The Testament of Yves Gundron by Emily Barton

green stick that made her foam like a mad horse and reek of peppermint leaves. Then, when she came backin and I offered her a slice of bread, she held it over the fire until its edges were quite black, and ate it as if it were the world’s finest delicacy.”
    Her report seemed cause for alarm, yet my brother kept at his hammering and said, simply, “Toast.”
    â€œI beg your pardon?”
    â€œToast. Burnt bread. There are some peoples, Ruth’s among them, I suppose, who like to eat it. For breakfast.”
    Adelaïda looked disappointed. “What about the other things?”
    â€œNone dangerous, I think. You should get back to the house before she finds you here whispering about her.”
    She stood, sorry, it seemed, to have no cause for alarm, and went out to feed the chickens in the yard.
    â€œYou’re sure you’re right about this?” I asked him. “I have a child to protect.”
    Mandrik kept unhurriedly at the nails. “She is no danger to Elizaveta.”
    When Ruth returned, she sat quietly with a block of the finest, fairest paper I had ever beheld on her lap before her, and asked to know about measurements, the lathe, and the slight bow in the shape of the finished wheel, an improvement we had stumbled upon quite by accident, producing perhaps our third two-wheeled cart, and whose efficacy she did not at first understand. She admired our craftsmanship, which made me proud, and addressed my brother with the shy attitude of respect such a holy man deserved. She fingered the engraved box and pronounced it beautiful, but did not ask to look inside—which I took as a sign of good judgment.
    We wrighted two new wheels that day, and the next built and attached the second axle. The next Market Day, we drove the new cart into town, to the never-sated astonishment of our brethren and the natives of Nnms. Cheers erupted as we drove, laden with the first fruits of spring, through Mandragora that fine morning; Desvres, Ydlbert, and our neighbors lauded us as if we had personally sprinkled the ground with the morning’s dew. But as I watched, from aloft, my brother walking alongside the new invention, beaming with pride and answering the many questions with grace, I began to wonder anxiously what I could invent next. And who knew but that all our neighbors’ attentionwas focused not on our work but on the tall, square-shouldered stranger who rode with her arms stretched along the rear gate and her smiling face pointed toward Heaven.
    To attend church Ruth wore her loose trousers and a pale, modest shirt, and wrapped a handkerchief around her throat. She still looked odd, and her legs were still rather too visible, but at least her modified garb might prevent Father Stanislaus from choking. My wife and daughter dressed in their town-bought linen of robin’s-egg blue, so fine it made the petals of the blooming wildflowers look coarse. We climbed into the cart, newly strewn with fragrant hay, and drove to town behind our Hammadi, the wind whistling through her black mane. We arrived as the last bell tolled, and tied Hammadi to the post, where she snorted affably at Ydlbert’s Thea and received a nose to the cheek from Jepho Martin’s gray Gar.
    Were I to build a church, I would name as its patron one of the great avenging saints: Michael, I mean, or George. But when our forefathers started a parish, she who drew their hearts was St. Perpetua, no worker of miracles, but a young Roman who, for her faith in the Church, was sentenced to die by a stampede of cows. Since childhood I had puzzled over this choice of patroness, gathering from her story that one should keep quiet about unpopular beliefs and be wary of kine. My brother, however, had a deeper understanding of its import, and wrote a translation of her tale, with an exegesis in which he explained that in Perpetua’s story our forebears must surely have seen the image of their own persecution. Ruth,