All this time later, the boots looked no worse for wear. Perhaps they had been enchanted, or perhaps the rabbi had chosen the strongest leather available. But Ava had changed. She now resembled a woman more than she did a creature made of clay. Her black hair shone, and she lacked the pallor she’d had when she was made, and now possessed a rosy complexion. More than anything, what was different was the expression in her eyes. If Ettie wasn’t mistaken they had changed color. She remembered them as gray as stone, but now they glinted with light.

They walked toward one another, each measuring the other.

“Do not get to your knees,” Ettie warned the golem when they met.

Ava smiled. She hadn’t intended to. She was not the same foolish creature she had been on the train. “I can still thank you.”

“For bringing you into this wretched place?” Ettie felt a wave of guilt for her selfish actions in creating life in exchange for a price. “I should get on my knees and beg you to forgive me.”

It was a heartless world, but there were the swifts, soaring above them in the half-light.

“No. I’m grateful to you,” Ava said.

“You realize that you were born to do our bidding? To serve us and nothing more?”

Ava knew that her maker was wrong. She was born to walk through the reeds and dance with the heron, she was made to watch Lea sleep safely through the night and to feel the sun on her skin and to stand here in the rabbi’s boots beneath a bower of green leaves.

“And what were you born to do?” she asked her maker.

Ettie grimaced. She knew the truth about herself. “I was born to fight.”

They sat in the wooden chairs where the doctor’s wife had spent early mornings in the last weeks of her life in order to watch the sun rise. Azriel had often kept Sarah Girard company; he had appreciated the long view through the trees, across to the mountains, and now he had returned to sit at Ettie’s feet. He could unleash flames and fire if he wished to do so, he could open the earth to send a plague of snakes and frogs. Instead, he leaned against Ettie’s legs, so that she thought a breeze had come up.

“If you fight,” Ava told her, “you will die.” She could glimpse the future, not for herself, but certainly for her maker. She saw a field and she knew that Ettie wished she had never let go of her sister’s hand.

“We all die,” Ettie responded. “Except for you. Until the girl gets rid of you.”

Lea was in the house, asleep, or sleeping as best she could. She had bad dreams of bees and of those she had lost, dreams that had turned her hair white.