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pails.
    She carried the milk to the dairy and found her grandmother waiting.
    “Are you sure about the horse?” Ellen said without preamble.
    “Yes, of course,” replied Jess, puzzled.
    “They were talking this morning as if Freya just fell into the pool and drowned.” Jess stared at Ellen in disbelief.
    “Do they think I’ve lost my mind? Or that I made all this up? Is that what
you
think?”
    “No.” Ellen looked her in the eye. “I believe every word you said. But don’t be surprised if no one else mentions the horse again. It’s easier for them that way.”
    “What do you mean?” Jess started to ask, but her mother came in just then and Ellen gave a quick shake of her head that said, clear as words,
not now
.
     
    Jess tried several times that night to talk to her mother and father about what had really happened to Freya, but somehow they always turned the conversation in another direction or found something they had to do that couldn’t wait.
    Finally, Jess’s patience snapped.
    “Why won’t you listen?” she shouted. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
    Ian shot a glance at Martha.
    “We do know what happened. Freya drowned. Stop upsetting yourself with this tale. I don’t want to hear any more of it.”
     
    No one searched the next day. Ian went back to town with Arnor so that he wouldn’t have to go into the shop or house alone yet. Life on the farm returned, outwardly at least, to something like normal, though Jess and Ashe were forbidden to leave the farmyard alone for the time being.
    Which made no sense,
Jess noted as she swept the kitchen floor,
if Freya, as people said, had simply drowned
.
    Ellen appeared in the doorway, a cloud of white wool in her arms.
    “You don’t mind if I borrow Jess to help me pin out this shawl, do you?”
    “No, of course not,” said Martha, busy making bread at the big, scrubbed table.
    Jess followed her grandmother upstairs and they began to pin the gauzy shawl out. She was sure that wasn’t the only reason she was there, and waited impatiently for her grandmother to speak.
    “The horse was black, you said?” Ellen said suddenly.
    Jess nodded.
    “What about its eyes?” Ellen said, watching for her reaction.
    Jess gave a start. She hadn’t said anything about its eyes, she was sure.
    “They were blue,” she said quietly.
    Ellen closed her own eyes for a moment, then opened them as she spoke again.
    “You deserve the truth,” she said. “Even if those other fools choose not to see what’s in front of them. Sit down, lass, and I’ll tell you what really happened to your friend.”
    Jess sank down on the window seat as her grandmother settled herself in the chair.
    Ellen tried to decide where to begin.
At the beginning of course, you old fool,
she chided herself silently.
How else will it make sense?
    “When I was young – a year or two younger than you are now – a boy and a girl disappeared near the same pool, a fewmonths apart,” she began.
    “The boy – he was Ashe’s age – disappeared first. There was a search of course, but no sign of him was ever found. There were no tracks to follow; the weather had been too dry. There had been a gang of children playing hide and seek in the woods and it had been Euan’s turn to hide, so it was a long time before they realised he was missing. One of the other children said they’d seen a blue-eyed black horse near the pool a little while before, but none of the adults listened to her. They never found out what happened to Euan. A girl – I can’t remember her name after all these years – went missing about nine months later. Same place, and this time there were footprints and hoof prints – unshod hoof prints – mixed up at the pool’s edge.
    One old woman in Kirriemuir remembered what had been said about the horse after Euan disappeared, and started to whisper about the
Kelpies
. The Kelpies were a legend: a race of beings who lived in another world that could only be reached