Free Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs by Kate Klimo Page A

her mouth dry enough to choke her. She takes another step into the tent and waits. The centaur sleeps on. She sees no weapons. Had she been in his place, Malora reflects, she would have been up on her feet and holding a knife to the throat of the trespasser. But then again, she means no real harm, and perhaps the centaur, even in his sleep, senses this.
    Malora steals over to the table and uncorks the green bottle. Lifting it to her nose, she inhales a rich floral aroma. In her mind, she sees the centaur who sleeps nearby. He is standing in a field of flowers kissing a female centaur wearing an odd-looking hat. Malora shrugs and shakes her head, then replugs the bottle of scent and sets it down. She picks up a silver-backed looking glass and stares at herself in the dim light. The looking glass shows all too clearly how matted and wild she has become. No wonder Theon fears her! Compared to these elegant centaurs, she is a fright, more baboon than person—and at least baboons groom themselves. Hastily, she sets the mirror facedown and makes her way out of the tent.
    Malora enters the cooking tent and finds sacks hanging on hooks from the tent frame. She sniffs around until she finds something redolent of mint and wild onion. She brings the bag down and eats everything inside so quickly that she gets a violent case of the hiccups. She wipes her mouth, looksaround for water, and finds none. Smothering the hiccups in her fist, she heads out of the camp.
    The receding floodwater has gathered in a gully near the mouth of the canyon, making a pool that is bigger than a puddle but smaller than a pond. Malora drops to her knees at its edge and drinks deeply. By noon tomorrow, Malora knows the pool will be shrunk to half its current size, surrounded by the tracks and scat of a dozen animals, and bugs and tadpoles will already be hatching in it. But right now, it is pristine, cool and fresh from the sky, as good as water gets on the plains. When Malora has drunk her fill, she slides all the way into the pool and immerses her body. She shivers, but her hiccups eventually subside. Sitting in water that comes up to her chin, she grabs handfuls of sand to rub into her skin and scalp.
    When her hair is rinsed and her skin is raw and tingling, Malora lies on her back and floats, listening to her breath, moving in and out of her body as she gazes up at the stars. Now that she is fed and watered, perhaps she can come up with a plan. It would be so easy to go to the pen and simply free the horses while the centaurs and the pussemboos sleep. But without Sky, she isn’t eager to return to what she already thinks of as her life before the centaurs. Without Sky, she has no interest in leading a herd. She is happy that Sky is free, but she realizes suddenly that she doesn’t want to leave the centaurs. Freedom on the plains has been such hard work and so lonely. Her mother’s death has left her feeling ungrounded. It is as if she has been surviving all this time only because she might one day go home to her mother. Without her mother, Malora’s life has lost its purpose. She knows sheneeds something different, and the centaurs and the pussemboos are certainly that.
    Then, through the water, the nearby yelp of a jackal brings her surging to her feet. Splashing out of the gully, she dashes onto the plains. She pulls up short and gasps. There they are, lying everywhere, like great dark boulders stranded in the moonlight.
    “Oh, my boys and girls! What have they done to you?” she whispers.
    The bodies of Blacky and Mist and Streak lie in a matted mound where the cat-men have dragged them. She walks past them and sees that there are other bodies as well, strewn about, belonging to horses she believed to have escaped. She sees Oil. And then she sees, off by herself as she often was in life, the moody and solitary mare, Silky.
    “Oh, my sweet, shy Silky! Look at you!” Malora falls to her knees and throws herself over the body. “I’m so sorry,