the first rise of flight.
She crouches to gather it up, but by the time she straightens, the splinters on the ground are gone, and in her hand, the little wooden bird is whole again. She nearly drops it in surprise, doesn’t know why this is the thing that seems impossible. She has been made a stranger, has seen herself slide from the minds of those she’s known and loved like the sun behind a cloud, has watched every mark she tries to make as it’s undone, erased.
But the bird is different.
Perhaps because she can hold it in her hands. Perhaps because, for an instant, it seems a blessing, this undoing of an accident, a righting of a wrong, and not simply an extension of her own erasure. The inability to leave a mark. But Adeline doesn’t think of it that way, not yet, has not spent months turning the curse over in her hands, memorizing its shape, studying the smooth surfaces in search of cracks.
In this moment, she simply clutches the small, unbroken bird, grateful that it’s safe.
She is about to return the figure to its flock when something stops her—perhaps the oddness of the moment, perhaps the fact that she is already missing this life, even if it will never miss her—but she tucks the bird into the pocket of her skirts, and forces herself out of the shed, and away from her home.
Down the road, and past the twisted yew tree, and around the bend, until she has reached the edge of town. Only then does she let herself look back, let her gaze drift one last time to the line of trees across the field, the dense shadow stretched beneath the sun, before she turns her back on the forest, and the village of Villon, and the life that is no longer hers, and begins to walk.
Villon-sur-Sarthe, France
July 30, 1714
XIV
Villon vanishes like a cart around a bend, the rooftops swallowed up by the trees and the hills of the surrounding country. By the time Adeline musters the courage to look back, it is gone.
She sighs, and turns, and walks, wincing at the strange shape of George’s boots.
They are too large by half. Adeline found socks on a washing line, shoved them into the toes of the shoes to make them fit, but by the fourth hour of walking she can feel the places where her skin has rubbed raw, the blood pooling in the leather soles. She is afraid to look, and so she doesn’t, focuses only on the path ahead.
She has decided to walk toward the walled city of Le Mans. It is the farthest she has ever gone, and even still, she has never made the trip alone.
She knows the world is so much larger than the towns along the Sarthe, but right now she cannot think beyond the road in front of her. Every step she takes is a step away from Villon, away from a life that is no longer hers.
You wanted to be free, says a voice in her head, but it is not hers; no, it is deeper, smoother, lined with satin and woodsmoke.
She skirts the villages, the farms alone in their fields. There are whole stretches when the world seems to empty around her. As if an artist drew the barest lines of the landscape, then turned, distracted, from the task.
Once, Adeline hears a cart trundling down the road, and ducks into the shade of a nearby grove and waits for it to pass. She does not want to stray too far from the road, or the river, but over her shoulder, through a copse of trees, she sees the yellow blush of summer fruit, and her stomach aches with longing.
An orchard.
The shade is lovely, the air cool, and she picks a ripened peach from a low branch and sinks her teeth greedily into the fruit, her empty stomach cramping around the sugared bite. Despite the pain, she eats a pear as well, and a handful of mirabelles, scoops palm and after palm of water from a well at the orchard’s edge, before forcing herself forward, out of the shelter and back into the summer heat.
The shadows are stretching long when she finally sinks onto the riverbank and pulls off the boots to assess the damage to her feet.
But there is none.
The socks are unbloody. Her heels, uncut. No sign of the miles walked, the wear and tear of so many hours on the packed-earth road, though she felt the