Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)

by Seanan McGuire

Daisy smiled, watching the girl go. It had been so long since there was a human in the Hooflands. She didn’t like to consider what might be ahead of them that was bad enough to require human intervention. Humans were heroes and lightning rods for disaster, and none of the stories she’d heard about them when she was a filly had ended gently for them, or for the people around them. Aster had always been careful to tell Chicory the most hopeful of the human stories, the ones where the humans did their grand deeds and disappeared, presumably going back where they came from, but Daisy’s own mother had been less circumspect, and she knew where most of the humans had gone when their battle ended—into the ground. She couldn’t possibly say whether the same fate waited for Regan—it was too soon for that, and she’d never heard of a human hero as young as Regan was, or as eager to please—but the girl was more likely to find her own doom than a doorway home. In the meantime, the herd would care for and tend to her, and part of that caring was keeping her busy enough that her thoughts didn’t devour themselves alive. She was a child, far from home, surrounded by members of a species that wasn’t hers. It would have been understandable for her to fall into despair. The fact that she hadn’t was barely shy of a miracle, and one more piece of proof that humans could do anything when they put their minds to it.