Wonder Light

by R. R. Russell

  The wind had picked up, thinning out the fog, and it blew into the stable, damp and chill.

  Was she going to get Mr. Murley and his gun? What if that was the wild boy coming through the gate? What if Mr. Murley shot him? But why would he bother with the gate? He’d only opened it last time for Mystery, probably because she was too heavy with her foal to jump the fence like his stallion. What if it was someone else? Surely the wild boy wasn’t alone on the island.

  Twig turned her attention from the dark square of night at the end of the stable aisle to Mystery. Twig didn’t move; she tried to become a part of the wall. Mystery let out a long breath, and a pair of pale forelegs emerged from her body. A head, then the foal’s entire body slipped out, just like that.

  Twig’s hands trembled. It is a miracle! she wanted to shout to Mrs. Murley when she saw the foal raise its head. It is!

  Mystery licked the foal clean, though it seemed to take all her energy to do so. There was a growing sort of hollow darkness in the pools of Mystery’s eyes that made Twig’s throat ache. But the foal turned its head toward Twig. Its mane was more a pale silver than its mother’s white, and its forelock curled around a strange, white nub. Something left from the birth? A deformity? Twig leaned closer—too close for Mystery’s comfort.

  Mystery snorted at her, and Twig jumped back and met those quicksilver eyes, and that was when she saw it: the horn emerging from Mystery’s head. It slid out slowly, bit by bit, parting her forelock. Twig’s mind stumbled over the word just as her feet stumbled back another step—unicorn. What other word was there for it? For a horse, white as moonlight, with mysterious pools for eyes, with the nimble cloven hooves of a deer—and now, with a lone, spiraling silvery-white horn? Could the foal’s little nub be the brand-new baby beginnings of its own horn?

  A quiet footfall in the silence, behind Twig. Too intentionally quiet to be one of the Murleys. Slowly, breath held, Twig turned away from Mystery and her foal.

  There, with the night wind whipping his cloak out around him so that his slight frame seemed to fill the entire aisle, was the wild boy.

  Chapter 13

  There was no mistiness to the wild boy. It had been mere fog, not ghostliness, in those glimpses Twig had caught before; it had belonged to the forest and to the night, not to him. The only wisping about the boy himself was his swiftness, his stealth. That was all his.

  He was just a boy, not much older than Twig, but with his light brown hair and eyes that nearly matched, he looked as though he could have come right out of the earth; he was so alive and so solid, smelling of sweat and cedar and rain. How could she have ever mistaken him for a phantom?

  He noticed Twig and his eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in confusion. He hesitated a split second, like he knew he ought to run, and she realized he’d made the noise with the gate on purpose, to draw whoever was in the stable out; he hadn’t counted on her being in here.

  He gave Twig a fearful but determined look and brushed right past her as though he owned the place. Twig noted a bundle of sticks strapped to the boy’s back, with white feathers secured to the ends. A bow slung next to them confirmed that they were arrows.

  “Look what you have here, girl. A little filly.” There was a slight lilting to his speech, something barely discernible and almost musical.

  As he knelt next to the newborn, a leather sheath about a foot-and-a-half long stuck out from his hip. Too big to contain merely a hunting knife, it could only be a sword.

  The boy spoke soothingly, but also with a clip of urgency, a quake of fear he couldn’t entirely conceal. “She’ll make us a fine mare, will she not, Wind Catcher?” He lay his cheek on Mystery’s neck and rubbed his hand over her trembling muscles in slow, sure circles, though his eyes kept flicking to Twig and to the open stable door at the end of the aisle.

  The worry lines above Mystery’s eyes deepened. She whinnied, high and thin, then moaned. The ponies’ voices formed a chaotic chorus of despair. The boy buried his face in the mare’s mane. Twig strained to make out what he said. Something like, “He cannot give up. Not now.”

  “What’s happening?” Twig pushed past the absolute strangeness of speaking to this boy who wasn’t supposed to exist, this boy whose identity was somehow entwined with these mystery creatures who absolutely couldn’t exist.

  The boy looked up at Twig and that wildness was back in his eyes. He rose, and the wind caught his cloak again and whipped tangles of Twig’s hair into her face so that she had to hold it back with both hands to see. The filly made a pitiful cry and groped at the bedding with delicate cloven hooves. Mystery’s horn retracted a bit, then extended again, then retracted nearly all the way.

  Mystery gave a sudden sniff-snort. She scrambled up, legs wobbling, eyes glaring at the empty aisle with desperate determination.

  “No.” The boy turned back to Mystery. “Don’t!”

  When the creature tipped her sharp horn forward and lunged out of the stall, the boy jumped back in alarm. He ran after her as she bolted out of the stable, and without thinking, Twig followed. The mare collapsed midway across the stable yard, and Twig stopped short.

  “No! No!” Tears streamed down the wild boy’s face. He crumpled to his knees, and his cloak spilled onto the sodden grass around him, utterly limp, no longer buoyed by the wind.

  The faintest of shivers rippled over the mystery mare’s body. The boy put his palm on the point of her partially extended horn and pressed it down with a shuddery sob, until it disappeared into the thick silk of her forelock.

  A howl cut through the fog, and Twig ran for the stable. But the boy didn’t run. He shouted a curse at the trees, said something about night, something about a dagger.

  Twig stopped. She couldn’t leave him out there all alone. But what could she do? She pressed herself against the outside stable wall, chest heaving. Please, God, she prayed. She hadn’t prayed since she was six years old. No one had seemed to listen then, and probably no one was listening now, but her heart cried out anyway. Don’t let Mystery die. Don’t let those things get us. Make everything right. If you’re good, if you’re God, make it all right.

  Tears blurred her vision, and the fog gathered thicker around the stable yard. She thought she heard hoofs galloping swiftly over the ground. She lowered her hands and blinked through the blobs of light that had formed from rubbing her eyes too hard, and tried to understand the shifting mist. Her heart skipped a beat. Some of the mist seemed to take on a horselike shape, pale and lithe and quick—just a glimpse, an impression of leaping away.

  Twig searched the mist but couldn’t spot Mystery or the boy. She eased back into the stable and waited by the door, wanting to shut it but afraid for the boy, that he might need to run back inside.

  When the boy appeared in the stable doorway, he didn’t run. He paused and grabbed a white-knuckled fistful of cloak and wiped his face, and then he looked right at Twig and came in. He was shaking violently, uncontrollably. He clutched his cloak around him, against the weather and the fear, so that Twig wanted to offer him her shell.

  “You cannot tell anyone,” he said hoarsely.

  Twig shook her head. “I don’t tell people things,” she said, “just to tell people things.”

  He regarded her for a moment, then gave her a nod of acceptance.

  “She was a unicorn,” Twig whispered. “And now she’s…”

  She hadn’t expected a reply, but the wild boy turned his eyes on her, eyes burning with sharp, fresh grief, and he said, “Gone! She’s not the only one. And if you don’t take care of her”—he pointed at the filly—“it will all be for nothing.”

  “Me?”

  “She trusted you. Her filly will too.”

  “But—”

  He shook his head sharply. Before Twig could ask what he meant and who he was and what was going on, an eerie horse howl blew into the stable on the tail of a vicious
, wet whip of wind. The boy spun on his heel and sprinted out of the stable, leaving Twig standing there in the aisle with the wakeful ponies squealing and tossing their heads on either side and the filly plaintively crying out behind her.

  Twig hurried back to the stall, where the filly lay with her spindly forelegs bent up as though she had tried to use them to rise, to do something, even in her innocence and confusion. She looked at Twig with big, lonely quicksilver eyes just like Mystery’s. But beside her, there was nothing but an impression in the bedding and the mess from the birth. Her mother’s place was empty. Mystery was gone.

  What was she going to tell Mrs. Murley about that? Mystery’s little filly was still here, making it impossible for any of them to lie to themselves about Mystery’s existence, to shove her into a distant corner of memory, into the cobweb of things too difficult to understand. Worse, the filly boasted her own little bit of a unicorn horn! Twig supposed it would grow as she grew, much as a deer’s antlers grew as it matured. There would be no ignoring that.

  Quickly, Twig crouched beside the filly. She touched her fingertip to the little horn nub. She pressed it gently, and it went down, just as Mystery’s had when the wild boy had done the same. The filly laid her head in Twig’s lap. Twig let her nuzzle her hand, and she rubbed her neck the way the wild boy had rubbed Mystery’s, but she didn’t tell her that everything was going to be all right, because there were things howling outside, and she didn’t know. She just didn’t know.

  Mrs. Murley rushed into the stable. “I’m sorry I took so long. Casey woke up, and then Mandy and Regina. I just got them settled.” She stopped short at the open stall door. “Twig? She’s foaled!” Then, searching the stall and after that the stable behind her, she asked, “Where is Mystery?”

  Twig licked her dry lips. She shook her head. “She’s gone. I don’t know. She’s just—gone.”

  “Well, she can’t have gone far, just after foaling. But why would she leave her little filly? It’s just not right.”

  Twig burned to defend the mare. She wouldn’t have left her filly if she’d had any choice. That had been clear in her final cries, her last efforts to face the threat in the woods, to protect her from it.

  “Mr. Murley’s outside, checking the yard. He’s sure he latched that gate, but of course there’s no sign of anyone—all the girls are in their beds and—I’ll tell him she’s missing, and then I’ll be right back to have a better look at this little girl.”

  After Mrs. Murley ran back out, Twig got a blanket from the tack room. The filly would be cold without her mother, all alone in a great big stall. She wrapped her up, and then she settled against the inside wall of the stall and she hugged her knees to her chest and she tucked her face between her knees and she let herself cry, just for a little bit.

  Twig heard Mrs. Murley coming back in, and she rubbed her face on her knees and let her hair hang in her eyes to hide their puffiness.

  Mrs. Murley knelt beside the filly. “Mr. Murley’s looking for Mystery. She’s got to be in the yard or the pastures somewhere. Poor little girl. I see you’ve got her nice and warm.”

  Twig didn’t even try to speak around the lump in her throat. Mystery wasn’t here to look after her little girl. And according to the wild boy, that meant Twig was going to have to do it. But what exactly did that mean? Feed her? Groom her? And—

  Another howl rattled the night. Mrs. Murley froze for a second, then brushed it off. But Twig pushed herself up and stared into the darkness beyond the open stable doors.

  She ran down the aisle and a few strides beyond, out into that darkness. She screamed, “You can’t have her! You can’t!” and she grabbed the stable doors and slammed them shut, first one and then the other.

  She pressed against the doors, ready to put everything she had into holding them shut against whatever was out there in the deep dark of Lonehorn Island, howling and hunting the bleating little scrap of moonbeam, the silver-white filly. Her mother was more than vanished; she was gone, gone with a heavy certainty that coated Twig’s heart. But the filly was alive, a beautiful, wild, wonderful, little light. And in that moment, Twig was just as certain she’d do anything to keep it that way.

  Chapter 14

  Twig stood at the stable door until Mrs. Murley came up behind her and pulled her shoulders to her chest and hugged her. She steered Twig back to the stall. Twig was sitting there with the filly’s head in her lap when Mr. Murley came in, all wind- and sleep-rumpled.

  He leaned into the stall. “So this is our new arrival. What a pretty little filly.” Mrs. Murley rose, and he gave her a quick hug. “There’s no sign of Mystery, and the fences are all undamaged.”

  “It’s dark. I’m sure we’ll find her in the morning.”

  Twig spoke up. She nodded at the filly. “I think she’s hungry.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Mr. Murley said. “Hungry and confused.”

  Mrs. Murley pulled her collar up and put her hands in her pockets. “I’ll be right back.”

  She returned a few minutes later with a bowl of milk and a rag. “Hold her head in your lap, Twig, and we’ll see if we can get her to eat. Come on, wild one. I know it’s not what you want, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  Twig dipped the rag in the milk herself and offered it to the filly.

  “What should we call our little wild one?”

  “Wild one,” Twig repeated absently, thinking more of the boy now than the filly. Who had he run to? Who would he tell about what had happened to Mystery? Twig realized she was no longer wondering who else was out there for her own curiosity, even for her own safety—she was wondering for the boy. The boy whose fear and grief had been every bit as real as his body once he came out of the shadows and stood in the faint glow of the dimmed stable lights.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Murley said, “Wild One. Let’s call her Wild One.”

  But Twig’s heart said, No, she’s a silver-white sliver of light in the darkest night. “She should have Light in her name.”

  Mrs. Murley smiled. “Wild Light, then. What a beautiful name for our little filly.”

  “I’ll have to go to the vet in the morning to get some supplies so we can feed her,” Mr. Murley said.

  Twig stopped, letting the rag drip down the front of her jacket. The filly nuzzled the stream of milk. “You can’t let the vet see her.”

  Mr. Murley ran a finger over one of Wild Light’s little cloven hooves. “No, I suppose we can’t. Twig…”

  He didn’t say anything more, but his eyes said, There’s more, isn’t there? More that you know.

  ***

  Twig heard Mrs. Murley whispering to Casey to let her sleep. The memory of what had happened before Mrs. Murley ushered her to bed in the still-dark hours of the morning, assuring her that Mr. Murley would watch Wild Light, filtered through Twig’s fatigue. She threw the covers off and shrugged away Mrs. Murley’s protests. Twig slipped into her old shoes rather than taking the time to fumble with her boots, and followed the girls to the stable for early morning chores.

  The girls were all murmuring about the filly and about Mystery’s disappearance. Twig was quiet as she followed Casey’s directions and fed Rain Cloud. She peeked at Wild Light real quick, but there were too many people poking around her and Mr. Murley, asking too many questions.

  With the ponies fed, Mr. Murley shooed the girls out of the stable. Twig was the last one out, and she lingered on the path, gazing at the woods. How safe was the little filly, even in the daylight?

  At the edge of the pasture beyond the stable yard, movement flickered in the trees—movement that seemed to want her attention just as much as it wanted to be hidden. Movement that now made her want to stay, just as much as yesterday it had made her want to run. The wild boy.

  “Come on, Twig,” Taylor called as Twig drifted closer to the pasture.

  Twig shoved her hands in her pockets and tippe
d her head to the morning sky, trying to give the impression that she was just enjoying having a look at the day wakening over the island.

  “It’s breakfast,” Casey added with a frown.

  “Just a minute.”

  Taylor sighed and took Casey’s hand and tugged her toward the house. When they were far enough away, Twig ran for the pasture gate, and darted across the wet grass and behind one of the pony shelters. She stepped up to the fence line and stood still and waited. The boy’s face emerged.

  “The filly,” he whispered. His eyes, reddened and shadowed, were full of questions and fear.

  “She’s okay.” Twig twisted her toe in the damp earth. “She’s beautiful.”

  The boy smiled a small, sad, longing smile.

  Twig looked down uncomfortably, and that was when she saw his hands. “What happened to you?”

  He held out his muddied, bloodied hands, as if noticing them for the first time. His face got hard, then crumpled. He crossed his arms, stuffing his dirty, trembling hands under his cloak.

  “They’re after you, aren’t they?” She nodded toward the woods behind him.

  Twig took his silence for a yes. She wanted to grab his cloak and take him into the house and feed him hot chocolate and pancakes with apple cider syrup.

  “I thought you were with them at first,” she said.

  “Not now. But…it’s complicated.”

  “You can tell me. Maybe I can help.” What had possessed her to say that? What could she do?

  He shook his head, so she shifted back to something more pleasant. “We named the filly Wild Light.”

  “A good name for such a wonder.”

  “A wonder?” Twig recalled something she’d read, a line about great signs and wonders. “You mean like a miracle?”

  “Is that what you call it here?”

  Twig shook her head. “I’d call a unicorn magic, here or anywhere else.”