Epilogue
It was only temporary. They would stay, they told Asta’s parents when they got to the farm, only as long as it took to heal and figure out what they were going to do next.
They slept in Asta’s old room together. Asta’s mother had not liked this arrangement, but with Leif in the house, they were out of bedrooms. And Linden liked to sit on the couch in the mornings with his coffee and his newspaper, which he couldn’t very well do if Felix was sleeping there.
When the trailer had arrived from Port Veracruz with Carmine in it, Asta reminded her father that he had once sworn that dragons would enter the Ekenberg Farm only over his dead body.
‘You going to keel over just to prove a point, Papa?’
‘Oh, Asta,’ Maeve had chided, ‘don’t joke about that.’
‘It’s only temporary,’ Linden had said, shrugging. And yet it seemed like every other day, Asta spotted him out in the field with Carmine, talking affectionate nonsense and wrestling the dragon’s horns.
Carmine was supposed to be the exception to the rule.
The only dragon. But after the third time that Essie broke out of her stall at night and ran across the fields to break into Carmine’s, Linden had started saving little nibbles of fatty salmon skin for her, which was her favorite.
After the fourth time, he started clearing out the stall next to Carmine’s.
They did try to bring Essie back. As Peter Seraphin made very clear to his son, she belonged to the Seraphin racing house, not Felix – and Felix no longer raced for the Seraphins. But a half dozen escapes had broken Peter’s resolve.
‘Just keep her,’ he said when Asta and Felix had knocked on the door of the estate house that final time, Essie’s lead in Asta’s hand. Peter’s mouth had been turned down in a way that Asta thought looked more sad than angry.
Now, Carmine and Essie spent their days together chasing and eating any hapless rabbits that lolloped through their pasture, scaring the cows on the other side of the glittering containment fence, going for rides through the woods with Felix and Asta, and spreading their wings in the sun.
At night, sometimes, Felix would go to the upper field, to stand under Asta’s old oak tree and throw gleaming illusions of running dragons into the sky.
He said he made them for his sister, Monika, but Asta suspected they were mostly for Peter – little missives from his son.
If the man had half a brain, Asta thought, he would answer.
But so far, he had stayed as silent as the oak.
After their first month at the Ekenberg Farm, Asta began to worry that her parents wanted them to stay.
This was not on her account, she thought.
It had turned out to be far too easy to slip back into the habits she had developed when she was a child in this house.
She left balled-up dishrags on the sink to get mildewy and wreaked havoc on her mother’s careful organizational system for the refrigerator, creating tippy little towers that fell on whoever went in there after her.
And she was as lazy with her chores as ever.
No, her parents wanted them to stay because of Felix.
He was obviously their favorite, and Asta couldn’t blame them.
Felix’s knee bothered him on rainy days, but he helped out as much as he could.
Linden seemed to like having him around to talk to as much as anything.
He even took him out bird-watching a few times, which had delighted Asta more than she could say.
But as much as she liked picking bits of hay out of Felix’s hair and teasing him about the dung on his expensive boots, Asta knew that they couldn’t stay.
If you didn’t race, what would you do? Allie’s question had opened up a little crack in Asta. Over the past few weeks, that crack had eroded into a deep gulley. And now, there was movement there in its shadows. Something was stirring, glinting.
The answer came to her one night, just as winter was starting to set in.
She had been outside, walking up and down the lane, watching Felix’s illusions.
Suddenly, she could see it all: the glittering spectacles that Felix would build to boggle the mind; the crowds, gasping with awe; and Asta and Carmine, breaking every rule that had ever been written about how to ride, how to fly.
No petty games to play. No rings to kiss.
No regulations hanging over them. Just Carmine and Asta and the open sky.
She ran toward the oak, hurdling the fences between the fields, as lithe and sure as Carmine had ever been on the track. She grabbed Felix when she reached him, spinning him by his arms. The illusion he had been working scattered into sparks and fell around their heads.
She looked into his face, illuminated by the golden glow. Her heart burned so bright and hot that she wondered if it might not be shedding its own light.
‘I know what I want to do,’ she said.