a raptor of some kind, most likely a golden eagle, proud and wild and not subject to such mammalian cruelties. That night she dreamt of flying, soaring high and free above the land, and nothing could catch her, or touch her, or bring her back to earth. She dreamt of Moon and Mockery, standing beneath her, watching how she caught the wind.
That night, Lundy began plotting her escape.
It was not difficult to begin modifying the pattern of her days. The habit of friendship had never come easily to her, and while most of the other students thought reasonably well of her, when they thought of her at all, none of them counted her as a close companion. It was a small thing to withdraw, to choose the library over the gaming field, the empty classroom over the cafeteria. The staff at the Chesholm School were meant to ensure that every student had proper exercise and access to fresh air, but the reality of things was that the quiet girls, the patient girls, the girls who didn’t make waves or make trouble, could effectively do as they liked when not in class.
Lundy did her lessons, did her chores, and watched the doors, waiting for one of them to shift in its frame, to become something it wasn’t intended to be. Weeks went by with no such transformation. She began to question whether it was ever going to happen at all.
This, she finally realized, was the true intent of her banishment; she was meant to begin questioning what had happened to her, where she had gone, what she had seen. She was meant to forget Moon and Mockery, and the Archivist, and the taste of Vincent’s pies. And maybe she could have done it, maybe she could have left them behind, if not for the patch of impossible feathers on the nape of her neck. Children did not sprout feathers in this world. If she had sprouted feathers, she must have done it somewhere else. The only other world she could remember was the Goblin Market—which meant the Market was real, and this slow, grinding extinction of the child she had been was nothing more than an attempt to keep her away from it.
She was staring at a closet door when she caught a flicker of motion and turned to see one of her classmates walking down the hall, a stack of books tucked under her arm. Lundy frowned.
“Hello,” she said. The other girl looked up, apparently startled to hear herself addressed. “Do you come this way often?”
“Every day,” said the girl, with a look on her face that clearly indicated she was questioning Lundy’s sanity. She hurried onward, not offering any further conversation.
Still frowning, Lundy gave the closet another thoughtful look. The first door had been in a tree, and there had been no one else around. The second door had been in the school hallway, yes, but the hall had been empty, hadn’t it? The middle of the day meant people were locked in their classrooms, by and large, and there had been no one there to see her go.
That was the reason her father had selected a school guaranteed to turn a rebellious child into an obedient one, promising an absolute absence of privacy. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been entirely unsupervised. She was never alone, and the doors couldn’t find her.
That needed to change.
Lundy looked over the school activities the next day, considering each of them in turn until she found one which seemed to fit her needs. Neatly, she put her name down on the list. The upperclassman who was meant to be supervising the signups looked at her quizzically.
“Birdwatching?” she asked. “Really? You’ve never struck me as the naturalist type.”
Having gone out of her way not to strike anyone as any type of anything, Lundy smiled politely. “I appreciate birds,” she said. “And my father’s latest letter said if he felt I was making more of an effort to participate in the life of the school, he might let me come home at the end of the term. I want to show that I’m willing.”
The upperclassman smirked, as if to say that no one ever really left the Chesholm School behind. But she stamped Lundy’s application for the birdwatching club all the same, and handed her a notebook with an attached pencil, so she could start writing down the birds she saw.
Birds I want to see, thought Lundy, dutifully recording sparrows and blackbirds and