xXx
Hettie came swinging down the hillside in a flurry of skirts and scarf, ankle twisting on a partly buried stone sending her sprawling through the needle grass, rolling, thudding down and skidding in the mire and the meadow. She wasted no time on herself, she couldn't afford to, pushing forward in a scramble at the bottom, a thrash of tawny limbs and black curls and wide frantic eyes. She ran, and ran, and ran, and ran-
And by the time she made it to the fringes of the clearing where she had set up Demon away from the other horses, she was still too late. Jibben was on the floor crouched down at a tree trunk, heaving quiet, wet sobs that caught in his throat like thistles. Above his head dangled the torn off soft cotton she had used to tether Demon to the tree, anything made from leather or rope still too heavy for the wild beast to stomach. Hettie's knees knocked as they fell beside the boy, hands hovering, unsure whether to sooth or search for injury.
"Jibben? Lad, look at me."
The boy blinked up at her with drenched lashes and a bottom lip clasped between teeth to stop a howl of bright pain from slipping out, tear tracks down his port wine stain, and she could see him curled around himself, knotted up like fishing wire cradled around his right arm.
"The horse, Hettie-… He's gone. I swear I didn't mean-"
"None of that now, alright? Can you move, just a little?"
Her fingers brushed the flesh of his forearm and this time even the lip caught between his teeth couldn't stop the oncoming shriek. His arm limply hung awkwardly at his side, a bulge at the joint catching Hettie's eye.
Fuck.
"Shhh. It's going to be alright. There's no blood. You haven't broken skin. Nothing one of my special drinks can't fix, aye?"
Reaching up, Hettie unwrapped her head scarf.
"I'm guessing you came around the back of Demon? Did he startle? Did he kick back?"
She needed Jibben to start talking. Talking would take the bite out of what came next, and distract the boy from knowing what came next.
"Yes. I forgot I weren't supposed to do that. He spooked, he reared and kicked out and I tried to jump away but he got me. He started neighing and thrashing and I panicked, and then I crashed back and I think the rope tore and he ran off-… AH!"
Grasping the boys wrist, free hand balanced on his shoulder where neck met blade, Hettie tugged and twisted in a clean, sharp motion. The dislocated joint popped back into place with a sickening crack only muted by the breathless gasp of the boy, and she set to work on using her head scarf to bandage the arm up and close to his chest.
"There we go. All over. The worst of it's done. You were ever so brave, Jibben. Much braver than I would have been. I would have squealed like a piglet."
The boy puffed in short, shocking breaths, but the tears began to fade.
"It feels better now. Sore, but better."
"Good. Don't move your finger's, alright? I think it might be a fracture but until we get you back to the Vardo I can't be sure."
The sound of thudding steps broke over the hillside. Hettie glanced back to the slope, to the shadows of men rising like smoke over the cap, hollering.
"Over here! He's fine! A bit bruised, but alive!"
xXx
Tem tossed a handful of dried chips onto the embers of his fire, and the scent was sharp and sudden, a blossom of Applewood and pine in the rising fume and something a little minty. Hettie, barefoot and freshly dressed, ambled down the Vardo steps wiping her hands off on a soiled rag of linen.
"Jibben?"
Hettie came to the smoke pit and slumped on a tree stump, dropping the linen rag between her feet before scrubbing at her eyes.
"With his ma and pa. He'll live to fight another day. I fixed his arm up as best as I could but he still won't be able to properly use it for another two weeks or so. After that he'll be as right as rain. We were lucky today. Really lucky."
Tem scoffed, smile golden in the campfire and the setting sun behind his dark arched head.
"Lucky, she says! Two weeks, she says! As if that ain't magic by itself. Fishing ye out that Thornberry bush was the best thing me and me kin ever did, lass. Ye sure ye no Changeling, aye?"
Despite how tired Hettie felt, despite the scramble she had gone through to find the ingredients and the herbs to make a quasi Skele-Gro potion only an hour ago out of whatever bric-a-brac she could locate littering the English countryside, Hettie grinned and breathed in deep on the Applewood smoke. It soothed her frayed nerves very little.
Tem's toothy smile was a better medicine.
"Oh, yeah. Why do you think I stay away from Willy's iron nails?"
Tem snorted, as Hettie bent over and began slipping on her boots she had left by the pit the morning before.
"Off somewhere?"
The laces pulled tight as the wood crackled in the looming stars above. It would be night all too soon, and though the cities had gas lamplights, nothing like the electrical of Hettie's time, the countryside would be dark and murky with shadows as thick as stew. If she wanted to find Demon's tracks she would need to find them now or not at all.
"Got to go find Demon, don't I."
"It's nearly sunset, lass-"
"And he's out there alone."
Hettie thought Demon might have been a war horse once upon a time. He had the size and strength of it, a good sixteen, seventeen hands high, and wider than she was if she laid flat on the ground, and she was sure by the glimmer of his black coat he had some Normandy mount in his veins.
He must have been brought back over after the war in France, he might have survived the Somme or Verdun or Marne. Maybe all fucking three. He had survived shells and ballistics and mines, the ferry ride over, and he'd come back a little bit broken, as Hettie was sure all the boys sent to war had come home like, as she herself had come back as. That's what war did. Break things. Bullets, boys, and beasts, it broke them like glass on cobblestone.
Maybe Demon had run from someone's stable. Maybe he had raced from a battlefield. Maybe he had sprinted from the war, as, indeed, Hettie had done with her own. Galloped from the noise and the blood and the memories. And maybe that was why Hettie desperately wanted to find the horse, though he was beginning to be more trouble than he was worth. Maybe if she soothed that broken part of him, got him to settle with the other stallions and mares, took a bit of the sting out of his wildness, never all of it, wild things could never truly be tamed, maybe-
Maybe there was hope for herself yet.
"At least wait until sunrise-"
"He's still too wild, Tem. If someone stumbles across him with the scare he's had this morn he'll rear, they'll shoot, and that's no way to go. Never mind if he's somehow made it into town. That's all we need right now, an angry mob because a gypsy horse has gone and trampled a man's cart or cat. Remember what happened last time one of the townies thought we'd stolen from them? They tried to set our Vardos on fire."
Hettie doesn't quite remember when she had crossed the point from referring to their things as our things. Neither does she quite know when the thought of Jibben's face smashed in by a horse hoof became such a terrifying thought. Hettie has seen worse, done worse, lost worse, still had nightmares about the playing fields she had stumbled across during the war where Fenrir Greyback had broken in and-
These people had taken her in out of the goodness of their own hearts, yes, but that didn't automatically make them family. Nadya's morning porridge, which was hot and always steaming and fresh by the time Hettie rose, did. The scarfs Drina kept stitching for her did. Willy's curse when he struck his thumb with a hammer did. The little alcove around the pit fire where they warmed their shoes, an extra spot dug for Hettie, did.
Families, Hettie was becoming to understand, was not some big, fanciful grand singular thing. It was tiny things, little kindnesses, that all bled together. In the space of a year, this rag-tag group of old, young, and lost had wormed their way into her life, and, by Merlin himself, Hettie wasn't going to let anything hurt, maim, or ruin them.
That included the bastard horse Demon.
Tem's lips thinned to a razor-edged grin.
"And if I remember correctly none of their torches would light. Strange thing, that. It had been a dry week. Not a spot of rain or water to be found, yet not a spark would take to their oil."
Hettie glanced up; blue eyes cold, voice as unforgiving and dead as the falling leaves on an Elder tree.
"Yes, very strange."
Tem didn't push it any further. Smart man, Tem. He knew when enough was enough. Just as no one really questioned why strange things happened around the strange girl. Enough was enough. Changeling? Maybe. Coincidence? Perhaps. A good thing? Definitely. What was that Romani saying again? The one Nadya kept hissing? I chatski tsinuda de tehara, vai de haino, khal tut. The true nettle stings from the beginning. In short, if Hettie was ill intentioned or bad luck in skin or dangerous in any way she would have struck by now. And what was that muggle saying? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Why question a good thing?
"You takin' Fleetfire with ye? Towns an hour ride away, and Demon could be anywhere by now. If ye do find yourself heading into town there's a place on the outskirts, just on ye way in from the main road off our park called Charlie Strong's yard. Drina has a cousin there by the same name, knows us, knows we've been visitin' these last few days. Drop Fleetfire there if ye have to, he'll take good care of her. I'll head in at dawn and pick her up and bring her home after."
Hettie toed her boots straight and stood, making sure to check her head scarf, her wand safely hidden in the knot.
"Should be back in a turn. If Jibben suddenly gets worse-"
"We'll find ye, lass."
Hettie nodded and marched away from the warm fire.
"Tell Nadya I'll be back for breakfast!"
"Ye betta' be lass!"
xXx
In a hazy side street off Garrison Lane a row of cars were parked, waiting in the gutters for their drivers to come out from the warm pub, out into the moonlight and the smog and the Birmingham streets. Tommy, Arthur, John and Polly Shelby appeared, slinking out the pub doors and down the lane between the gas lamps like trouble on eight legs. The band split into two with a pledge to meet back at the bookies, Arthur and John sloping off for the furthest car and Tommy and Polly for the closest.
Tommy Shelby walked like a man making progress, pleased with his work as he moved towards his car parked in the shadows, keys in hand, Polly only a step behind. He also stalled at the waxed door, slows down, sixth sense tipping, and he thought he heard-
Hooves.
He shakes it off, slides the key home, hears the noise again, glances up and down the street, and he sees it. A horse, a beast of a thing, as black as the devils soul down Watery lane, breath fume staves rising from its nostrils and coiling into clouds, hooves trampling on the brick and the grime. The black horse looks right at him-
And then it turns and flies off down a side road towards the cut.
Tommy, of course, thought nothing of it. There's plenty of horses in Birmingham. Certainly, not ones like… That, but plenty to be sure. The beast likely got the jump on a stable hand and broke free, ran wild, and would be found come morning. Tommy wasn't going to follow a horse into a dark alley in the middle of the night in the heart of fuckin' Birmingham. Tommy Shelby thought nothing of it-
Until footsteps joined the sound of a retreating gallop. He peered over his shoulder, squinting in the dark, frowning and shouting at the running figure quickly disappearing into the fog.
"Pol?!"
But the woman was already sprinting down the lane, the way the horse had gone, heels clacking on the cobblestone.
"Wait! Pol!"
Tommy cursed and pulled his keys out, pocketing them before giving chase, Arthur and John already gone.
xXx
Tommy Shelby manages to catch up to Polly by the time they reach the underside of the bridge over the cut not too far off from Charlie Strong's yard. The low hanging bridge along with the tightness of the canal road with the sound of rushing water frightens the beast of a horse with its back to the brick. The fright of being followed has made him unpredictable. He kicks out and neighs, oil slick on the road, keen to release some kind of hell upon his pursuers.
Tommy had his hand in his suit jacket within a blink of an eye, draping around the handle of the 455 Mk VI. The Webley stashed to his chest, his other hand shooting out to grab Polly, who had maddeningly gone to bloody rush for the horse, by the scruff of her dress to yank her backwards.
That was around when the singing came.
"Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, lavender's green. When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen: Who told you so, dilly dilly, who told you so? 'Twas mine own heart, dilly dilly, that told me so."
It was an old English song, a lullaby, and one Thomas Shelby had not heard for many, many years, before the guns and the Garrison and the war he didn't all-the-way come home from. He had forgotten it had even existed before hearing it again.
Yet, there it was.
Polly used to sing it to them as children, after his mum died and after his da' left. Ada now sang it to Karl sometimes, when the weather was wet and heavy. Tommy used to sing it himself to Polly's kids, when no one else was around, before he was enlisted in the army and that young boy, the one who had been soft and kind, who would bounce a bubbling baby on his hip, had died out in a dirty trench. The girl, Hester, had crooned back at it, trying to mimic, though the boy Michael had only cried harder and squirmed to be let go.
He had never liked Tommy much. The girl, however-
Pol used to say it was the gypsy blood. As strong in him as it was in the young girl. Wild things know wild things as much as fire was made to burn, Pol used to say with that peculiar smile of hers. The one that meant she saw something in her shades and her spirits that were bittersweet. Tommy used to think she was simply happy someone, anyone, could get the child down for a nap and out of the garden.
The singing picked up, looping over the same words, and when Tommy's vision settled he witnesses the scene before him. She came from the other end of the road down the cut from Charlie Strong's yard way, and at first the girl was just a shadow, a smudge of black in the night, indistinct and hazy like the memory of the lullaby.
When she comes close enough, however, Tommy saw. He saw a whole lot.
She was young, eighteen, nineteen perhaps, and the first thing anyone could take note of was the tangle of curling black hair as dark as the night above reaching her lower back, perilously carried together and away from her face underneath a startling red and gold scarf.
Her face was striking in the way those old roman statues in the Birmingham museum were, graceful, ageless, straight and aquiline, and something a little bit untamed, all orbiting the vibrantly cold and distant blue of her eyes as if they held the stars themselves in their grip.
She was dressed like any other gypsy, in linen that was white and soft and stitched in patches, tied together underneath a mans old vest that had seen better days, and boots lined in muck like she had just come back from her own tour of being a claykicker. Her skin was tanned, peaking out from collar and cuff, days spent under the sun's warm rays and not inside or stashed in tunnels.
She also had her hands up, palm flat and open, singing as she edged closer to the brute of a beast-
A brute of a beast who had calmed at her voice, impossibly soothed. Tommy could only watch as she edged closer, begins to sink down, lowering, still singing… And the horse follows suit, laying down underneath the bridge of the cut, like she was holding a mirror up between them, simulating and imitating.
The horse huffed as it settles, but settles it does. The girl smiled brightly, a flash of white in the night.
"There we go, Demon."
She scuttled forward, hand still out, and the horse-
The horse nuzzled into her palm, and the girl-… The girl looks over to Tommy and glares.
"I swear if you don't take that hand out your coat and off from around that gun I know you have and you shoot my bloody horse, I'll make sure you won't leave this bridge with both your knees unbroken."
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