Vayne’s eyes glowed with rage, but he stopped when Peregrine reared again, fire flaring off him. Spinning, she swung herself back into the saddle, horse and rider united once more. The voices of the damned rose: a hum of uncertainty, a reminder of choice.
“Peregrine and I are damned, but we’re not monsters.” She spun with Peregrine, addressing the other damned souls, knowing that Peregrine had Vayne fixed with his eagle stare. “We don’t have to be what he wants. Now that our chains are gone, we get the choice of the type of souls we want to be. We don’t have to be cruel.”
Another group moved in from the darkness, and Hennessy tensed. Ten more riders and mounts came into view, with Delia at their lead, clothed in a black jacket and riding pants. She levelled a shotgun at Vayne, her expression fierce. “Lady’s right. Y’all have a choice. Not all of you are monsters. Your time’s done.”
This time, the voices were audible. We’re done. The cloud began to thin—not like folks backing off, but like folks disappearing. Smokey forms spiralled into the night while others solidified and took back their human bodies.
Peregrine trotted over to Father Monaghan and Hennessy reached down to grab the yolk with a glowing hand. The wood charred and splintered, fracturing until he was able to shake it off.
“Stop!” Vayne bellowed. “You pathetic, mewlin’ little bastards, stop!” He raised his whip—or at least the handle of it. The rest had dissolved into ash.
“They ain’t got faith in you,” Hennessy told him. “You’re not their boss anymore.”
“You,” Father Monaghan growled, levelling a glare at Vayne, “aren’t wanted here.” Reaching up, he moved his white-knuckled fist into the light, revealing a clump of bloodied hair, black like Vayne’s. Little shit puts up a mean fight, all kickin’ and hair-pullin’… Lighting it on Peregrine’s fire he circled the stream of smoke in the air. “Vayne, I banish you. Now, get the hell out of my town!”
Vayne howled, his form sputtering, crackling, and then vanishing entirely. His steed screamed its rage, torn away with him.
Hennessy slid down out of her saddle and draped her jacket around the priest, scared to ask him what faith had fuelled that move.
Peregrine thought nervously, Perhaps he was angry about the nice church?
All around them, the damned wobbled on legs long since forgotten. Mounts neighed and pranced nervously at the sudden shock of being alive. Some slunk away into the night, but not so many as she would’ve guessed.
Delia slid up beside Hennessy. “I always knew you were something.”
Hennessy smiled, taking a deep breath. “Listen up,” she yelled to the new posse, and Peregrine let out a haunting whinny. “This here’s Father Monaghan. As far as you’re concerned, he’s your boss now.”
Father Monaghan stared at her wide-eyed.
She pointed to the townsfolk. “Now help them, and clean up this mess.”
Father Monaghan coughed. “This isn’t done. I banished him, not destroyed him. I…”
“Easy, Sebi.” Delia steadied him and gave Hennessy a pleading look. “What do we do now?”
Peregrine whinnied. There are more damned. Demons. Even the angels. They’ll need us.
Hennessy smiled, drawing herself up. “So now we start livin’. One day at a time.”
***
V. F. LeSann is a co-writing team presently living in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, comprised of Leslie Van Zwol and Megan Fennell. Court clerks by day and writers of myriad strange tales by night, they enjoying adding a touch of grit to imaginary worlds. Being lifelong prairie-dwellers, it was initially tricky to think of horses as fantastical, but the chance to riff on the legend of the Ghost Riders was far too fun to pass up.
Above the Silver Sky
Dan Koboldt
I turned fifteen on the day the rain stopped falling in the vale. My father had taken me up to the mushroom field, where thousands of colorful fungi basked in the gentle mist that drifted down from the silver sky. They dotted every ridge, white-caps and speckle-spreads, ruby tops, greenbulbs. All living in gentle symbiosis with the moss that coated the old bones of the valley’s northern edge.
“How do so many grow in one place?” I asked.
My father’s lips curved into his clever little half-smile. “You’d have to ask the fairies that.”
“I’ve never seen any fairies here.”
“Maybe you’re not looking hard enough.”
I crossed my arms and harrrumphed at him. Father loved to stoke my curiosity, to send me on endless searches for nonexistent faerie creatures in our little valley. Nothing that lived here on its own had true magic, not the people or the dogs or the endless flora. Only the horses did, and he wanted me to have no part of those. That’s why we visited the mushroom field in the north end of our vale, not the southern prairie where the four-legged beasts dipped out of the sky to graze on the long grasses.
“What do you want for your birthday, Neshka?” Father asked.
There was nothing I truly needed. The rain that fed our valley gave us grain and berries and dew squash. We had sheep and hogs for meat, goats for milk. Bees for honey, and a never-ending stream of cool clean water. But mostly, we lived on the mushrooms. Soon my father would begin to teach me the arts of mushroom-tending, and one day I’d take over for him. I watched a trickle of rainwater as it meandered down a stepladder of red-and-white toadstools, each one just shorter than the next, and told myself it would not be so bad. But my lips betrayed my heart to him, and I said, “I want to see the horses.”
“Neshka,” my father said, in his sternest voice. “You know better than to ask for that.”
“Please, father? I only want to look.”
“That’s exactly what your mother said. She only wanted to look, and then the horses took her away from us. Is that what you want? To leave?”
“Of course not.” My voice sounded as small as I felt.
“Good.”
A pool of vague sadness welled up in me, for I’d meant to fight harder to see the horses. He would say no, then I’d throw a fit, and we’d meet somewhere in the middle. Maybe that was creeping up to the edge of the prairie-lands to watch them from a distance. Maybe it was simply hearing the story once more about my mother and the time she rode one. But the hurt in his voice took me aback, and his accusation stilled the arguments upon my lips.
Not that it mattered anyway, because at that moment, the rain stopped.
The gentle patter of raindrops faded into silence, a numbness against my ears. The trickle of water on those red-and-white toadstools slowed, then died. My father and I looked at each other, then up at the silver sky in askance.
“Has this ever happened before?” I asked.
He frowned up at the sky. “No.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know, Neshka.” He crouched to inspect a fragile fan-top as it curled inward, barricading itself against the sudden lack of precipitation. Other mushrooms followed suit, offering a collective sigh as they tucked their beautiful colors away to preserve them. His jaw tightened.
“Maybe we should…check the prairie.” I kept my eyes on my boots, afraid that they might give away my intent.
“Why would we do that?”
“To see if the rain has stopped there, too.”
His jaw tightened even more, but he gave a sharp nod. “We’ll have a quick look. As long as you promise not to go near the horses.”
“I promise!” I said, a bit too quickly.
He turned his frown on me, stitching his eyebrows together.
“What? I promise.” I said.
“Stay close to me.”
We ran along the narrow, rocky trail that bordered the rim of the valley on the west-hand side. Little curls of smoke drifted up from the cluster of frond-roof cottages below. A mass of villagers milled about the small green in the center of the houses, all of them looking up. The rain had stopped there, too. That said something about what we’d probably find at the prairie, bu
t I clamped my mouth shut against this inconvenient probability. I took two steps for each of my father’s, but I kept pace with ease. Barely breathing hard. Running up here on the valley’s rim was the closest I got to freedom.
The rock path widened. Little green tufts of grass appeared underfoot. They thickened and joined together, forming a great mat of deep green tufted grasses. We halted at the end of the path and spread out our arms, searching for moisture in the air. Nothing. The rain was gone. The prairie lay absolutely still. No breeze whispered across the tops of the grasses. Normally they reached skyward to embrace the falling moisture. Now they drooped downward in rainless despair.
My father spoke in a hushed but fervent tone. “How can this be?”
I felt something then, a stirring in the air. Not rain, but a fey thrumming of anticipation. Ripples formed on the silver-liquid sky overhead. Then they burst through it. Five, six, eight horses. They tossed their heads, their manes drifting smoke-like in the sudden breeze that carried them gently downward. My breath caught as I watched them glide through the air. Their hooves glittered in the pale sunlight. They landed light as feathers, and set about grazing on the downtrodden grasses. All but one, the horse with the bone-white band across her forehead. She raised her head and looked at me. Our eyes met, both of us unblinking. My heart thudded in my chest. I took one step toward her.
“That’s far enough,” my father said.
The moment was gone anyway. The white-banded horse turned a quarter away, and wandered farther off into the prairie.
“What will happen to them, without the rain?” I asked.
“Forget the horses.”
“But they’ll be all right, won’t they?” I pressed.
“They can fly somewhere else to graze.”
He didn’t say the rest, but I figured it out on my own. We and the other villagers couldn’t fly away to another place where the rain still fell. The silver dome encasing our little valley kept us sealed in, like the cap on a butter churn. Our sky was broken, but we could not leave.
We climbed down to the valley floor, where a growing unease settled over the village. Passersby asked my father about the mushroom field, and the prairie. Some even asked about the horses. But he had no answers for them, and that did little to sway the rising tide of panic.
“Neshka, go to your grandmother’s house,” he told me.
I groaned, because grandmother’s musty cottage was my least favorite place in the village. Including the hog enclosures. I sulked as long as I could, but could feel his eyes on me all the way to her door. I knocked three times and let myself in. Stifling heat washed over me. She always had a roaring fire in the tiny hearth, despite the fact that the temperature in our little valley never wavered. It’s like she felt a cold that others didn’t, and chased it away with their sweat.
“Who is it?” Her voice sounded like the crumpling of old parchment. She sat in her wide chair-hammock by the fire, so close that it was probably burning her. Not a drop of sweat glistened on her wrinkled forehead.
“It’s Neshka, grandmother,” I said.
“What’s happening?”
“The rain stopped.”
“Where?”
I shrugged. “Everywhere. The mushroom fields, the village. Even the prairie.”
She grunted and returned to her endless hidework. She was forever working little bits of goat-hide in her chair, twisting them into complicated knots or sewing them onto slightly larger pieces of hide. My requests for sheaths and belts and a leather satchel had gone unanswered, but she still worked the hide.
“Father says this hasn’t happened before.”
“What?”
“The rain stopping. Father says it’s never happened.”
“He wouldn’t remember,” she said.
“So it has happened?” I settled into the little cot opposite her chair and scooted it away from the roaring hearth. It still had me sweating from head to heel, though.
“The rain’s always changing. Sometimes I think we’re wrong to call it rain, anyway.”
I smiled at her old-woman foolery. “What else would we call it?”
“Dribs and drabs. Lost water. Leakings from the other place.”
“What other place?”
“The place where the horses go.”
I gasped softly, because she’d mentioned the horses. Father had told her on multiple occasions never to speak of them. I knew I should be careful with what I said next. Careful enough to keep her talking. “They came today.”
“How many?”
I brought up the picture in my head again, of their silvery forms drifting down from the sky. “Eight.”
She muttered under her breath and shook her head. “Fewer every time. Soon there won’t be any coming down to graze. Can’t say I blame them. We started ignoring them, so they did the same to us.”
“I don’t ignore them,” I protested.
She scoffed and waved me off. “You’re just a girl.”
“Well, one of them looked at me.”
“Yeah?” She cackled. “When’s the wedding?”
“I’m serious. She has a white band across her forehead, and we looked at each other for a long while. I think she’d have let me approach her, but…”
“But your father was there.”
I sighed. “Exactly.”
“He’s looking out for his future mushroom-tender.” She reached out and felt around for another loop of goat-hide that lay drying by the hearth. I nudged it in front of her questing fingers. She found it, and wrapped the end around her current tangle of hide-work. Her fingers moved with a nimble urgency that I’d not noticed before.
“Will we have mushrooms to tend, if it never rains again?” I asked.
“Probably not.”
“I just wish I could go with them. And see the other side of the sky that they see.”
“You’ll have to do a little more than make eyes at one, for that to happen.”
A shadow loomed in the doorway. “Neshka?” my father called.
“I’m here.”
“Gather everyone you can and bring them to the mushroom field. Tell them to bring sacks or pails. Anything they’ve got.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“The mushrooms are shriveling up in the dry air. We need to harvest as many as we can.” He ducked away and pounded on the door of the next little cottage. “Need you in the mushroom field!”
I stood and made to follow him. My grandmother’s caught me around the wrist. “Ow!” She’d grabbed me like a cat catching a mouse, and as if she could see far better than she let on. “Grandmother!”
“Now’s your chance!” she whispered. “Everyone’s going to the mushroom field.”
“Chance for what?”
“To ride that horse.”
“Father said he needed me,” I said.
“You want to pick dying mushrooms, or you want to actually do something that matters?” she asked.
My heart leaped at the thought of a moment alone with the horses, but a cold uncertainty crept up into my stomach. “But I don’t know how to ride them.”
She shoved the jumble of goat-hide into my hands. “You use this.”
“Your sewing project? How is this going to help me?”
Her hands found mine, and slid them to a loop of hide at one end. “Behind the ears.” She moved them down to another loop. “For the brow.” My fingers slid down two flat pieces of leather to a short bar. The metal was cold. “Between the teeth.” Then she wrapped my fingers around the long, braided ropes of hide she’d tied to either side of the metal. “In your hands.”
“What is this thing?” I whispered.
“A bridle.” She brought my hand to her lips and kissed it, then pressed it against her cheek. “Now, go.”
I ran up the switchback-path that climbed the side of the valley rim, clutching grandmother’s ridiculous goat-hide thing to my chest. Distant shouts and the odd wail of despair drifted to my ears from th
e right, where most of the village had gathered to save what they could from the mushroom field. They formed a human chain, passing fungus hand-to-hand down the slope to the dark shelter of the water-shed in the village. There were gaps in the line yet. I should join them and help out, like my father said. If the mushrooms were drying up, every second mattered.
But if the mushrooms were drying up, so were the grasses in the prairie. Once they were gone, so were the horses. “This is foolishness,” I told myself. Madness, that’s what it was. But my heart and my boots carried me to the prairie anyway.
It was dying, too. A band of dull yellow encircled the sea of emerald grass. The stalks in the outer-most plants had become dry and stiff; they crunched beneath my boots. The sound of it made me shudder. I pushed ahead into the still-soft greenery, towards the silver horses that grazed in the center of the field. They walked without their usual grace, stamping their feet. Snapping at one another. Eating so fast that sparks flew from their mouths. They knew.
Only one of them acknowledged my approach, the mare with the white band across her brow. She lifted her head and looked at me, then turned quartering-to. I forced my feet into motion. One in front of the other. The other horses took notice and moved away. Not entirely fearful but untrusting of my intent. No one had come this close before, not since my father took over the mushroom field. I crept within arm’s reach, the bridle still clutched against my side. I’d never realized how big they were. Her midsection was thicker around than our oldest tree. My head barely came up to her shoulder.
“Hello,” I said.
Her ears quivered and turned toward me.
“I’m Neshka.”
I reached toward her, but too quickly. She snorted and lurched away. I stumbled back, caught my heel in the grass, and fell on my rear. It didn’t hurt, not really, but the shock jolted me out of my dreamlike state. The silver mare loomed over me like a great shining boulder. She could trample me in an instant, if she wanted. She hadn’t run, though, and I took that for a good sign. I clambered to my feet and reached out with an open palm. More timidly this time, and with a trembling arm that revealed my fear. She eyed it dubiously for a moment. Then she leaned down and put her head beneath my fingertips. Her head was cold as spring water, and the touch sent a tingling chill up my arm. I bit my lip against the gasp that wanted to escape me.
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