was the expression in her eyes. If Ettie wasn’t mistaken they had changed color. She remembered them as gray as stone, but now they glinted with light.
They walked toward one another, each measuring the other.
“Do not get to your knees,” Ettie warned the golem when they met.
Ava smiled. She hadn’t intended to. She was not the same foolish creature she had been on the train. “I can still thank you.”
“For bringing you into this wretched place?” Ettie felt a wave of guilt for her selfish actions in creating life in exchange for a price. “I should get on my knees and beg you to forgive me.”
It was a heartless world, but there were the swifts, soaring above them in the half-light.
“No. I’m grateful to you,” Ava said.
“You realize that you were born to do our bidding? To serve us and nothing more?”
Ava knew that her maker was wrong. She was born to walk through the reeds and dance with the heron, she was made to watch Lea sleep safely through the night and to feel the sun on her skin and to stand here in the rabbi’s boots beneath a bower of green leaves.
“And what were you born to do?” she asked her maker.
Ettie grimaced. She knew the truth about herself. “I was born to fight.”
They sat in the wooden chairs where the doctor’s wife had spent early mornings in the last weeks of her life in order to watch the sun rise. Azriel had often kept Sarah Girard company; he had appreciated the long view through the trees, across to the mountains, and now he had returned to sit at Ettie’s feet. He could unleash flames and fire if he wished to do so, he could open the earth to send a plague of snakes and frogs. Instead, he leaned against Ettie’s legs, so that she thought a breeze had come up.
“If you fight,” Ava told her, “you will die.” She could glimpse the future, not for herself, but certainly for her maker. She saw a field and she knew that Ettie wished she had never let go of her sister’s hand.
“We all die,” Ettie responded. “Except for you. Until the girl gets rid of you.”
Lea was in the house, asleep, or sleeping as best she could. She had bad dreams of bees and of those she had lost, dreams that had turned her hair white.
“We had no right to make you and she has no right to unmake you,” Ettie said.
Ava saw Azriel’s eyes flicker over her maker. “If I don’t stop you, you will die.”
She was strong enough, she could do so if she wished.
Ettie nodded. “And if I don’t stop you, you will.”
They exchanged a gaze, aware that they would leave each other to their own fates.
“You have fulfilled your part of the bargain,” Ettie assured her creation. “A mother could not ask for more. As soon as the girl is safe, don’t think twice. Run away.”
But the vow Ava had made was no longer a burden. It was a choice. She might have run if the bees had not changed her fate, but now she would stay. She had been wrong to try to gain more time on earth. That was not why she had been made, but perhaps the first human trait a creature such as herself would acquire was to be selfish. She was renouncing that now. She sat with her maker and they both wept because they would not see each other again. What had been created was alive. Ettie did not see clay before her, but rather a woman who had been made by women, brought to life by their blood and needs and desires.
Later, as the sun was breaking, after Ettie had gone inside, Ava made her way through the woods until she reached the bare reeds. The river was only a trickle now, splashing over the rocks. The fish were singing with their silver voices. It was a perfect summer day, despite the cruelty of the world. When the heron came, Ava bowed to him, then asked for one last favor.
Find him if you can.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE BEAST
HAUTE-LOIRE, AUGUST 1944
ETTIE SLEPT MORE FITFULLY AS the day drew closer. It was hard to sleep after you had heard a prophecy, harder still when you believed it. Once Victor came for her, time moved in a rush, as if they had stepped inside a rocket ship that was rattling through the Milky Way, a journey that, once begun, could not be undone.