All the King's Horses Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Samhain

  2. The Changeling Theory

  3. Outskirts and Sock Limbo

  4. Night-Elves and Dreams

  5. Captain Hook

  6. A Glamorous Bus Ride

  7. Dream Horse

  8. The Grey Land

  9. Humpty Dumpty

  10. Beltane

  11. All the King’s Horses

  12. Heart’s Desire

  13. A Saddle

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Book

  IT BEGAN THE DAY GRANDPA ESCAPED …

  Something very odd has happened to Colin and Sarah’s much-loved grandfather. It’s as if a stranger is inhabiting his body … as if Grandpa has been spirited away and a changeling left in his place. Raised all their lives on his tales of great heroes and fantastical legendary creatures, Colin and Sarah feel sure that the Faer Folk are involved.

  In an attempt to find him again, they follow Grandpa’s path, crossing the boundary between the everyday world and the enchantments of the Otherworld …

  A wonderfully lyrical fantasy adventure brimming with characters from the Otherworld – from magnificent horses to mischievous night-elves and the legendary Sidhe.

  Illustrated by David Wyatt

  In memory of

  John C. Cooley

  Dorothy W. Copeland

  and

  Geraldine Henderson O’Connell

  Dignitatem amissam redintegrat amor

  It is no doubt very strange that faeries should desire to have a mortal king; but the fact is, that with all their knowledge and power, they cannot get rid of the feeling that some men are greater than they are, though they can neither fly nor play tricks … [But] it is only between life and death that the faeries have power over grown-up mortals, and can carry them off to their country. So they had to watch for an opportunity.

  –George MacDonald, ‘The Shadows’

  IT BEGAN THE day Grandpa escaped. I know that makes it sound as if Grandpa was in jail, but it’s the only word to use. He wasn’t in jail, of course; he lived with us, which meant it was dangerous when he got out, because of the neighbourhood we’d just moved to … if you could call it a neighbourhood. The place we were renting – a run-down house with a stained-glass window in the hall and a nifty pointed tower – faced the T where the street that crossed the train tracks met a dirt road that didn’t go anywhere. Once, that road had led from town to the ferry, and it was still called Ferry Road, but the way to town was blocked off by a pile of dirt and the new 125 Connector now. As for the ferry, it had gone out of business at least sixty years ago, Mom said – and she must have been right, because Colin and I couldn’t even find the old dock when we went down to look. The trains were still in business, naturally; they ran half a block from our front door. In the old ferry days, they’d stopped for loads at the two warehouses that stood between the house and the tracks; but later, they’d just whizzed by, and the warehouses, which had been pretty grand once, like our house, had gotten sadder and sadder; now they had paper and boards in the windows instead of glass. People lived in them – old men, mostly, with bottles in paper bags under their beat-up coats, and a few women, not as old, but with the same washed-out look. We weren’t allowed to call them bums, and we wouldn’t have anyway, because they always said hello as we walked back and forth to the school bus. But anybody could see they were too far gone to stop Grandpa from wandering out on to the tracks and playing with the rocks between the pilings. He always wanted to do that. So we could never let him go out by himself.

  Grandpa wasn’t crazy – at least, he wasn’t crazy the way the warehouse people were. Obviously, a grown-up doesn’t sit down on railroad tracks if everything is OK upstairs; but with the warehouse people, you could say what was wrong (even if you weren’t supposed to be old enough to know words like DTs or Heroin Addict), and with Grandpa, you couldn’t. The doctor couldn’t, anyway; all he could say was that Grandpa was old, and that old people got forgetful. I explained, very politely, that Grandpa wasn’t just forgetful, he was losing whatever it was that made him Grandpa, but it didn’t do any good. The doctor gave me the look vets give you when they’ve just told you a horse is permanently lame, and he said ‘Sarah, I know it’s difficult to accept things like this, but even with the advanced medical knowledge of the 1950s, we can’t cure everybody,’ which is exactly what vets say. So Colin and I knew what we had to do. Grandpa had said you should always listen to vets carefully because they knew things you didn’t – but many a time, if you had a horse worth saving, it was up to you to find out what the problem was. Grandpa had cured a lot of horses that vets had said would never jump again, just by using his head. So we started using ours. Because, boy, was Grandpa ever worth saving.

  Until whatever it was happened to him, Grandpa lived on a big horse farm in Pennsylvania, and even though he was so old and had only one good arm, he was the head trainer. Every year, Colin and I took the train down there to spend the summer, and when we had to go back to Massachusetts to school, we counted the days until summer came again. The people who owned the stable had two hunter ponies, and since their kids were grown up, they let us ride them. Grandpa gave us lessons every day, and after we got good enough, he let us work bigger horses. He only let us ride six hours a day, but during the other hours, we got to watch him train young jumpers or work with famous people who brought Olympic-level horses to him for advice, so even when we were on foot, we learned a lot. Then at night, we would sit out on his doorstep, smelling the roses that grew up trellises on his cottage, looking at the stars (unless it was raining, of course). Sometimes, we’d just lean against Grandpa and dream off, but most nights, he’d stretch his good hand out to the darkness and chant:

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping

  than you can understand.

  We’d chant with him, feeling tingly all over, because that poem meant Grandpa was going to tell us faerie stories. You’d better understand right away that the faeries in Grandpa’s stories weren’t Disney fairies, with plastic wands and tiny wings; they came in all shapes and sizes, and they lived in hollow hills until they rode out at night to visit mortals. When Grandpa told us about them, his eyes shone, and his hand moved, and we could almost see what he was describing: the Sidhe1, who were so powerful they could spirit bards into the Otherworld, or bewitch the spears and swords of great heroes, or put whole armies to sleep by playing enchanted music – and elves and firbolgs and other little faeries who teased foolish people that didn’t believe in them. Sometimes, he got so deep into his stories he’d go on until dawn, and we’d doze off with our heads in his lap, dreaming we were with him in the Otherworld.

  Then whatever it was started. It was the summer before I was in fourth grade (I’m finishing sixth, now). Grandpa started forgetting things, like when our riding lessons were supposed to be. He would promise to give us one, but when we had gotten the ponies tacked up, he’d be off doing something else, and he’d get angry if we reminded him. Sometimes he forgot lessons for the famous riders, and they got angry and told the Smithes, who owned the stables. But the Smithes said that Grandpa was still the best trainer in the U.S., and people in their seventies were allowed to forget things. The next summer, though, they weren’t saying that any more, because it wasn’t just lessons Grandpa was forgetting; it was really important stuff. One of his jobs was to supervise the horses in Barn One – those were the top showjumpers, and
he wanted to be sure the stable boys treated them just so. But that summer, sometimes he told the boys to feed the horses twice in a row, and sometimes he insisted they’d been fed when they hadn’t, and if the boys argued, he’d holler at them. We tried to explain he was wrong, but that just made him holler at us, which he’d never done before.

  Half-way through July, Mom turned up at the farm. I was glad to see her, because I knew Grandpa needed a doctor and nobody else could persuade him to see one. But as I said, the doctor was a bust, and instead of thinking about ways to cure Grandpa, the grown-ups made an ‘informed decision’ about what he should do – which meant that the Smithes decided he was going to retire, and Mom decided he was going to come live with us, and nothing he said (and nothing Colin and I said) was going to make any difference. The only thing that got us through the rest of the summer, while we were saying goodbye to the farm and the ponies and moving Grandpa to Massachusetts, was that we’d have lots of time to figure out what was wrong with Grandpa, and when we did, he’d be able to go back.

  The trouble was, Grandpa got worse and worse, and no matter how much we read or how hard we thought, we couldn’t figure out why. He was upset and confused after he moved, and he began forgetting more and more things. Then, two nights before Christmas, when he was telling us the story of Finn Mac Cumhaill2 and the misty faerie monster that burned Tara, he jumped to his feet, the way he always did in the part where Finn throws a faerie spear at the monster – but instead of acting it out, he stared around the room, frowned, and wandered away. After that, no matter which story he started on, he couldn’t finish it, even if we helped him along. We begged Mom to take him to another doctor, and she took him to a specialist in Boston, but the specialist just said it was ‘dementia’, which meant, Mom said in a funny tone of voice, ‘tough luck’. That’s not what it meant; we looked it up, of course. The dictionary said it was ‘Irreversible deterioration of intellectual faculties with concomitant emotional disturbance resulting from organic brain disorder. Synonym: insanity’.

  We looked at each other. I thought Colin was going to cry (he’d just turned nine, for Pete’s sake), but he blinked and set his jaw. ‘We’re not licked yet,’ he said. ‘“Irreversible” only means the doctor has run out of ideas. Remember that horse that had “irreversible arthritis” that Grandpa cured? Well, if he can do it, we can.’

  But we couldn’t. No matter how hard we tried to help him, he forgot more and more things; by spring, he’d started putting a kettle on for tea and leaving it on the burner until all the water boiled away and it melted down into the stove in stalactites. One day, he started a fire that way; there was black gunk all over the kitchen walls when Colin and I got home from school. The next day, Mom quit her job so she could be home with him all the time. And soon after that, she put our house on Maple Street on the market. It sold in October. That’s when we moved to Ferry Road. Mom said she loved the new place – Victorian houses were so romantic. But I heard the real estate lady telling her the rent was very low because of its ‘less desirable location’, so I knew we hadn’t moved because of the romance.

  Anyway, Grandpa escaped, and it was our fault. What happened was, after we got home from school, the two of us kept track of Grandpa so Mom could go shopping or visit her friends. It wasn’t too hard, usually. Sometimes we could get him to play Go Fish with us (he taught us to play poker when we were little, and in Pennsylvania we’d played a lot, but he couldn’t remember the rules any more), and sometimes we went for walks. But that day was Samhain (Hallowe’en, if you’re not Irish), and we told Grandpa, hoping he’d remember his Samhain stories. He didn’t, though; he just kept pacing around the living room, the way he often did. We didn’t want him to see how sad that made us, so we decided to make some pancakes and invite him to celebrate by eating them. When we make pancakes, we make a whole stack, and Colin mixes up all sorts of interesting things to spread between them. If you don’t ask what the interesting things are, they’re the best pancakes in the world.

  I had just flipped the first pancake, when somebody knocked at the side door – the one that used to be the servants’ entrance from the driveway. Colin looked up from his mixture. ‘Listen to that! I told Mom nobody would pay attention to the law about not trick-or-treating in this part of town, but she was so freaked that she didn’t buy any candy.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s too early for trick-or-treating – and besides, who would come here? It’s not as if we were on the way to anyplace else.’

  Whoever it was knocked again, a little louder this time. Colin started to the door.

  ‘Hey, come on!’ I said. ‘We’re not supposed to let anybody in when we’re by ourselves.’

  ‘We’re not by ourselves,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Grandpa’s here. And besides, I’m not going to let anybody in. There’s a chain.’

  I turned off the burner and ran down the hall to stop him, but he had already slipped the chain into the socket and opened the door a crack. He took a quick look, then gulped. ‘Um, Sarah …’

  I shoved him to the side and peeked out the crack, and I saw why he had looked so funny. It was one of the women from the warehouses – not that I recognized her, but the smell of cigarette smoke, old people cooking, and whatever she’d been drinking couldn’t have come from anywhere else. Her face was a maze of lines, and her hair was so stringy and dirty that it was matted where it touched the collar of her coat. The coat had probably come from the bottom of a box at a Salvation Army store, and since it didn’t have any buttons, you could see that she had a ripped skirt and a bunch of different length sweaters on underneath it. As she took a step forward, a little white dog with red ears poked its head out from behind her and growled. She scooped it up and looked at me over it.

  ‘Hello, honey,’ she said, with a smile that didn’t have any teeth. ‘Your mother at home?’

  ‘No, she’s out right now,’ said Colin from behind me.

  I gave him a back kick. ‘He means she’s at home, but she’s busy. Can we help?’

  The woman stroked the quivering little dog. ‘One of the men down the road is sick. I want to make him some gruel, but there isn’t any oatmeal. Do you think your mother would let me borrow some?’

  Oatmeal. It seemed a funny thing to ask for, but I couldn’t think of any reason she would be lying. ‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘Um … let me go see if we have any.’

  I left the door chained and went back to the kitchen. Colin had already gotten the box out of the cupboard; I took it and stared at the smiling Quaker on the side, wondering if he knew where he was going. ‘Do you think we should do this? Mom said not to give those people anything.’

  ‘But one of them’s sick,’ said Colin. ‘And it’s not like she asked for anything expensive.’

  ‘That’s true. And if Mom notices it’s gone, we can just say we ate it, or something.’ I walked down the hall, shaking the box; there was a lot left. ‘Here you go,’ I began … but it wouldn’t fit through the gap. I had to undo the chain so I could hand it to her.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the woman. ‘I’ll get some oatmeal at the store first thing tomorrow morning and bring it around.’

  Colin poked me, but I already knew what Mom would say about that. ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘Don’t bother.’

  The woman gave us a funny look. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘We’re glad to help.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But listen, honey – if ever you need something, I live at the right-hand warehouse, and my name is Jenny. You got that?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  The woman smiled her toothless smile once more and turned away. It was foggy outside, and by the time she’d taken two steps, she’d disappeared.

  I shut the door. ‘She was sort of all right, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Colin. ‘You have to wonder …’

  On the other side of the house, a door banged. We took one look at each other and dashed into the living room. It
was empty, and the door that led from the front hall into the foyer was open.

  I stared at it. ‘Didn’t you lock the front door when we came in?’

  He shook his head. ‘I thought you did.’

  That couldn’t have been true; he’d stopped in the yard to look at something, and when he’d come in I’d been talking to Mom. But there was no point arguing about it then, and anyway, it was my fault for not checking. ‘Well, we’d better go find him,’ I said.

  We grabbed our jackets and ran out onto the porch, but the fog was so thick that we couldn’t even see the big maples at the edge of the yard – which meant, of course, we couldn’t see Grandpa. I started down the front steps. ‘I suppose we’d better head towards the tracks.’

  Colin shook his head. ‘I don’t think he went that way.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can tell,’ I muttered, but I followed him until he started up the hill behind the house. Then I grabbed his sleeve. ‘Don’t be a nerd – he never goes towards the highway!’

  ‘Shut up!’ he said, stopping. We both listened, but all I could hear was the roar of trucks on Route 495, which was the other reason our neighbourhood was ‘less desirable’. It wasn’t a regular highway; it was one of those new four-laners, with bridges and exits instead of cross-roads. The exits were called cloverleafs, because that’s what they looked like, and one of them (to the 125 Connector that cut off Ferry Road from town, if you care) was just over the little hill behind our house.

  Colin nodded. ‘That’s where he is – we’d better hurry.’

  I never argued with Colin when he was absolutely sure about something, so we ran towards the cloverleaf. But after we got over the top of the hill, it got harder to hurry. The Connector dead-ended at 495 (it was going to be replaced by a big four-laner that went north, but they hadn’t gotten around to building that yet), so the entrance ramp of the loop on our side was blocked off. When people figured that out, they started using the area as a free dump, so there were always beer cans, bottles, paper milkshake cups from the new McDonald’s hamburger stand, and even dead cars and old refrigerators lying in the grass on both sides of the ramp. By October, when choke vines had grown over everything and the tall grass had started to fall over, it was really slow walking there, and the fog didn’t help.