You are a child until I say you are not.

Am I really? What child would leave home as I do now, with no destination except away from you, penniless and provisionless, with only the shawl around her head for shelter?

When I grow hungry I will find roots and berries to eat. Perhaps it is out here, in the wide, wild, unchained world, that I will finally taste all the forbidden fruit you keep under lock and key. Perhaps there are fresh mysteries growing in the woods, delicious, dangerous poisons that even you do not know exist!

In this way my spiteful, wounded thoughts circle round and round, erasing the passage of time. Am I a mile from the cottage? Five miles? Ten? I break into a half run as the path veers into a downhill slope, and spread my arms like a sail to catch the wind. If only the currents of air could lift me and carry me! How pleasant it would be to fly on that wind, like the tuft of a dandelion. How much easier it would be to soar,weightless, than to trudge across the countryside dragging the bulk of my long skirt and petticoat, with my feet bound into heavy boots that seem to have grown too small, again.

I pause to catch my breath and to still my whirling brain. My thoughts trip over one another, vying to be heard, like many voices in a shouting mob. My hair has come loose and the stinging tendrils whip into my eyes. The hem of my skirt is heavy with mud; my sleeves are damp with the tears I have been wiping away since I bolted from the cottage. I did not think to bring water with me—I was not thinking at all when I ran out in the heat of fury—and now my throat is raw and dry.

It would serve Father right if I sated my thirst from the ditch where I poured the belladonna water, I think bitterly. Let him find me dead under the gorse bushes. Let him bury me deep in the ground, my arms twined around the bones of that soft, orange-furred cat.

Exhausted, I let myself fall to the ground in the sheep meadow that borders the path. I lie with my back pressed to the earth and feel the dampness of the grass seeping into my clothes.

Above me, high in the cold blue sky, a black dot moves, first one way, then another, making wide, deliberate zigzags toward the earth. As it descends, it grows larger, grows wings, grows a voice.

It is a raven, and its raspy cry mocks my own dry sobs. It lands on a fence post by the path, ten paces up the slope from me. Proudly it flexes its great black wings; when fully open, they span nearly as far as I can spread my own two arms. Its sleek head gleams with an iridescent, oily sheen.