Blue Window by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

Author:Adina Rishe Gewirtz [Gewirtz, Adina Rishe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780763670122
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2018-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

Four gates to the valley, four ways home.

It was an old saying. Wanderers and wise men, seekers and the bereft, carried the phrase with them, passing it, one to the next, as a cherished, free-given gift. And so for a century those who broke away, the unwanted or the far-seeing, were led to one of the gates or another, to find in the valley welcome, and shelter.

To these gates the exile returned now, to the clearings that overlooked the valley, to the place where the mist simmered, cold, beneath the heat of the day.

The first three, rarely traveled by any but watchers in these late years, lay undisturbed, the mist beneath them a dull, leaden cloud.

In the last, the grass was pressed to earth, and the mist rolled beneath the rise, angry. The exile searched the ground, counting signs: the broken stem of a wildflower, a trampled path, a second, a third. A curled hair, caught in a patch of onion grass and waving like a thin flag. More than one traveler had been here; more than two.

The mist crept toward the clearing, and the noise of it rose, a static, crackling sound of warning and hunger, of rage. Still the exile searched. Who had come? Who had waited upon this hill?

The cloud seeped upward, muttering and reaching, when at last the exile found a single clear footprint engraved in a bald circle of dirt, in a spot where the clearing began to slide toward the valley below. The perfect outline of a small shoe with a strange, lined sole. Too small, this, for a man or even a woman.

It was the print of a child.

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