meant was that she wanted to go home, back to a world where things made sense and girls with orange eyes didn’t touch her without permission. But she hadn’t said that, had she? She’d said she wanted to go, and they were going. It was a loophole, one she’d created with her own voice, and she grudgingly respected it, even as she allowed herself to be pulled along.
After a few seconds, she relaxed and started looking around, letting the owl-eyed girl lead the way. There was so much to see, so much to hear and smell and take note of to remember later. Not all the smells were pleasant ones—livestock and too many bodies saw to that—but there were more spices and sweet fruits than garbage piles and outhouses. A rooster crew in the distance. Someone played a fiddle, the tune dancing rapidly from one key to another, climbing like a boy in a fairy tale climbed a beanstalk.
Yes. That was the answer, and Katherine seized on it with both hands. If she thought of this as a fairy tale that she had somehow stumbled into, she could handle it. She knew the rules of fairy tales. Most importantly of all, she knew that fairy tales ended with “happy ever after” and everything being just fine. Better than fine: with everything being perfect. Perfect would be all right. She liked the idea of perfect.
The owl-eyed girl ran until the crowd began to thin around them, until they were past the wagons and the tents and the stalls. She ran until the sounds of people passing were replaced by the warble and caw and screech of birds, until the branches of the trees that were closing in around them—big trees, climbing trees, patchwork trees that looked suspiciously like the one where the door had been—dripped with birdcages instead of fruit. They were filled with birds the likes of which Katherine had never seen before, birds in every color of the rainbow and a few the rainbow itself had forgotten about. The ones she did recognize seemed bigger and cleverer than the ones she knew, pigeons the size of chickens, eagles with wings whose span must have been measured in exclamations instead of inches.
Somewhere on their journey through the impossible market, they had stepped onto a narrow ribbon of a path that wound and twisted through those bird-laden trees. At its end was a house. Katherine supposed it was house, at least; it could also have been called a hut, if she was being charitable, and a shack, if she wasn’t. It was too small to be more than one room no bigger than her own, with mossy shingles on the roof and bright geometric designs painted on the walls. A porch ran all the way around it, groaning under the weight of the container gardens stacked from wall to edge, each of them brimming with herbs.
The owl-eyed girl came to a sudden stop a few feet from the door, dragging Katherine to a halt. Katherine stumbled, glaring at the owl-eyed girl, who didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she dropped Katherine’s hand in order to cup her own hands around her mouth.
“Hello, the house!” she shouted. “It’s Moon! I’m outside! I found a new girl! She doesn’t know the rules!”
“I read them,” said Katherine peevishly. “One of them was ‘names have power.’ Should you really be shouting your name like it isn’t anything?”
“That isn’t my name, new girl,” said the owl-eyed girl. She did look like someone who could be called “Moon” without anyone laughing at her. Her face was narrow and her cheeks were flushed, but there was something about her that spoke of midnights and secrets and things no one dared to say during the day. “That’s just what people say when they want to talk about me. Whatever your name is, you don’t give it to anyone you meet here. Promise me.”
“I don’t—”
Once again, Moon was in her face too fast and too silently to have been seen in motion. It was like she’d foregone one place for another without traveling the distance between. “Promise me,” she hissed. “Your name is your heart, and you don’t give your heart away. Promise.”
“I promise,” said Katherine, wide eyed and suddenly, inexplicably afraid.
“Good.” Moon stepped back.
The door swung open. A woman stepped out.
She was tall. Taller than Katherine or Moon; taller even than Katherine’s father, who was the yardstick she used to measure out the world. Her hair was the color of