The Hex Witch of Seldom by Nancy Springer

morning, she did her chores and left for school without speaking to her grandfather. But he saw her walking down the lane toward the bus stop and called her back.
    He looked hard at her, and she met his stare without expression. He wanted to say something to help, somehow, but it came out sounding as hard as his stone-colored stare.
    â€œTime you get home,” he told her, “it’ll be done. Now, don’t fuss no more. Pay attention to your teachers.”
    Bobbi nodded and left.
    Three-quarters of the way down the lane she met the vet’s truck rattling up. Doc Boser waved at her. She waved back, turned and watched him drive out of sight up Canadawa Mountain.
    Then she stepped off the lane into the woods, left her schoolbooks and started back up the slope toward home, at a run. She had no plan. In fact, she was trying not to think. There was a knotted feeling in her chest that she did not want to name. She told herself that she was going to watch and see for herself what gelding was like. Then she would know what—what had been done to—
    Shane’s image shadowed her mind, black, no matter how she tried to send it away. She ran as if wildcats were after her. Like a deer she crashed through briars and underbrush. When she saw the maroon siding of the barn through the trees and slowed down to be more quiet, her heart would not quit pounding. She felt half panicked. Skipping school to watch something on the sly, a small rebellion, should not have made her feel so scared.… She quelled the thought. She did not dare think.
    The big door at her end of the barn, the end away from the corral, hung open. Bobbi slipped out of the woods, edged along the barn wall, and risked a peek inside. Shane.… The black horse had not yet been touched. Relief washed over her, a feeling as dangerous as a thought; she sent it away, trying merely to see what was happening in front of her. Doc and Pap in the barn, working on the sorrel.
    Take the easiest horse first was the horseman’s rule, whatever needed to be done. The horse that was likely to give trouble always waited until last; otherwise, his struggling would upset the others and cause them to give trouble as well. Since the sorrel was halter-trained, Pap and Doc were gelding him first. In a way hidden even from herself, Bobbi had been counting on that.
    She eased her eye past the door frame and watched. Both men were busy, and neither of them saw her. Grant Yandro was just taking the twitch, a sort of metal clamp, off the sorrel’s nose after using it to make the horse hold still while the vet injected the sedative into the neck. The sorrel’s head sagged; Bobbi could see it through the stall door. Doc had unbundled his instruments. They lay on a white cloth on the stall ledge. Bobbi watched as the vet selected a scalpel and disappeared into the stall. Most vets laid horses on their sides to castrate them, but Doc Boser preferred to do them standing up. Pap steadied the sorrel by the halter—the horse was standing on tottering legs, nearly falling, much too weak and shaky to struggle. Its head drooped nearly to Grand-pap’s knees.
    The sorrel groaned.
    Deep, heaved up from the inmost depths of the horse’s helpless pain, the groan trembled through the stable. Bobbi felt her fists curl. The knot in her chest turned into something that stung like smoke, burned like flame. The sorrel groaned as if it were giving up its soul. Something round and bloody, tossed out of the stall, landed in the dirt of the barn aisle. A cluster of stable cats gathered around it.
    Deliberately Bobbi shifted her stare and looked at Shane in his stall at the other end of the barn, the corral end.
    The door there stood open wide, like the one she stood at, for light. Bobbi could see the black mustang plainly, and she saw how sweat slicked his black hide, how the whites showed around the blue of his eyes, and she knew Shane’s fear was not horse fear, made up