Page 2 of Mestra

“I said, where’s the girl? She belongs to me!”

I looked up at his furious face. “I’m her,” I said, with my new voice.

“What?”

“I’m the girl,” I said. I stood up. I was taller than him now.

“It’s a trick.” But his eyes were wide. He had spoken lightly of Poseidon, he was remembering that. And he’d cheated us.

“I told you the god favored me,” I said.

The man’s eyes flicked towards the whip on the seat, as if he were thinking of seizing it. So I picked it up. It shocked me, how easy it felt, how natural in my hand.

“I’ll tell my father you changed your mind. Take your cart, and go.”

He wanted to argue. His fists were balled. He had paid seven chickens for a weak, thin girl with only virginity and obedience to recommend her. Now I was something different.

I jumped down. He climbed onto the seat and drove off.

I had never walked by myself on a road before. The only women who traveled alone were those who were very old, and had some safety because they might be witches who would curse anyone who troubled them. But now I was tall and broad and had a whip, even if I did not know how to use it. I coiled it as I had seen our old groom do, and stuck it in the rope belt around my waist. I remembered the workmen who had labored for my father, how they swung their arms as they walked. I tried to walk and swing the same. I could not tell if it was giddiness from my rescue, or the strength of my new body, but I strode along with more energy than I had felt in months. I could not stop touching my face, my thick jaw with its springy beard. I plucked a hair, and my eyes watered at how much it hurt. No wonder, I thought, looking at it: the hair so thick and dense. I liked its shining blackness. My ears were large and fleshy, my shoulders well-muscled. I could lift a boulder, I could carry a sheep. I peered into the darkness of my tunic. The smell of my skin was warm and sharp. My belly was round, and I could rest a hand on it. It was a strange feeling, to not be hungry anymore.

I examined my calves, the thick tendons behind my knees. I had a purple toenail, and I wondered what had caused it. At last, I lifted up my tunic to look there too. I could feel the thing when I walked, the dangling oddness between my legs. When I touched it, I wanted to laugh. It was softer than I had expected, and squishy. Well, all right, I could live with that.

I passed an apple tree. A few fruits remained, high up at the top, beyond the pickers’ reach. So I pulled myself up into the branches. It felt just that simple—my arms moving, and my body following after. I laughed out loud, and the sound spread over the fields around me. I dropped the remaining fruits inside my tunic. They pressed pleasantly against my belt as I climbed back down.

It was dark when I came to my father’s house. There were no lights to welcome me. All the porters and guards were long gone, and we had sold the lamps and tapers months ago. Still, it shocked me anew, how dull and gnawed it looked, even in shadow.

A single small fire burned in the dining room. My father grew cold so easily now, he needed the brazier lit even in the warmest weather. His head was on the table, but he jerked up when I came. Beside him were the seven chicken carcasses. They’d been eaten down to the marrow, every bone split and sucked.

He glared at me. “Who are you? Do you have something to eat?”

I held out the six apples I’d brought, three in each huge hand. He seized them from me and bit hard into their flesh. He had to chew to the side, because one of his teeth was broken from worrying a beef bone too long. It was a miracle more of his teeth had not cracked. Last month, I’d found him peeling bark from the courtyard pine when I hadn’t come home with dinner fast enough.

He swallowed the cores, and looked up. “Well? Who are you?”

All the way from the apple tree, I had thought of what I might say: Look at the miracle that has come to us. I am your Mestra, but changed. But when his eyes were on me, those words fled. He looked even worse than he had that morning, so thin that at any moment his skin would tear and his bones stick through. Cold dizziness washed over me, and I felt the man’s body melt away. In stories, those whom the gods changed never changed back. But the whip fell limp to my feet, and my stomach cramped with its old hollowness.

“Father,” I said. And there was my shriveled voice, as it had always been.

He was staring at me. “Since when can you do that?”

“Since today.” My throat felt like dry straw. My legs ached.

He laughed, a single sharp sound. “That must have been a shock. I wish I could have seen his face. That’s what he gets for cheating me out of three chickens. Tell me what happened.”

I told him, in my wisp of a voice.

My father slapped the table. “I knew it! I knew the other gods could not let this go on forever. She cannot just run riot. Hah!” He stood up to pace. It was the most he had moved in days, and I could see every long bone in his legs. The apple I had eaten on the road prickled in my stomach.

“Tell me what you said to the god. You asked to be changed?”

“No, I only asked for help, for your sake.”

“Can you turn back? Try.”

I did not have to try. The moment he said it, a shiver was going down my arms, like gooseflesh, and I felt myself fill with warmth. My chin itched with black hairs. I was taller too, and the tremor in my legs stopped. My father frowned.

“The god certainly picked a brute. I suppose that was the point. All right. Back to yourself.”