crows. Owl. Eagle. Moon. Me.
She started slow, following the assigned trails, writing down the common birds that were too slow or too stupid to avoid the school. She showed her lists to their faculty advisor every other Tuesday, when the club held its official meetings. She sat at the back of the room and made notes, which she willingly shared with anyone who asked. She thought this was fair value for the freedom to rove farther and farther from the school building itself, following the promise of rare bird sightings away from the thick stone walls that held no future for her.
Every time she went out, she carried a handful of potential trade goods with her, hiding them in the hollow of an old hickory tree. By the end of six weeks, she felt rich from all the pencils and buttons and bright-colored ribbons she had hidden there, enough to pay for food and lodging for an entire season at the Market.
Only once did another student catch her in the act of accessing her cache, another upperclassman, this one an exile for “unnatural urges,” a phrase Lundy still didn’t quite understand. The teen stared at her across the clearing. Lundy froze with her hand inside the hickory, barely daring to breathe.
“They won’t announce it, but Miss Henley who does the Thursday night patrol has the flu and no one wants to take her shift, so there’s not going to be a Thursday night patrol,” said the older girl, voice low, in case someone might come along and overhear her. “If you’re going to run, you should do it then, when there’s nobody looking.”
The teen walked away, leaving Lundy’s head spinning. This could be a trap. It didn’t feel like a trap, but the good traps never did, did they? If every trap felt like a trap, they’d never catch anyone.
But the woods at night, with a full bag and no one to stop her . . . it was a temptation too great to be denied. Lundy swallowed her fear and her concern and returned to the classroom, sitting with her hands folded in her uniformed lap, listening as the teacher droned on about comportment and manners and the importance of not bringing shame to the family, and her thoughts were full of beating wings and the sweet smell of impossible fruits.
Later—when her parents were summoned to the school in the wake of her disappearance, when her father and the headmaster were flinging accusations back and forth like a golden ball—her teachers would say she’d been attentive and polite during her last days with them, that she had listened more closely than ever before, participating in class discussions with the passion of the converted. “We felt like we were finally reaching her,” they would say, and their words would be defensive apology and lament at the same time, because the teachers of the Chesholm School truly believed in the work they were doing, truly believed they could, with hard work and strict discipline, lead the children in their care to a better life.
Later, the school would say she’d run away, and her father would point to the literature where they bragged about their unclimbable fence, their professional security teams, and ask how that was possible. He would say she must have been taken, telling a little lie to cover the huge, inconvenient truth that she had run so far that she might never be recovered, so far that she had crossed into another, impossible world rather than spend one more minute in this one. The authorities would become involved. Money would change hands—what the school would consider blood money, paid for silence, and Franklin Lundy would consider fair value for a daughter, and silently, secretly bill against the Goblin Market in his dreams.
But that is all later.
When Thursday arrived, creeping into the present one day at a time, as days are wont to do, Lundy rose, dressed, and went about her day as she always did. No one noticed her slipping an extra apple into her pocket at lunch, or taking a handful of pencils from the supply cupboard in her English class. She might not have become a better student during her time at the Chesholm School, but she had definitely become a better thief. She counted off the minutes of her classes with her hands folded on her desk and her eyes on the teachers, giving no outward sign that anything was wrong. She needed, more than anything,