closed and cheeks pink with cold.

  “You okay?” I prodded her with my foot.

  “No,” she whispered, her head drooping to the side. She stuck her tongue out for full effect. “I’m dead and you’ll have to bury me.”

  She was pretending, caught up in some inner play, but this time it was too close to reality and I felt a shiver of fear run down my spine.

  “Come on.” I turned my back on her abruptly and headed off toward the woods. “You want to find your unicorn, don’t you?”

  “Sam,” she corrected, springing to her feet and trotting beside me. “He told me he had a longer name but it was too hard for me to say so he said to call him Sam.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, scanning the snow. “Look, he branched off this way.”

  We walked silently through the deepening snow, our breath coming in laboured puffs that grew worse the higher we climbed.

  We must be halfway through Cecily’s property by now. I knew she had sixty acres of land; there were the house and an old barn used for storage, the greenhouse, and Cecily’s studio. The rest was part pasture that she loaned out to a local farmer to hay, part woods and the garden, but there was no fence and it was impossible to know when her land stopped and the neighbours began.

  “Oh, no!” Amy sucked in her breath. “Blood.”

  The snow in front of us had been trampled in a huge circle, hoof prints marking the ground, but there were other flattened spaces where the animal had fallen hard. Splashes of blood were churned into the snow.

  “Don’t panic,” I said sharply, shooting her a look. The last thing I needed was for her to lose her marbles way out here. There was no way I wanted to carry her all that way back kicking and screaming. I crept forward, holding my breath until I stood in the center of the crime scene. So why did he stop here? I kicked into the snow. My foot met something hard and I plunged my arm deep into a drift, clearing a space until I uncovered the culprit. A rusty bale of barbed wire, the end snaking out under the snow.

  “Ah-ha,” I said, carefully holding up the coil of wire to show Amy, it had sharp knots woven in it every few inches that snagged at my gloves, leaving small pinprick marks. The animal must have walked into it and gotten caught somehow.

  “We have to help him.” Amy’s stood stiffly, arms held out to the side and her breath coming in the rapid gasps that meant she was close to a panic attack.

  “Right, but we have to stay calm. We know he got away, so that’s one good thing, and we know he can walk, so that’s a second good thing. Let’s follow his tracks a little further and if we don’t find him then we’ll run home and get Cecily. She can call the police or someone to come help him, okay?”

  Amy still looked like she would start wailing, but I turned my back on her again and marched away. “Hurry,” I said. “Sam needs us.”

  That did it. She plowed after me and didn’t say another word. We moved as fast as we could through the snow, half-running, following his tracks like hound dogs chasing prey. The blood wasn’t so bad now, but it hadn’t stopped, either. How long could he keep this up?

  Just as I was ready to give up, there he was in front of us. He stood with his head hung low, sides heaving, speckled grey coat splashed with red. He looked like a painting; red and grey contrasting perfectly in an awful sort of way. Despite his condition, he was magnificent. He reminded me of the poem I’d been working on, The Horses of Winter, about these wild spirit horses who used to come and ferry dying people away against their will. It wasn’t my favourite poem of Dad’s; it was kind of depressing and I didn’t like that he’d made the horses seem evil, but I could still hear his voice as he recited it, eyes lit up with the drama of it all. It was one of my favourite memories of him.

  “Sam!” Amy cried. I came to my senses and grabbed her jacket just as she sprang forward. The horse flung his head up and stumbled a few paces away, his eyes rimmed with white.

  “Don’t,” I said sternly, “you’ll scare him.”

  Her lower lip tremb
led, but she nodded. “Sorry. I want to help him.”

  “We’ll go up together, but very slowly so we don’t startle him. He must be terrified.”

  “Yeah,” she breathed. “It’s okay, Sam, we’re here to help. Good boy.”

  He lifted his head and flicked his ears in our direction. He had a leather halter on his head that had come half-loose and ridden up over one ear so it lay partly obscuring his eye.

  “Poor guy,” I crooned, adding my voice to Amy’s as we edged toward him, “poor horse, you just stand there and let us help you.”

  “Don’t call him a horse,” Amy whispered, “he’s a unicorn.”

  “Uh huh.” Up close he was huge, much bigger than any horse I’d even ridden, and built like a tank. I gingerly reached out to touch him with my gloved hand. He shuddered, but didn’t move; he was done running. I stroked his neck softly, wincing as I looked at the red smeared on his beautiful, white coat.

  Most of the damage was to his near front leg and chest; a hole gaped in the flesh of his upper leg, drenching his whole front end in a blanket of red. The other wounds looked pretty minor, but he’d have to be cleaned up before we could know for sure. He needed to get back home so we could call a vet.

  “We’ll have to wrap his leg,” I said, thinking quickly. “We can’t have it bleeding all the way home.”

  “We can use my scarf,” Amy said, sounding surprisingly calm. She moved to unravel it from her neck, but I laid a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “No, let’s use mine, just in case Cecily is mad that we got our new stuff all bloody. It’s better if she’s angry at me than you.”

  Amy frowned but didn’t argue. She watched as I gave the unresisting horse another pat and then wrapped the scarf around his leg as best as I could. I tried to be gentle, but it needed to be a bit tight to stay in place and he tossed his head when I made the last wrap.

  “Sorry, boy.” I reached up carefully and slid his halter strap back over his ear. There was a brass plate attached to the halter and I leaned down, squinting in the slanting light to read it. “Silmarillion”, I said, sounding the letters out. “Oh, that’s the name of a novel. What a funny name for a horse.”