to be seen as normal.
The feathers on the back of her neck itched, edges brushing against her skin until it was almost maddening, and she didn’t scratch, and she didn’t draw attention to herself. She was going back where they could be paid off, where fair value could be achieved—or its opposite, where she could allow herself to slide peacefully into debt and feel the sky stretched out around her in a loving embrace, talons spread and wings bearing her ever on. She was going home.
The final bell rang. She rose with the others, and returned to her dorm to collect her birdwatching things. Her active and enthusiastic club participation was well known within her dorm. No one questioned her planning an after-dinner excursion. She had filed all the appropriate forms, gathered all the appropriate permissions.
No one questioned anything, until she walked into the woods and did not come back.
* * *
LUNDY WALKED through the trees with a spring in her step and the weight of her bag hanging against her hip, every pilfered pencil and stolen scrap of ribbon reassuring her that she was going, she was on her way. There was no turning back now. Evening walks were allowed for birdwatchers, but they were logged out and logged back in, and by now the upperclassman in charge of watching the register would surely have noticed that she was running late.
She’d been walking for more than an hour, heading deeper and deeper into the trees surrounding the campus. Strange sounds called to her from out of the foliage, the cries of owls and the rustling of nocturnal animals. She ignored them. Nothing here could frighten her, not after the things she’d seen and done and faced in the Goblin Market. What did a few noises have on the Bone Wraiths, on the Wasp Queen? This was a test at most, a distraction at least, and so she walked on.
Her feet hurt. Her legs, no longer accustomed to traveling miles in a single session, ached, and her thighs chafed where they rubbed together. If not for the feathers on the back of her neck, she might have started to believe what her father had said before committing her to boarding school—that she had had a dream, wonderful and terrible and untrue, and now was the time to wake up. She might have turned back.
But the feathers on the back of her neck were real. It hurt when she tugged on them, and as her mammalian body had undergone puberty, they, too, had changed, growing longer and stronger and darker. Even for a bird, she was no longer a fledgling. And if she wasn’t a fledgling, she could walk.
She walked until she saw a tree that looked like it belonged to a different forest, twisted until there wasn’t a straight line anywhere in its trunk or in its branches, with leaves in a dozen delicate shades of green. Lundy’s breath caught. She did not hurry, but angled toward it as a flower angles toward the sun.
When she drew closer, she saw that at the center of its trunk, there was a door, and that graven on the door were two simple words:
BE SURE
“I am,” she whispered, and pushed the door open, and stepped through, and was gone.
11
IN AIR AS CLEAR AS CRYSTAL
LUNDY STEPPED OUT of the impossible hall and into the comforting, golden-lit darkness of the Market by night. Candles, paper lanterns, and colorful glass lamps hung from wagons and stalls, providing enough illumination to see by, if not to do fine needlework or read. She didn’t need to do either of those things. As if in a dream, she wandered toward the first rank of sellers.
A few were still open, despite the lateness of the hour. They looked at her uniform, at her legs, long and gawky with the latest attack of puberty upon her frame, and politely looked away. The clothing booths were closed for the night, and she was dressed; there was no value to be had in pulling a seamstress or tailor from their bed and thrusting her at them.
Surprisingly few of them recognized her, for she was a child no longer: her hair, which had never been very long before, or terribly well tended, hung loose down her back, secured with a ribbon tied just so, according to the exacting standards of the Chesholm School. Her skin, which had been dirty and bruised and freckled in the way of Market children, was clean. Even her uniform,