pillow, and has no time for peasants, no place among the wood and stone and river water.
Adeline’s father thinks Estele is mad.
Her mother says that the woman is bound for Hell, and once, when Adeline repeated as much, Estele laughed her dry-leaf laugh and said there was no such place, only the cool dark soil and the promise of sleep.
“And what of Heaven?” asked Adeline.
“Heaven is a nice spot in the shade, a broad tree over my bones.”
At twelve, Adeline wonders which god she should pray to now, to make her father change his mind. He has loaded up his cart with wares bound for Le Mans, has harnessed Maxime, but for the first time in six years, she is not going with him.
He has promised to bring her a fresh pad of parchment, new tools with which to sketch. But they both know she would rather go and have no gifts, would rather see the world outside than have another pad to draw on. She is running out of subjects, has memorized the tired lines of the village, and all the familiar faces in it.
But this year, her mother has decided that it isn’t right for her to go to market, it isn’t fitting, even though Adeline knows she can still fit on that wooden bench beside her father.
Her mother wishes she was more like Isabelle Therault, sweet and kind and utterly incurious, content to keep her eyes down upon her knitting instead of looking up at clouds, instead of wondering what’s around the bend, over the hills.
But Adeline does not know how to be like Isabelle.
She does not want to be like Isabelle.
She wants only to go to Le Mans, and once there, to watch the people and see the art all around, and taste the food, and discover things she hasn’t heard of yet.
“Please,” she says, as her father climbs up into the cart. She should have stowed away among the woodworks, hidden safe beneath the tarp. But now it is too late, and when Adeline reaches for the wheel, her mother catches her by the wrist and pulls her back.
“Enough,” she says.
Her father looks at them, and then away. The cart sets out, and when Adeline tries to tear free and run after the cart, her mother’s hand flashes out again, this time finding her cheek.
Tears spring to her eyes, a vivid blush before the rising bruise, and her mother’s voice when it lands is a second blow.
“You are not a child anymore.”
And Adeline understands—and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up. She is so angry then that she wants to run away. Wants to fling her mother’s needlework into the hearth and break every half-made sculpture in her father’s shop.
Instead, she watches the cart round the bend, and vanish between trees, with one hand clenched around her father’s ring. Adeline waits for her mother to let her go, and send her on to do her chores.
And then she goes to find Estele.
Estele, who still worships the old gods.
Adeline must have been five or six the first time she saw the woman drop her stone cup into the river. It was a pretty thing, with a pattern pressed like lace into its sides, and the old woman just let it fall, admiring the splash. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving, and when Adeline ambushed the old woman—she was already old, has always been old—on the path home, Estele said she was praying to the gods.
“What for?”
“Marie’s child isn’t coming as it should,” she said. “I asked the river gods to make things flow smooth. They are good at that.”
“But why did you give them your cup?”
“Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”
Addie. A pet name, one her mother scorned as boyish. A name her father favored, but only when they were alone. A name that rang like a bell in her bones. A name that suited her far more than Adeline.
Now, she finds Estele in her garden, folded in among the wild vines of squash, the thorny spine of a blackberry bush, bent low as a warping branch.
“Addie.” The old woman says her name without looking up.
It is autumn, and the ground is littered with the stones of fruit that didn’t ripen as it should. Addie nudges them with the toe of her shoe. “How do you talk to them?” she asks. “The old gods. Do you call them by name?”
Estele straightens, joints cracking like dry