And so her insane hope falls out her feet, replaced by a surge of fear and heat that rises through her so forcefully she begins to shiver. The king’s hand is reaching for the wine bottle. The king’s voice is saying, “Come.” Esther is walking as slowly as possible, drawing out her chance to think. There must be a solution. But what? She thinks of stories she knows in which impossible things take place. Sarah. Eve. Isaac. Dinah. Her father told her these and all the other stories until she could tell them back to him. They had to be told to be remembered, he said. They had to be remembered so you knew how to live. But Esther, beholding the dwindling distance between her and the king, doesn’t see how they can help her now. The story she is living is nothing she has heard. In this story, the king of Persia is carefully, perhaps ceremoniously, filling two goblets: one for him, one for her. In this story, she takes one and realizes that it, too, like the stool and the throne, is undersized, meant to make him appear larger than he is. She wonders if he will stand now, to welcome her, and then, when he does not stand, she wonders if this peculiarity could work to her advantage—if the king is so determined to maintain the aggrandizing artifice of his set pieces that she could run now and he would not leap up to catch her.
The king lifts his glass to her and waits. What would he do if she turned and fled? His voice is soft, she thinks, but he banished his queen. He banished his queen, but he is very short. All she can read in his face as he looks up at her is waiting. No clear pleasure or displeasure in his eyes. No ripple in those lines between his brow. Even his mouth appears oddly neutral, neither open nor fully closed. He is not a man primed for a chase. Yet even as she calculates, Esther knows she is fooling herself again. She knows there must be guards on the other side of that door, with sharpened lances taller than their heads.
The end of another idea feels like a death; her shivering grows more pronounced. Gripping the goblet to steady herself, she begins to drink. She drinks as she walked, letting a trickle drop back into the cup with each sip, trying to prolong the activity, to think. But her thoughts are scraps that go nowhere: an awareness that the glass she’s holding is pressing ornate shapes into her palms, a vision of her mother threading a needle, an image of Nadav’s mouth, his brown, unbearded face. Soon Esther is drinking quickly—she drains the rest of the wine in two gulps.
The king, his eyes on the empty goblet, smiles. “I shouldn’t be surprised,” he says. “You were the only one who didn’t try to hide yourself.”
Esther watches as he fills the glass again. Her throat stings. Her trembling limbs are very warm.
“Do you come with a voice?” he asks.
She lifts the glass to cover her mouth. I shouldn’t drink any more, she thinks. Then she drinks, quickly, beckoning courage, and soon her stinging throat begins to hurt less, to open, and the king is still smiling up at her, without cruelty, she thinks, and without falseness, and she thinks, wildly, I will ask for what I want.
“May I go home?” she says, holding out the empty goblet.
The king laughs. But when she doesn’t laugh back, the king blinks, a long, slow-motion blink, so that for an extended moment, she is examining the purple veins on the backs of his eyelids, and praying, not the prayers of her parents, only Please, please. When his eyes open, they fix on the glass. His fingers brush hers as he takes it—they are dry and cool. Please. He raises the goblet. He raises it higher than she expects, his arm stretched toward the ceiling as if he is about to make a speech. Then the goblet drops to the floor, where it cracks with unnerving precision into two equal halves.
As Esther steps away, her blood knocking in her throat, the king releases a quiet chuckle. “You’ve just arrived,” he says mildly. Then he fills another goblet and places it, presses it, back into her hands.
What option does she have? She takes it, and drinks, and knows what she must do, or try to do. She will transform. Until now she has held this possibility at a distance, fearing the risk, knowing what she has in mind is not the kind of transformation she was taught. The lesson she was given in the magicians’ tent the night before Marduk brought her to the palace was focused on turning one object into another, or making something larger or more abundant or of a different quality. It was a beginner’s course, meant to tie her to her mother and her mother’s mother, to give her some sliver of their power to possess. Until this moment, she hasn’t known if she would ever try to use it. But now she knows. As the king refills her glass again and guides her by the elbow to the bed, she is so intent on recalling how to do the magic she barely registers that he has finally stood up. She is only a thumb’s width taller than he, it turns out. “Sit,” he says, and she does, obeying so she can travel in her mind to the tent.
“You are a beauty,” he says.
Esther, thinking, I will make it not so, lifts her glass once more to her mouth, and rewinds in her mind to her final night in the camp. Not a sound came from the Gadol family’s tent, but when Esther crawled in, their matriarch was awake, sitting over a brown flame that stank of goat. Above her, hanging from the tent’s smoke hole, dangled a piece of wood in the shape of a hand. A hand was a symbol of peace in the camp, but the stink worried Esther. Why would the woman be reusing cooking oil? The camp required this now—the Persians had begun stealing first oil during their raids—but wouldn’t a magician, if she were a decent magician, simply make her own fire? Esther wasn’t given a chance to ask. The woman’s eyes were bright, her cheeks as dry and red as the riverbank. She smiled as if she’d been expecting Esther and began interrogating her at once. What was she here for? What did she want? What happened to her hair? When Esther glanced with apprehension at the horizontal forms of the Gadol family, the woman sniffed. They’re out! she declared, leaving Esther no choice but to ignore or trust the dozen or so strangers in her midst. She began to explain her situation. Ridiculous! spat the woman at the idea of Esther being put up for queen. Moronic! that Marduk could think his plan might actually work. Could he be so dumb, the woman asked—or this was the gist of what she asked; she spoke in an old accent and with a lisp, from missing front teeth—could he be so stupid that he actually thought a man like the king would notice the difference between those figs and these, let alone call off the Persian brigands on Marduk’s behalf? Cruel! she cried, that he should make Esther go. If Esther had become a burden, he could marry her off; even without a dowry she was pretty enough that some boy would have her. Esther shook her head at this. She knew better than to talk about Nadav, but the woman’s outrage 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.