The Book of V.

had begun to pass in her mind as a kind of sympathy, softening her, and so she talked about Nadav, and once she was talking it seemed to her she should keep talking, that the more she told, the more sympathetic the woman would become. Esther was wrong about this. Frivolous! cried the woman. Trifling! She knew, as everyone did, of Nadav and his family, knew he was basically betrothed to another girl and that Esther was no one to stop him. Esther should let him marry the other girl and choose her own, more realistic match. At this Esther felt a roil in her glands, the bitter flare that came just before she acted rashly. “I didn’t come for matchmaking,” she said. “And it won’t help me now anyway. Can’t you teach me something?” The woman slitted her eyes and sniffed. For a second, Esther thought she was about to be slapped for her rudeness. But the woman sat calmly, her hands in her lap. She held them in a way that caused Esther to look up and see that the hand shape she’d thought was made of wood—a common enough sight, though usually hanging outside a tent—was in fact a human hand, shriveled to hardness from smoke and decay. She felt a surge of hope; this woman did have power. Esther grew aware that the bodies around her seemed to be not merely asleep but in a deeper state; their forms were not rising and falling with breath.

“How do I know you’re teachable?” the woman crowed. “Most aren’t. Especially trifling, swoony girls.”

“My mother was from magic.” Esther reddened as soon as the words were out. Her mother was a quarter-breed, at most. She would have hated Esther using her in this way. She hated anything that reeked of boasting.

“What was her name?”

“Rut. Daughter of Hanya.”

The woman’s dry face did not move.

“Did you know her?”

The woman rubbed her hands together. Esther, wanting to shake her, said, “What do you know about her?”

“They were at the top once,” was all the woman said.

And then what?

The king is walking toward her. He retreated briefly, to retrieve the bottle, but now he is back. He is down to only his black robe now, and the robe is open—is she imagining this?—to an extent that it wasn’t before. Esther closes her eyes and hunts for the place the Gadol woman showed her. A dark, cold enclosure. It was meant to be a space outside her body, meant to be deposited into an egg, or a seed, whatever object she was working to alter. But Esther brings it inside herself. Then she brings herself inside of it, lowering herself down until a vibration finds her. At first it’s almost like a humming, and then, without warning, it’s nothing like that, it’s a school of fish pulsing at the bottom of the ocean, hundreds of thousands of fish in a resplendent eddy contained within her. But they won’t be contained for long. They resist her boundary, pressing outward as they flash and pulse, forcing her to enlarge. The dangling hand breaks in, not as spell or tincture but goading, meant to propel. There was power in Esther, the woman said, more than she would have guessed, but it was old and lazy and had to be whipped into action, and it was fragile and had to be handled with care … so Esther lets the hand hang in the room with her, a calm, terrifying stillness in the center of the pulsing eddy. Catastrophe is what she’s going for, a full vortex, but to get there, she cannot self-destruct. She must become the eddy, the fish, the infinite flashing, without inhale or exhale, no longer breathing but existing, not waiting but allowing, not wanting but receiving.

It is exhausting, this work, far harder than digging or chopping or squatting. She is very cold, then very hot. As the pressure builds, she feels as if each of her digits, each limb and nerve, is being squeezed in its own vise.

A pressure from without. Esther opens one eye. The king, seemingly oblivious to her efforts, is tilting the wine bottle into her goblet, and for a moment, relieved of the pressure and the flashing, she lets herself rest. She waits for the wine to flow; when it flows, she will force herself in again. Here, you may be thinking, she will lose her courage. She’ll drink more wine, she’ll start enjoying it, this will go back to the story it is supposed to be, where the maiden wants her beauty, wants to be queen. But Esther is very stubborn. And her stubbornness is aided by the fact that nothing flows. The bottle is empty. The king calls out, “Another!” and Esther, wanting to stay ahead of whoever will be sent in with the wine, dives back in again. Down, she tells herself, and the heat flips back to cold. She is distracted briefly, pulled from the vibration by a recognition, obvious yet fresh: the king has people; she has none. Don’t be distracted, she tells herself. Don’t be afraid, go in again. She urges herself lower but the pain is shocking now, the dark hole grips, the lights begin to flash fitfully and with menace, no longer the pulsing school of fish but a storm. She gasps but keeps her eyes closed, refuses even to peek. She is aware of the king on the other side but wills herself further in, downward, and noise recedes. The vortex holds her. She has never felt cold like this.

Years pass, or twenty seconds. When she is loosed from the place, dropped from the swirling, the king is still alone and staring at her. He drops the empty wine bottle, but without force, and the bottle doesn’t break as the goblet did—instead it rolls in Esther’s direction, arcing and wobbling until it reaches her foot. She looks down. Her sandals are in tatters; her toes have grown talons. “Your wine,” a voice calls, and