First Aid For Fairies And Other Fabled Beasts: Chapter 1

The slow hoofbeats moved up the dark lane to the vet’s house and surgery.

The boy’s breath made clouds in the air, and he gasped with pain every time the fourth hoof touched the ground.

Helen closed her diary after another entry of school, violin practice, tea and homework. She wondered whether she should just write “same as yesterday,” as she had done nothing new for weeks. Like yesterday, she still hadn’t found the perfect tune, so she hadn’t been able to practise the most important piece of music. She sighed. There was only a week left to go until the concert.

She put the diary up high where Nicola couldn’t reach to scribble on it, and went to the window to close the blind. She saw a shape moving up the lane. A horse? She opened her window a little.

The horse looked odd. It was limping, the rider was leaning too far forward over the horse’s neck, and she couldn’t see the horse’s head. It must be hanging down very low. Yet the horse struggled up the lane.

Mum wouldn’t be pleased if this was a late patient. She’d been out all evening with a flock of sheep that had run into a barbed wire fence after being panicked by a strange dog. Now she was soaking in a hot bubbly bath with a book and some biscuits. And Dad wouldn’t be pleased if the doorbell woke Nicola, he was trying to get some urgent work done on the computer.

If it was just a local rider and a pony with a stone in its hoof, Helen could give them a hoof pick and a torch and they could sort themselves out.

She crept downstairs and grabbed her fleece and her wellies, hoping to get out into the garden before the rider rang the doorbell and disturbed everyone else.
Helen opened the front door as fast as she could, still waggling her feet into her boots. “Hold on a minute,” she whispered.

Just before she pulled her fleece over her head, she saw a bare-chested boy on a chestnut horse, standing in the front garden.

No. He wasn’t on the horse ... he was the horse!

The boy and the horse seemed to melt into each other.

Helen stopped for a moment with the red fleece over her face. She shook her head, yanked the fleece down to her shoulders and looked again.

The boy had a horse’s legs, back and tail.

The horse had a boy’s head, arms and chest.

The boy’s head said clearly, “Are you the horse healer? Can you heal me?” He pointed to the horse’s back leg, which was bleeding from a deep open gash.

Helen looked behind her. No one in the house seemed to have heard.

“Shhhh,” she said. She put her arms through the sleeves of her fleece, grabbed the bunch of keys from behind the door, and stepped out into the garden.

Without saying another word, because she couldn’t think of any sensible ones, Helen led the lame horse-boy to the large animal surgery by the side of the house.

She unlocked the sliding doors, put the lights on, and ushered him in. He squinted at the bright light shining off the white cupboards and the gleaming metal equipment, then he limped inside. His hooves were loud on the concrete floor.

“Shhhh!”

Helen looked at him, seeing him properly for the first time now they were out of the night. But even in the clear clean light, she couldn’t understand what she saw.

She remembered what men’s torsos on horses’ bodies were called. Centaurs. But that was a mythological name for a fantastic animal. They weren’t real. She doubted they’d even existed in ancient Greece, let alone in the south of Scotland in the twenty-first century.

“You’re a centaur.”

“Yes. You’re a horse healer. Kindly heal my leg.”

“I’m not a horse healer. My Mum is the vet.”

“Then fetch her ...”

A gust of freezing winter wind blew in through the door, and Helen turned to close it. As the door started to slide shut, the creature crouching in the bush just three steps away grunted with frustration. Now he couldn’t see the centaur or the girl with the curly black hair. Should he wait here until the colt came out, or go back now and tell his Master that the young fool had involved a human child? Helen shoved the door until it clicked closed. She shouldn’t have taken a stranger into her Mum’s surgery, and she didn’t want anyone to see the light.

She turned back to the centaur in the middle of the floor. “My Mum doesn’t believe in centaurs or cyclops or sirens or anything like that. She only believes in science books. If she doesn’t believe in you, she can’t really bandage you up.”

“Do you believe in me?”

Helen examined him from a distance. He scowled back at her.

The glossy horsehair on his horse body seemed to grow from the same skin as his boy’s tummy and back. The tangled hair on his boy’s head was the same reddish colour as the horsehair. Most of the hair on his head was hanging long onto his shoulders, but some was tied up off his face in a small ponytail above his forehead. She noticed scrapes and bruises on his bare skin. The horse and the boy had both been injured recently.

“Do you believe in me?” he demanded again.

He didn’t look like a circus trick. He wasn’t half a pantomime horse. But there was only one way to be sure.

Helen was used to boys in the playground and horses in the fields and she wasn’t afraid of either. This horse-boy shouldn’t frighten her.

So she took a step forward. She reached out her hand and ran it from his boy’s back to his horse’s flank. He hunched his shoulders, clearly annoyed at being touched, but he didn’t shy away. The boy’s skin was warm, and so was the horse’s hair. There were no joins.

“Yes, I believe in you.”

Extract by kind permission of Floris Books and remains ©Lari Don and Floris Books