The Festival on the Ridge

She did not ask for much. She asked for clothes in which she might, for one afternoon, walk among the young people of the valley without being recognized as the servant girl of the house at the end of the lane. She asked for shoes that would not split on the path.

The bones answered at once. On the stones beside her lay a jacket woven of kingfisher feathers, blue as the river in deep water, and on top of it a pair of slippers so light that they seemed to have been made of a leaf of gold. They were no larger than a sparrow's footprint. She put them on, and they fitted as though they had been made on her feet.

She walked up the path to the temple. Her heart beat fast. She had not been among other young people since she was a small child, and she did not know how to carry herself; but the feather jacket seemed to carry itself, and the slippers were light, and the road under her feet was no longer the rough road of the house at the end of the lane.

At the temple she stood at the edge of the crowd. No one knew her. The young men glanced at her, and then glanced again; the young women whispered. She was beautiful in a way that the feather jacket made almost unearthly, and she was quiet, and she did not know she was beautiful, which made her more so.

There was a young chief at the festival — not her own valley chief, but a king from a larger country beyond the hills, who had come to the gathering to make treaties and to see the people he ruled. He saw Ye Xian. He did not approach her at once; he was a cautious man, and a king, and he had learned not to speak first to a woman whose name he did not know.

But he watched her. He saw how she moved among the dancers, light as a bird; how she did not laugh too loud; how, when a small child stumbled and cried, she stepped out of the dance at once and knelt to comfort him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

It was then that the stepmother, who had been watching the same small child, looked up and saw her. The woman's mouth opened. She could not believe what she saw; and yet the jacket was the color of deep water, and the girl's face, even across the crowd, was the face of the servant she had left at home.

Ye Xian saw the stepmother's eyes find hers. She did not wait. She turned and fled down the path, the dancers parting before her. The young chief, seeing her go, called out, but she did not look back. She ran as she had not run since she was a child, and as she ran, one of the golden slippers came off her foot and lay in the dust of the path, and she did not stop to pick it up.

She reached the house, threw off the feather jacket, wrapped the bones again, and lay down on her straw, her heart pounding. When the stepmother and her daughter came home, chattering about the festival and the strange girl in the blue jacket, Ye Xian was in her usual place, her face as quiet as always. The stepmother did not connect the quiet girl at home with the vision she had seen across the dancing-ground. It was, she told herself, too impossible.

But on the path up the ridge, in the dust where the runners had passed, lay a single golden slipper, small as a sparrow's footprint, that no one at the festival had yet noticed.