They stand in the corner now, tracking her. She still isn’t sure who they work for exactly, whether they answer to the king himself or to the wicked minister who acts as the king’s puppeteer. She used to think knowing this would help her somehow, but now she understands that it doesn’t matter.
What she doesn’t understand is keeping a thing that you know wants to escape. Keeping it, dressing it, feeding it, praising it, and all the while, you know it doesn’t want you. It seems to her it would be a great humiliation. Yet no one appears humiliated except for her.
The child has made it better, and much worse. He came in the middle of the night, waking her like the river was inside her, needing to get out, and the midwives arrived instantly, though it was, oddly, Baraz she turned out to want. She called out for him, she cried for him. When someone told her they had looked but could not find him, the weight that howled into her back in that moment, a hot, massive fist that contained her mother and Lara and Itz and her aunt and Nadav and her father and Mother Mona and Esther’s own birth, made her want to die. But she had no choice; the child’s seizing was hers. And then he was born, a boy, his little wand swollen and waving, and she gave up a cry.
He looks unlike anyone she has known. Even the king admits this; he wonders aloud if his child is of another world, a god; his mistrust of Esther deepens. Once upon a time, she has learned, the king served as a steward in Vashti’s father’s palace; whichever girl in the night station said he himself was not of noble blood was correct. So even as he reigns he is displaced, and his son’s entrance has displaced him further. The child is four months old now, with yellow hair the color of a grass that grew in the city where Esther was raised, along the washing creeks. His eyes are darker than brown. His name is Darius. The king’s choice. Esther is grateful for it, though her gratitude stings: Darius is not a Hebrew—or won’t have to live as one, at least. And he is, as the midwife knew, not a girl. He is the king’s first son. He is in line to reign. Esther is glad for all these things, though her father would mourn the child not knowing the stories and prayers. Maybe she will tell him someday; or maybe, she sometimes thinks, he will discover them on his own, like Moses. She is glad for Darius’s warmth, when he isn’t being taken away to be nursed or put to sleep. But she is also aware that he has sealed her fate, because even if she were released now, she would never be able to leave.
She knows from Baraz that the attacks on the camp have grown more violent. He goes as close as he can, he tells her, he looks and listens. This must be what he was doing when Darius was born, Esther decides. He is sorry—his sorrow is visible—that he can’t do more. He tells her everything he learns. He tells her children have died. He tells her women are raped.
But what do they gain now? Esther asks. If the camp is already in pieces, why do the Persians keep smashing it?
There are many poor among the Persians, too, says Baraz. It’s a solace for them. Not to be the lowest.
Oh.
A bird lands on the palace wall, choosing the last bit of sun. It’s the same type of bird Esther saw from her pallet in the night station one afternoon, black with yellow wings, and she slows her feet, not wanting to scare it off. Don’t go, she thinks at the bird, even as she waits for it to lift. Don’t fall any further, she thinks at the sun, though she looks forward to night, when Darius is brought to her. She stands, her back to the guards, waiting for the instant when the sun will abandon the bird to shadow and the bird will fly, and when it comes, and the bird wings away, Esther’s blood beats with what she takes at first to be longing until she recognizes it for what it is: a new plan.
* * *
Late that night, from a chest in the corner of her chamber, she unearths the bird skeleton she took from the king’s bones room. It’s still intact, held together by the king’s handiwork of guts and wire, as light as a reed in her cupped palm. Esther studies it, then turns it over into her other hand and studies it more. She has dismissed the boy with the fan to go stand outside with the guards. She is alone, except for Darius, asleep in his basket—she has an hour, maybe, before his cries will wake the nurse, who sleeps as lightly as a cat behind the closet door.
She stands the bird upon the chest, marveling at its silver feet. If this one works, she thinks, she won’t have to sneak or cajole or seduce her way back to the bones room. She hasn’t been allowed there since her first visit, when she broke the feet off the fox, and the minister has warned her that if she attempts to visit the king again without official invitation, he will have her locked in her chambers from one moon to the next. He traps her in corners. He pretends to whisper in her ear, then licks. Once, under the table at a banquet, he drew the king’s golden scepter—a thing she had never seen the king so much as touch—up under her robes until its tip arrived at her entry point. After that he decided that anytime she was brought before the king, the king had to point the scepter at her before she could approach. And the king now does this. He appears even smaller since Darius was born, as if his son’s strange beauty has diminished him further. He does whatever the minister suggests.
Esther touches a finger to the bird’s beak. It looks oddly long, without eyes or feathers to accompany it. You will talk, she thinks, and almost instantly, she believes she can do it. Enough time has passed. Her magic must be accumulating again. You will.
* * *
She works each night, while Darius sleeps. She has no one to guide her now or provide instruction. She must make it up. She must be patient beyond her capacity for patience. She knows the beak must come last so starts with the feet, and one night, a few weeks in, the silver toes begin to quiver. She jumps, forgetting Darius, settles him before the nurse can hear—he likes his stomach patted—then mazes in her mind back to where she began, reconstructing the order of breath and mind that led to the quivering. She tries again. Nothing. But the next night, her energies renewed, the feet again quiver. The next, they turn from silver to bone. The next, a layer of skin grows upon them. In this way, she works her way up the bird. Each time she achieves a new turn, she panics—she will never be able to do it again. There is no formula, no incantation or trick. Only faith and focus. But every night—except when she is kept late at a banquet, or called to the king—she sits with the bird and brings another part of it closer to life.
The wings are not easy. The yellow doesn’t want to come in. She almost gives up. Does it matter if they are yellow? Maybe this is a different kind of bird. But she’s certain it’s not. She keeps going. She must press the point of herself into the bird’s wings with great force yet slowly; she can’t leave a hole. She thinks of her mother whittling one of her needles, working until the tip was so fine she could push it through cloth and watch the cloth close up again behind it. Esther’s task is similar now to the needle’s: she has to enter and disrupt, while leaving the bird intact. She hums, to steady herself. She goes so slowly she isn’t sure she’s moving, and every time she is interrupted by Darius crying—forcing her to dive, eyes closed, onto her bed, the bird hidden inside her robe, readying herself for the nurse’s entrance—she must begin all over again. Sometimes she is too tired. Sometimes she brings Darius into her bed, deciding that this bird business is a kind of madness, vowing to stop. She has this boy. It could be enough. But the next night, always, she begins again. And eventually, at a moment that does not announce itself as any different from the moments that have come before, the yellow blooms.