“Your husband wanted to keep you from speaking! To your mother!”
“And look what happened when I did,” says Tabitha stiffly. “It was a test of loyalty, and I failed it. You did nothing wrong.”
“That’s funny,” says Amira, unsmiling, “because to me, every day feels like a test: Will I move from this hill or not, will I grasp at a bird or not, will I toss an apple down to a man when I shouldn’t, will I speak too loudly, will I give them a reason to hurt me and fall off the hill, and every day I don’t is a day I pass—”
“That’s different. That’s dreadful.”
“I don’t see the difference!”
“You don’t love this hill!”
“I love you,” says Amira, very softly. “I love you, and I do not understand how someone who loves you would want to hurt you, or make you walk in iron shoes.”
Tabitha chews her lips, trying to shape words from them, and fails.
“I told my story poorly,” she says, finally. “I told it selfishly. I did not speak of how good he was—how he made me laugh, the things he taught me. I could live in the iron shoes because of his guidance, because of knowing the poison berry from the pure, because he taught me to hunt. What happened to him, the change in him”—Tabitha feels very tired—“it must have had to do with me. I was meant to endure it until the curse broke, and I failed. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Amira looks at Tabitha’s ruined feet.
“Do you truly believe,” she says, with all the care she pours into keeping her spine taut and straight on her glass seat, “that I had nothing to do with those men’s attentions? That they would have behaved that way no matter what I looked like?”
“Yes,” says Tabitha firmly.
“Then is it not possible”—hesitant, now, to even speak the thought—“that your husband’s cruelty had nothing to do with you? That it had nothing to do with a curse? You said he hurt you in both his shapes.”
“But I—”
“If you’ve worn your shoes halfway down, shouldn’t you be bending your steps toward him again, that the last pair be destroyed near the home you shared?”
In the shifting light of the moon both their faces have a bluish cast, but Amira sees Tabitha’s go gray.
“When I was a girl,” says Tabitha thickly, as if working around something in her throat, “I dreamt of marriage as a golden thread between hearts—a ribbon binding one to the other, warm as a day in summer. I did not dream a chain of iron shoes.”
“Tabitha”—and Amira does not know what to do except to reach for her hand, clutch it, look at her in the way she looks at the geese, longing to speak and be understood—“you did nothing wrong.”
Tabitha holds Amira’s gaze. “Neither did you.”
They stay that way for a long time, until the sound of seven geese’s beating wings startles them into looking up at the stars.
The days and nights grow warmer; more and more geese fly overhead. One morning Tabitha begins to walk her circle around Amira when she stumbles, trips, and falls forward into Amira’s arms.
“Are you all right?” Amira whispers, while Tabitha clutches at the throne, shaking her head, suddenly unsteady.
“The shoes,” she says, marveling. “They’re finished. The fourth pair. Amira.” Tabitha laughs, surprises herself to hear the sound more like a sob. “They’re done.”
Amira smiles at her, bends forward to kiss her forehead. “Congratulations,” she murmurs, and Tabitha hears much more than the word as she reaches, shaky, wobbling, for the next pair in her pack. “Wait,” says Amira quietly, and Tabitha pauses.
“Wait. Please. Don’t—” Amira bites her lip, looks away. “You don’t have to—you can stay here without—”
Tabitha understands, and returns her hand to Amira’s. “I can’t stay up here forever. I have to leave before the suitors come back.”
Amira draws a deep breath. “I know.”
“I’ve had a thought, though.”
“Oh?” Amira smiles softly. “Do you want to marry me after all?”
“Yes.”
Amira’s stillness turns crystalline in her surprise.
Tabitha is talking, and Amira can barely understand it, feels Tabitha’s words slipping off her mind like sand off a glass hill. Anything, anything to keep her from putting her feet back in those iron cages—
“I mean—not as a husband would. But to take you away from here. If you want. Before your suitors return. Can I do that?”
Amira looks at the golden apple in her hand. “I don’t know—where would we go?”
“Anywhere! The shoes can walk anywhere, over anything—”
“Back to your husband?”
Something like a thunderclap crosses Tabitha’s face. “No. Not there.”
Amira looks up. “If we are to marry, I insist on an exchange of gifts. Leave the fur and the shoes behind.”
“But—”
“I know what they cost you. I don’t want to walk on air and darkness if the price is your pain.”
“Amira,” says Tabitha helplessly, “I don’t think I can walk without them anymore.”
“Have you tried? You’ve been eating golden apples a long while. And you can lean on me.”
“But—they might be useful—”
“The glass hill has been very useful to me,” says Amira quietly, “and the golden apples have kept me warm and whole and fed. But I will leave them—I will follow you into woods and across fields, I will be hungry and cold and my feet will hurt. But if you are with me, Tabitha, then I will learn to hunt and fish and tell the poison berry from the pure, and I will see a river raise its skirt of geese, and listen to them make a sound like thunder. Do you believe I can do this?”
“Yes,” says Tabitha, a choking in her voice, “yes, I do.”
“I believe you can walk without iron shoes. Leave them here—and in exchange, I will give you my shoes of silk, and we will fill your pack with seven golden apples, and if you eat from them sparingly, perhaps they will help you walk until we can find you something better.”
“But we can’t climb down the hill without a pair of shoes!”
“We don’t need to.” Amira smiles, stroking Tabitha’s hair. “Falling’s easy—it’s keeping still that’s hard.”
Neither says anything for a time. Then, carefully, for the hill is slippery to her now, Tabitha sheds her fur cloak, unstraps the iron shoes from her feet, and gives them and her pack to Amira. Amira removes the three remaining pairs and replaces them with apples, drawing the pack’s straps tight over the seventh. She passes the pack back to Tabitha, who shoulders it.
Then, taking Tabitha’s hands in hers, Amira breathes deep and stands up.
The glass throne cracks. There is a sound like hard rain, a roar of whispers as the glass hill shivers into sand. It swallows fur and shoes; it swallows Amira and Tabitha together; it settles into a dome-shaped dune with a final hiss.
Hands still clasped, Amira and Tabitha tumble out of it together, coughing, laughing, shaking sand from their hair and skin. They stand, and wait, and no golden apple appears to part their hands from each other.
“Where should we go?” whispers one to the other.
“Away,” she replies, and holding on to each other, they stumble into the spring, the wide world rising to meet them with the dawn.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
NOVELETTE
EXCERPT FROM
THE JEWEL AND HER LAPIDARY