“What if the soldiers come?”
“Let them come,” he said with more conviction than he actually felt. “They can’t see her anyway.” This had largely been true. While the dogs were aware of the child from the moment they encountered her, no one else seemed to notice that she was there. Both the junk man and the egg woman had tested this, taking the child to the market, to the well, to the monthly census, and to the required church services, and the results were the same: no one noticed the baby. Not even when she cried. She was invisible, inaudible, a cipher.
All’s the better, the junk man thought.
But Marla worried. For what purpose? she wondered. And for how long? At Marla’s insistence, the junk man agreed to have the girl stay with the egg woman for one week per month.
“Because someone has to teach her how to keep herself clean and whole,” Marla explained. “Someone will have to teach her to read and write and reason. How to mend a sock and make a jacket and keep the wind out and make stew. Someone will have to show her how to take care of her lady bits when they change and how to shoo the boys away when they come sniffing around. Someone will have to teach her how to protect herself.”
The idea that there might, some day, be any lady bits to manage or any wooing boys crossing his path was more than the junk man could bear, and he agreed to the situation.
(Besides, he reasoned, while he could get reasonably drunk with a baby in tow, he couldn’t get good and drunk, and the thought of saying farewell to his periodic blackouts was a devastating one. Now, he could limit his benders to the first week of the month.)
Marla, of course, had come to a similar conclusion, which is why she suggested the situation in the first place. She knew how much he loved the inside of a bottle.
But most of all, Marla thought of her own taken child (dead now, most likely. Worked to death. Pale lips. Milky eyes. Red flowers, red flowers, red, red, red) and how to protect the Sparrow. How to hide the curious curl in her navel. Hide the oddness of her birth. And her death. And her un-death. Hide everything. Marla worked twice as hard and sold what she could and bought fabric for the girl’s clothes and leather for her shoes and traveling gear, should they ever need to leave her beloved home at a run, and live out their lives in hiding.
(Where would they go? her heart asked her.)
(Marla told her heart to hush.)
And Marla hoped that the magic inside the girl—untapped, unknown, unnamed—would remain inside. That if she didn’t know about the magic, then she would not use the magic, and thus no laws would be broken and no unlicensed magic children would be repossessed by the heartless soldiers of the Minister’s personal guard. She would be raised as a regular child—hidden, yes, unconventional in terms of lifestyle, clearly, but fundamentally a regular child.
It was a good plan, Marla decided. And it would work. She decided that too.
But then, odd things started happening. Things the girl did not initiate or intend. It was as though the magic itself was leaking out.
The stick that became a snake.
The pebble that became a beetle.
The withered apple tree that, after a single touch, became heavy with apples the size of watermelons.
But surely those could be explained away. The snake was just a trick of the light. The beetle must have been there the whole time. And don’t fruit trees always surprise a person—coming back just when you think all is lost? They are the phoenixes of the plant world—though she couldn’t quite remember how she knew what a phoenix was. She certainly had never encountered one in a book.
Still, everything was explained. Rationalized. Forgotten.
For a while.
The Sparrow turned five on a Tuesday. It was the first week of the month, so Marla had sent the junk man packing (he had several bottles rattling around the cart in anticipation of his weeklong bender), and had brought the little girl with her to the chicken coop.
Sparrow, then as now, delighted in the populations of multicolored birds living in the chicken coop, but saved the majority of her love for a Blue Speckled by the name of Midge—a fat, fine princess of a chicken, with a tall, proud comb atop her head, and two deep red wattles adorning each side of her face like rubies. On the way to the coop that day, Sparrow jumped off the porch in a high, clean arc, going much higher and much more slowly than seemed possible (a trick of the light, Marla told herself). She landed daintily on the very tips of her toes.
“Well, look at you,” Marla said. “A ballerina.”
The word stopped her cold.
She had no idea what a ballerina was. She had never seen one, nor had she seen a picture of one, nor had she heard the word before in her life. And yet, there it was. In her mouth. In her memory. Ballerina. And not just the word, but the essence of the word as well. In her head was the swell of violins (what on earth are violins?), the toes like grace notes on a polished wood floor, the ribbon-wrapped ankles, the long, oiled hair tied back in a hard, round knot. She saw a feathered woman who was both princess and swan, a toy who would be king, a red bird with jeweled eyes (the downfall of tyrants, that bird, and oh! To have such a bird!). It was as clear as water, this meaning. As true as the breath in the lungs. Ballerina.
