“My name is Amira,” says the woman, and Tabitha marvels at how she speaks without moving any other part of her body, how measured are the mechanics of her mouth. “Have you come to marry me?”
Tabitha stares. She wipes the juice from her chin, as if that could erase the golden apple from her belly. “Do I have to?”
Amira blinks. “No. Only — that’s why people try to climb the hill, you know.”
“Oh. No, I just—” Tabitha coughs, slightly, embarrassed. “I’m just passing through.”
Silence.
“The mist was thick, I got turned around—”
“You climbed”—Amira’s voice is very quiet—“a glass hill”—and even—“by accident?”
Tabitha fidgets with the hem of her shirt.
“Well,” says Amira, “it’s nice to meet you, ah—”
“Tabitha.”
“Yes. Very nice to meet you, Tabitha.”
Further silence. Tabitha chews her bottom lip while looking down into the darkness at the base of the hill. Then, quietly: “Why are you even up here?”
Amira looks at her coolly. “By accident.”
Tabitha snorts. “I see. Very well. Look.” Tabitha points to her iron — strapped feet. “I have to wear the shoes down. They’re magic. I have a notion that the stranger the surface — the harder it would be to walk on something usually — the faster the sole diminishes. So your magical hill here. .”
Amira nods, or at least it seems to Tabitha that she nods — it may have been more of a lengthened blink that conveyed the impression of her head’s movement.
“. . it seemed like just the thing. I didn’t know there was anyone at the top, though; I waited until the men at the bottom had left, as they seemed a nasty lot—”
It isn’t that Amira shivers, but that the quality of her stillness grows denser. Tabitha feels something like alarm beginning a dull ring in her belly.
“They leave as the nights turn colder. You’re more than welcome to stay,” says Amira, in tones of deepest courtesy, “and scrape your shoes against the glass.”
Tabitha nods, and stays, because somewhere within the measured music of Amira’s words she hears please.
Amira feels half — asleep, sitting and speaking with someone who isn’t about to destroy her, break her apart for the half kingdom inside.
“Have they placed you up here?” Tabitha asks, and Amira finds it strange to hear anger that isn’t directed at her, anger that seems at her service.
“No,” she says softly. “I chose this.” Then, before Tabitha can say anything else, “Why do you walk in iron shoes?”
Tabitha’s mouth is open but her words are stopped up, and Amira can see them changing direction like a flock of starlings in her throat. She decides to change the subject.
“Have you ever heard the sound geese make when they fly overhead? I don’t mean the honking, everyone hears that, but — their wings. Have you ever heard the sound of their wings?”
Tabitha smiles a little. “Like thunder, when they take off from a river.”
“What? Oh.” A pause; Amira has never seen a river. “No — it’s nothing like that when they fly above you. It’s. . a creaking, like a stove door with no squeak in it, as if the geese are machines dressed in flesh and feathers. It’s a beautiful sound — beneath the honking it’s a low drone, but if they’re flying quietly, it’s like. . clothing, somehow, like if you listened just right, you might find yourself wearing wings.”
Without noticing, Amira had closed her eyes while speaking of the geese; she opens them to see Tabitha looking at her with curious focus, and feels briefly disoriented by the scrutiny. She isn’t used to being listened to.
“If we’re lucky,” she says softly, turning a golden apple around and around in her hands, “we’ll hear some tonight. It’s the right time of year.”
Tabitha opens her mouth, then shuts it so hard her back teeth meet. She does not ask how long have you been sitting here, that you know when to expect the geese; she does not ask where did that golden apple come from? Didn’t I just eat it? She understands what Amira is doing and is grateful; she does not want to talk about the shoes.
“I’ve never heard that sound,” she says instead, slowly, trying not to look at the apple. “But I’ve seen them on rivers and lakes. Hundreds at a time, clamoring like old wives at a well, until something startles them into rising, and then it’s like drums, or thunder, or a storm of winds through branches. An enormous sound, almost deafening — not one to listen closely for.”
“I would love to hear that,” Amira whispers, looking out toward the woods. “To see them. What do they look like?”
“Thick, dark—” Tabitha reaches for words. “Like the river itself is rising, lifting its skirts and taking off.”
Amira smiles, and Tabitha feels a tangled warmth in her chest at the thought of having given her something.
“Would you like another apple?” offers Amira, and notes the wariness in Tabitha’s eye. “They keep coming back. I eat them myself from time to time. I wasn’t sure if — I thought it was meant as a prize for whoever climbed the hill, but I suppose the notion is they don’t go away unless I give them to a man.”
Tabitha frowns, but accepts. As she eats, Amira feels Tabitha’s eyes on her empty hands, waiting to catch the apple’s reappearance, and tries not to smile — she’d done as much herself the first fifty or so times, testing the magic for loopholes. Novel, however, to watch someone watching for the apple.
As Tabitha nears the last bite, Amira sees her look confused, distracted, as if by a hair on her tongue or an unfamiliar smell— and then the apple’s in Amira’s hand again, feeling for all the world like it never left.
“I don’t think the magic lets us see it happen,” says Amira, almost by way of apology for Tabitha’s evident disappointment. “But so long as I sit here, I have one.”
“I’d like to try that again,” says Tabitha, and Amira smiles.
First, Tabitha waits. She counts the seconds, watching Amira’s empty hands. After seven hundred seconds, there is an apple in Amira’s hand. Amira stares at it, looking from it to the one in Tabitha’s.
“That’s — never happened before. I didn’t think there could be more than one at a time.”
Tabitha takes the second apple from her but bites into it, counting the mouthfuls slowly, watching Amira’s hands the while. After the seventh bite, Amira’s hands are full again. She hands the third apple over without a word.
Tabitha counts — the moments, the bites, the number of apples — until there are seven in her lap; when she takes an eighth from Amira, the first seven turn to sand.
“I think it’s the magic on me,” says Tabitha thoughtfully, dusting the apple sand out of her fur. “I’m bound in sevens — you’re bound in ones. You can hold only one apple at a time — I can hold seven. Funny, isn’t it?”
Amira’s smile looks strained and vague, and only after a moment does Tabitha realize she’s watching the wind — caught sand blowing off the hill.
Autumn crackles into winter, and frost rimes the glass hill into diamonds. By day, Amira watches fewer and fewer men slide down it while Tabitha sits by her, huddled into her fur; by night, Tabitha walks in slow circles around her as they talk about anything but glass and iron. While Tabitha walks, Amira looks more closely at her shackled feet, always glancing away before she can be drawn into staring. Through the sandal — like straps that wrap up to her ankle, Amira can see they are blackened, twisted ruins, toes bent at odd angles, scabbed and scarred.