***

The Landkeeper needs a son, for otherwise, who would Keep the land after he died? It is important for his son to be mighty, wise, and unshakeable. The boy must come up thick through the chest and arms. He must know how to be violent, though he must also practice prudence and patience and, occasionally, goodwill. He should walk as if the fields belong to him, as if the dirt will yield because he tells it to. When he looks ahead there should be no pause in it, no turning back; the years will line up and he must cleave through them.

So, naturally, his mother must bear something of that shape in her too, some toughness in the blood, some willingness. Generations ago, the Landkeeper’s grandfather’s grandfather kept a field of over a hundred women to choose from. Since then, the Glade has been pared back season by season, harvest by harvest. The maidens have dwindled to four.

Alo, Myrh, Safi, Isme. I am, by far, the weakest of us. Alo is all bright edges and hunger, sunlight scattered through broken glass. She is the fiercest of the Glade, and the most beautiful. I pity her, because the Landkeeper will almost certainly choose her. But Myrh is witty, and thoughtful. She has consistently scored higher than all of us during our annual testings. And Safi has warmth; she is soft moss under bare feet, hearthstone heat, gold and orange and yellow. The Landkeeper may surprise us all. He may choose me. Little dark Isme, with the funny eyes. Rabbit Isme, he used to call me, back when we were all just children playing cat-and-mouse in the Glade, because I would find little burrows to hide in for hours on end, long after the game had stopped, and we were being collected for dinner.

  Now, as we wait for the Landkeeper to decide which of us to retain, I have no burrow. We are each in our own room, walls too close, the air thick with heat and dust. Time moves crooked here, slow as molasses, and the doors are heavy and final. Finally, the Landkeeper reaches my room. The floor groans under his weight as he pushes through the door. The slick of his hair sticks to his skull, catching the dim light like wet feathers. His jaw is wide and slack, teeth glinting like chipped ivory, and his eyes crawl all over me.

Rabbit Isme! Stand, darling. I stand. Turn. I pivot, and his gaze sears into my back. A bead of sweat loosens at my hairline and makes its slow way down my spine; somewhere in the wall a pipe ticks and stops, ticks again, as if counting for me. You’ve grown into yourself nicely since I last saw you, bunny.

  It is too much, it is too hot, it is a weight pressing down and lifting at once. I am a lamb on a spit, burning, wriggling, smelling the smoke before the flame, wanting to run, wanting to disappear into the cracks in the floor. I squeeze my eyes shut. It will be over by midnight. I will have the comfort of a rope under my chin, and the promise of infinite rest in just a few hours.

  Finally, he is finished. He sits me down and asks me questions. And then it is time for the selection.

***

The Landkeeper used to be a boy named Maj. Maj, Alo, Myrh, Safi, and Isme, racing barefoot through the Glade with burrs in our hair and apple juice slick on our chins. Then, Maj was taken to the universities to learn how to read maps and ledgers, the languages of ownership and trade, the architecture of great empires. He was gone eight years, crossing salt water and silver cities, learning how to buy and sell men with his name alone, and when he came back it was not a boy at all but a monster swollen into his skin, soft and heavy and ravenous.

  When Maj returned to the Glade for the first time, the Landkeeper now, he asked to see us working. Safi was carrying water from the well, the bucket sloshing against her leg, and when he spoke her name she did not answer quickly enough, bent under the weight of the water. He crossed the space between them in two strides and struck her, open-handed, sharp enough that the sound cracked across the yard, the bucket tipping and water darkening the dirt at her feet. How dare she make him wait? How dare she turn her back on the one who owned her?

  Afterward, he gave us an explanation, patiently, as one explains to children or animals. Men endure so the land endures, he said; women bear so the men may continue. A body that cannot be used to Keep the land or to sustain the Landkeeper, is waste, and waste must be cleared. One body spared, the rest returned to the earth. A life of service, or no life at all.

***

We eat our final meal together. We visit our Glade, solemnly now, to pay our respects. We are dressed in white robes and scrubbed clean and pure. They shear the hair from our bodies and it clumps around our feet in large sheets; without it we are small, pinked, trembling, our skins too thin for the air. Bells are tied at our throats and we are herded through the Glade along a path worn smooth by other feet, other seasons. The trees lower their branches as if to touch us. The land waits with its mouth open.

  Someone circles us slowly, sprinkling salt into the soil in deliberate arcs, pressing it in with the heel of a boot, marking where the offering will stand and where it will fall. Someone else brings a basin of water and touches it to our foreheads, our chests, the soft places beneath our jaws, and the water clouds briefly and then clears. We stand in a line, skin touching skin, and for a moment we are one warm animal with four hearts stuttering inside it. I try to memorize the weight of them; Alo sharp and burning, Myrh steady and clever, Safi soft as sleep. I try to carry them with me.

  Then the Landkeeper comes out. He inspects us for a moment. His boots disturb the salt. His hand reaches out, pauses, withdraws. When he speaks my name it does not sound like a name at all, only a noise used to separate one body from the rest.

Rabbit Isme.

Something in me bolts.

I am suddenly very small. I am all hind-leg and breath. The world fractures into corridors. I run.

The maze is inside my skull, dug hurriedly, walls soft and damp and giving way. I take a corner too fast and there is Alo, lifted, her feet scrabbling uselessly at air, her bell ringing once, twice, then stopping. I slam into another turn and there is Myrh, her clever mouth split far and slackening around a question she will never finish asking. Another turn; Safi, sweet Safi, swaying gently, rocking herself to sleep. The maze does not let me stop. The maze does not let me look for long. I run and the walls pulse.

White cloth becomes garland, becomes binding, becomes nothing at all. Someone lifts my chin. Someone presses words into my ears that sound like vows and instructions. The Landkeeper’s mouth is on mine, sealing something, too wet and too close, and I am no longer there to receive it. I am clawing through earth with my teeth, packing soil against my ribs, making myself smaller and smaller, the bright terror of a rabbit fleeing deeper and deeper underground.

  Bunny, where have you gone? Talk to me, Isme.

Come here. Talk to me, goddamnit!

***

After that, life continues. Not forward, exactly, but outward, spreading thinly across the days. I am moved into larger rooms, with windows that look out onto the fields. I am fed regularly. I am dressed in pretty fabrics. People speak to me gently, for it is understood that I am to give the Landkeeper a son. I begin to know my days by the sound of his boots in the hall, the smell of wine before noon, the way the house seems to brace itself when he is drunk, as if leaning slightly away.

  He is often drunk. Not always cruel, not always kind. Sometimes he ignores me entirely, moving through me as though I am furniture, a feature of the house rather than a person in it. Sometimes he is indulgent, fond even, pinching my cheek. When he reaches for me at night, I am already elsewhere, already deep enough that nothing reaches.

One afternoon he calls me to the courtyard.

The stone is hot under my knees. He has been drinking since morning; the cup is still in his hand when I arrive, and he watches me over its rim with lazy interest. He tells me to sit, so I sit. He asks, conversationally, why I always look at him like that, why I seem so frightened. His tone is almost curious, as if this is a small flaw in workmanship he has just noticed. He laughs when I do not answer, says I am a nervous thing, says I have always been like this, ready to run at the slightest noise. Rabbit Isme, he says again, and nudges my leg with his foot, amused.

Then he leans closer, lowering his voice conspiratorially as if sharing a confidence, and asks if I want to hear a secret.

I don’t answer, and he laughs, loud and unrestrained, a sound that echoes off the stone and startles the birds from the wall. When the laughter finally stops, it stops cleanly. He looks at me, and his eyes have gone dark and glossy, all the wine burned away, leaving something cold and precise behind.

‍ ‍You know why I call you Rabbit Isme, don’t you? he says softly. Because I made you.

I do not move. I do not look away.

‍ ‍When you were little, he continues, I cut a rabbit’s heart out, and I cut yours out too, and I switched them. And I had them stitch you back up, my own little Bunny.

For a moment the courtyard tilts, just slightly, as if the ground has decided not to hold. He laughs and laughs and laughs, and I feel my rabbit heart beating, thumping wildly against its cage. It knows. It knows it is trapped in the wrong body, and it beats harder and harder, frantic and punishing, trying to split me open so it can get out.

***

When I learn that I am pregnant it does not arrive as joy or even shock, but as a tightening, a sudden clarity. Of course it has happened. Of course this body, this misfit housing, has done what it was kept to do. I press my hand to my chest and feel that small, frantic engine still there, still wrong, and for the first time I am angry at it, at the rabbit heart that has made me flinch and flee and vanish inward, that has marked me as prey. I imagine cutting it out myself, crude and shaking, setting it free at last, and the image brings a thin, terrible relief – until I am seized by the certainty that there will be nothing underneath it, no second heart waiting, only an open space that will not close. I go to the Glade instead. I kneel where the ground is darkest, where the soil still smells sweet and metallic, and I press my forehead to it, paying my respects to my fallen sisters in the only way I know how.

The Landkeeper finds me there. He watches for a moment, bored already, and tells me I am too sentimental. He says it is unbecoming, this lingering, that it dulls him. When he speaks of the future it is only to say that he looks forward to a happier house, that things will be simpler once his son is secured and I am no longer necessary, his tone easy, almost relieved, the way one talks about finishing a tedious errand. The Glade holds its breath after him, and when I look up the leaves gleam wetly, the earth shining dark and furious beneath them. I hope he dies. I hope he dies, and I wish for my soon-to-be son to die too, so that this Land may grow unkempt and wild and free.

***

Later, I stand over him.

He is slumped at the long table in the library, cheek pressed to parchment, mouth parted, a line of spit shining on the page. Books lie open beneath his hands.

I am not meant to be here, upright. I am meant to be beneath him, as the soil is beneath a tree. Still, I make myself stay. I stand in the wrong place and let the discomfort crawl through me. I think of bells and white cloth and the way the Glade drank my sisters down. I think of the rabbit heart in my chest, that tireless, thudding, panicked thing

His body is pliant, buttery soft as the knife enters. He doesn't even resist it. I slip my hands between his ribs and ease his heart from its seat, a small, pulsating thing that glitters darkly in my palm. I reach deep into my own chest and pull out my heart, my rabbit heart. It shrinks away from the light, beating sporadically and frantically, as if it has realized what I am about to do.

And then I switch them. The Landkeeper’s heart in my chest, and the bunny heart in his. I pinch his flesh together, stroking the seam with my fingers until it is knitted tight, and he stirs, eyes widening in horror as he looks up at me.

‍ ‍Shh. Shh, bunny. I whisper, caressing his face, his hair.

And then I run out of the house and into the Glade, barefoot, bleeding, the night tearing past me in ribbons. Blood slips down my ribs, my thighs, warm as honeywine. The Glade takes it eagerly. Roots kiss my ankles. The earth opens its mouth and I give myself to it without shame. For these fleeting moments, I feel the glory of being the Landkeeper. The vast, illicit sense of entitlement, the thrill of command, the intoxication of believing the world exists to answer me. The fields roll wide in my chest. The sky feels owned.

It is dazzling. It is brief.