I followed behind her as she rode through the forest, and neither one of us said anything for quite a while. Occasionally birds would chirp in the distance, or there’d be a rustle in the undergrowth, but the only regular sounds were those of hoof-clops.
Then Selina cleared her throat.
“Once, a long long time ago, there was a girl who lived by the ocean in a little house by herself,” she said, not looking back at me. “She loved the fresh air, and the open skies, and the wide plains.”
I nodded, not really knowing what to say.
“Then she ate a poison mushroom and died.”
She paused, not speaking again for a while, and I had to speak up when it seemed like that was all there was. “Um — that’s a strange story.”
“I’m not done,” she said. Her horse continued walking. “She was friends with a sorceress, a powerful ancient witch, but just as she died, the sorceress took the last of her friend’s essence, her soul, and captured it in a bottle, saving her from being truly gone.”
“Uh — ”
“That bottled essence sat on a shelf for years, until one day, the sorceress met a dying unicorn, struck by a hunter’s arrow. The unicorn had escaped, but it was bleeding.”
I frowned. “I’m confused. Is this going somewhere?”
She ignored me. “Unicorns were rare, even then. The sorceress, seeing the value of saving a unicorn, drew out the arrow and patched the wound. Then she took the bottle with the soul of her friend, and she made a potion, a rare potion of life, the kind that can only be made from the soul of a living mortal. She gave it to the unicorn, who drank it, and who recovered.”
I really had no idea what to say. “Um, okay.”
“But two souls can’t share a single body. It’s too much, even for a unicorn. So at the unicorn’s horn, a gemstone grew, a white stone, glowing with a magic never seen before, with equal parts of the girl’s soul and the unicorn’s soul, and when the unicorn at last became whole, the stone broke free. The unicorn, grateful, left it with the sorceress.”
In spite of myself, I was wondering where the story was going. I was also starting to wonder where *we* were going, since we seemed to be very deep in the woods now.
“Then, one day, another girl, a pretty yellow-haired girl named Cyntarei, was brought to the sorceress by her family. She was dying. She had been crushed under a cart, and she was bleeding badly. If the sorceress had not acted quickly, she would have died.”
“What did she do?”
We stopped. I hadn’t even noticed, but we had emerged from the forest into a broad clearing, with small wooden houses. There were — villagers here, for lack of a better word, walking between them. But they weren’t the same people I’d see on the street. They were dressed in clothes that were hundreds of years old, and there was no sign of electricity or cell phones or any modern amenities. My jaw hung open at the strange people walking about in front of me.
“The sorceress used the white stone to heal Cyntarei,” said Selina softly, “and the fused essence of human, and of magical equine, saved her life, and it turned her into the first of the Centaurs.”
I looked up at Selina, agape at the horse-people walking through the village as though nothing was wrong, and realized as I watched the illusion fall around her that she too was a centaur, and there had never been a horse at all. She smiled back at me.
“So now that you know my secret,” she said, “you’re obligated to keep it.”