It was nice, being in the company of turtles again. The turtles back in the pond at school (which seemed more like a dream with every endless, languid day that passed here, time defined by the lapping of the water against the riverbanks, by the occasional sound of music drifting from the Hall) had never wanted to spend time with her. There wasn’t enough magic in the world of her birth. Some magic worked there—Christopher’s flute, or Nancy’s stillness, back when she’d been a student, although Nadya had to admit that it was nothing compared to what Nancy could do here, in her natural habitat—but most magic was just too much for the local laws of nature to bear.

These turtles, though … these were proper, magical turtles. They didn’t talk to her, not like the turtles back in Belyyreka, and the largest of them was only the size of a dinner plate, instead of being wide enough to ride upon, like her beloved Burian, who had been her steed and dearest companion in the Drowned World, but they were still willing to let her tickle their shells and stroke their long, finely pebbled necks. They let her exist among them, ever-damp and ever-weeping, and she loved them all, and she hated them all, because they were a constant reminder that what she had here was not enough. This, none of this, was enough.

“I hate everything,” she said, and grabbed a stone off the bank and skipped it hard across the water, watching it hit the surface three, four, five times before it plopped and sank, joining the others she had already thrown to the bottom. Then she froze.

She had grabbed the stone with her right hand.

Nadya had been born without anything below the elbow on her right arm, a teratogenic trick of something her birthmother had been exposed to back in Mother Russia. Three mothers for Nadya: the one who bore her, the country that poisoned her, and the one who adopted her, American tourist on a misery tour of the rest of the world, well-meaning and well-intentioned and willing to take on a “special needs” child who liked nothing more than to flood the orphanage bathroom playing with the taps.