The horse paws again, muzzle nosing anxiously against ice. I take a step forward, cautiously, and raise the willow branch. The horse steps back, wary, like a deer at the edge of a wood. I use the branch to bust up the ice in the fountain, chop, chop, chop as hard as I can, and then step back quickly to the wall. My heart thunk-thunks. When I look at the horse, my mouth fills with the slightest, barely there taste of ash.
She takes a step forward. And another. Cautious. And then she lowers her head and drinks long and deep from the water beneath the ice. I think she is very thirsty, and that it has been a long time since she has drunk her fill.
I LIE AWAKE ALL night wishing there were no such things as schoolwork and supper and silent prayer so I could have stayed with the winged horse.
At first I wonder: How did the horse get into the sundial garden?
And then I remember: She has wings, you dolt, she flew in.
But then I think: Why doesn’t she fly away again?
And I start to worry that maybe she has.
So I get up just after dawn and sneak out, even though I know God sees everything and might tell Sister Constance, and I climb over the garden wall with a mealy turnip from the larder in my coat pocket. I’m more and more afraid the winged horse won’t be there again, but she is. She is standing by the golden sundial, which is being slowly disappeared by briars, like everything else.
She hears me coming. She stops scratching. She turns her beautiful gray muzzle and looks at me through the mist. She is even more miraculous than I remembered.
“I brought you a treat.” My words turn to clouds of mist in the air. I hold out the turnip, but my hand is shaking. I taste ashes in my mouth. The horse is so very beautiful. She’s small for a horse, but small things can be lovely, too. Her wings are as white as sugar, and I bet they feel soft and warm, like the chickens.
“Emmaline?”
Someone is calling my name from the hospital. Sister Mary Grace, I think.
The winged horse’s eyes go wide and wild. Papa tells stories of horses like this, untamed ones of the plains. He says in America there are whole valleys of horses that have never even seen a person before. The cowboys round them up into giant wooden pens that they keep moving closer and closer, until the horses suddenly find themselves caught. Some are happy to be tamed and pull carts and carry saddles on their backs. But others never are.
“Do you have a name?” I ask.
The winged horse’s nostrils flare.
And I notice how she is holding one wing close to her body. I take a step forward, cautiously. The wing’s feathers are each the length of my entire arm, the width of my hand. They are packed tightly together, like a shield, and coated with a waxy substance that would make rain roll right off of them. They grow out of the horse’s shoulder, and where they meet the bone, the skin is red and swollen.
“What happened to you?”
The horse pauses. Her ears turn back, and then she swivels her beautiful long neck around and swats at a fly on her haunch with her tail. I try to memorize the shape of her back legs—the smooth arcs and long, straight shanks—so that I can draw them later with Anna’s colored pencils.
I realize something. “I know why you have come,” I tell her. “I think you belong with the other horses, the ones that live in the mirrors, but you’ve come into our world somehow. Because you’re hurt, and you know this is a place of healing. It’s okay. No one comes here but me. You can stay as long as you like.”
“Emmaline?” Sister Mary Grace calls again. “Are you out here?”
A shadow ripples over the winged horse. A dark one with outstretched wings that swallow up the horse and the sundial. A shrill siren wails to life from the direction of the hospital. The horse’s ears go straight, and I turn toward the wailing sound. Its shriek rises and falls.
The air raid siren.
I gape up at the shadow. A plane! The Germans, attacking! I drop to all fours and cover my head like they taught us in school. I can’t believe the Germans are here, in Shropshire. They bomb cities, not turnip fields. We’re supposed to be safe here. The trains, the countryside. It’s supposed to be safe.
After a minute no bombs shatter the earth, and I look up. The air raid siren is still wailing and wailing. The winged horse is blinking calmly in the mist.
I was wrong. The dark shadow was far too silent to have been a plane.
And the siren…
“Drat!” I run toward the garden wall. “Don’t worry, it’s just a drill,” I call over my shoulder to the horse. “?‘Half an hour, once a week, to keep us sharp and at our peak.’?” As I clamber over the ivy wall, I think of my schoolteacher in Nottingham, waving her hands as we all recited the rhyme together behind our thick rubber gas masks.