deep enough to reveal what light, if any, was emerging from his skin. Wherever she stood, she couldn’t shield him from every flower at once and observe the luminosity of his body alone.
It was frustrating, but as she gave up and crawled into bed, Yalda thought of the bright side. If any light emerging from Dario’s skin was so faint that it was hidden by the forest’s glare, surely that meant that whatever hue he’d been losing back on the farm was now being replenished faster than it was leaking away.
She wriggled deeper into the cool soil, squashing a few worms who’d escaped her earlier evictions, and gazed up into the violet backlight. She thought about the arborine—skulking along the branches somewhere, angrier than the worms—but if he came for her in the night she’d been forewarned. And if he snatched the men, smaller morsels that they were, she’d forego Amata’s tortuous history of guilt and redemption and just cut them free first thing in the morning.
To Yalda’s delight, the forest by day did show some fidelity to Dario’s story: many of the smaller flowers in the undergrowth, shielded from sunlight by the canopy of branches, really did retain their radiance.
Most of the clearing, though, was not entirely sheltered from the sky. With the violet flowers curled up into crumpled sacs, sunlight spilled through the net of vines that had supported their outstretched petals, mottling the ground with brightness.
After breakfast, Yalda dug storage holes for the loaves they’d brought, and Vito used some of the groundflower petals in which they’d been wrapped as lining. Yalda didn’t trust the worms here to obey the usual rules, but her father assured her that the pungent scent of the petals would keep any vermin away.
Once that job was finished, Yalda had nothing left to do but gaze into the forest. It was a strange situation; if she’d been moping around on the farm Vito would have quickly found her a task, and if there’d been no work at all her cousins and siblings would have dragged her into some game or other with their usual boisterous energy.
At noon, Vito brought out three more loaves. Dario remained half-buried as he ate, emitting unselfconscious chirps of pleasure. Yalda stood watching the slight movements of the branches around her, trying to unravel their causes. Over the course of the morning, she had learned to tell the difference between the swaying motion brought on by the wind, which was shared by many branches at once, and the trembling of a single branch when a small lizard ran along it. Sometimes she could even spot the successive rebounds when a lizard launched itself from one branch and landed on another.
“What do lizards eat?” Yalda asked Vito.
“Insects, maybe,” he replied. “I’m not sure.”
Yalda contemplated the second part of his reply. How could he not be sure? Were there things about the world that adults didn’t know? Dario offered no verdict on the lizards’ diet, and though he might just have been too preoccupied to bother, Yalda was beginning to wonder if she’d misunderstood something important. She’d thought that every adult’s role was to instruct their children and answer their questions, until the children knew all there was to know—by which time they were adults too. But if some answers weren’t passed down from generation to generation, where did they come from?
Judging that it would be impolite to probe the extent of Dario’s knowledge in his hearing, Yalda waited until he had dozed off again.
“Who taught you about the stars?” she asked Vito. “All those things you were telling me last night?” She had never heard Dario speak about the origin of the color trails.
Vito said, “I learned that from your mother.”
“Oh!” Yalda was astonished; how could you learn anything from someone your own age? “But who taught it to her?”
“She had a friend, a girl named Clara.” Vito spoke slowly, as if the subject required some special effort to address. “Clara went to school. She’d tell your mother about the things she’d learned, and then your mother would explain them to me.”
Yalda knew there was a school in the village, but she’d always thought its purpose was to train people for unfamiliar jobs, not to answer their questions about the stars.
“I wish I could have met her,” she said.
“Clara?”
“My mother.”
Vito said wryly, “That’s like wishing you could fly.”
Yalda had heard the phrase before, but now it struck her as an odd choice for the epitome of unattainability. “What if we stretched our arms wide, like a mite’s wings—”
“People have tried that,” Vito assured her. “We’re too heavy, and too weak; it just doesn’t work.”
“Oh.” Yalda returned to the subject of her mother. “What else did she teach you?”
Vito had to think about that. “A little bit of writing. But I’m not sure I remember much.”
“Show me! Please!” Yalda wasn’t sure what the point of writing was, but the prospect of seeing her own father perform the elaborate trick was irresistible.
Vito did resist, but not for long. “I’ll try,” he said. “But you’ll need to be patient with me.”
He stood for a while, silent and motionless. Then the skin of his chest began to tremble, as if he were shooing off insects, and Yalda noticed some strange, curved ridges starting to appear. They weren’t holding still, though; they were slipping away across his body. Yalda could see him struggling to keep them in place, but he wasn’t succeeding.
Vito relaxed, smoothing out his skin. Then he tried again. This time, a single, short ridge formed near the center of his chest, and though it quivered a bit, it more or less stayed put. Then as Yalda watched, it bent in on itself until it formed a crude circle.
“The sun!” she said.
“Let’s see if I can do the next one.” Vito’s tympanum grew taut with concentration as the ridge spread out and reformed, winding itself into five wide loops.
“A flower!”
“One more.” The flower split apart and the lines that had formed the petals softened, but then the fragments came together in a new configuration and the ridges grew sharp and clear again.
“An eye!”
“All right, three symbols, that’s enough!” Vito’s shoulders sagged.
“Teach me how to do it!” Yalda pleaded.
“It’s not easy,” Vito said. “It takes a lot of practice.”
“There’s nothing else to do here,” Yalda pointed out. She would have happily gone exploring in the forest instead, chasing the lizards to find out what they ate, but they couldn’t leave Dario behind.
“I suppose we could try one symbol,” Vito said reluctantly.
He beckoned to her, and Yalda knelt down so she was closer to her father’s height. He sharpened a finger and began scratching gently on her chest, never moving from the same small spot. Soon his touch was as irritating as the attentions of any insect.
Yalda squirmed; her skin was quivering, but that was giving her no respite. A mite would be swiftly unseated, but this prodding finger was far too heavy to dislodge.
“Don’t move your shoulders!” Vito reprimanded her. “Just use your skin. It’s something you’re doing dozens of times a day already, but you have to learn to control it more precisely.”
“I don’t see any shapes yet,” Yalda complained.
Vito said, “Be patient! The first thing is to make yourself aware of what’s going on under your skin. Then you can try to shift the point where it’s happening.”
It was harder than changing her posture, harder than reshaping her hands, harder than anything Yalda had tried to do with her body before. Most transformations took some effort, but once she pushed herself her instincts took over. This was different; the only thing her instincts wanted her to do was stop wasting her time with this ineffectual shuddering and simply sweep away the nuisance with her hands.
But she persisted. Her mother had learned to do this, taught by her friend, then passed on the skill to her father. Impossible or not,
By the time the clearing fell into gloom and the violet flowers above them unfurled across their nets, Yalda had made her own sun, written on her skin. As she peered down at her chest the dark circle writhed like a worm
