Wildwing by Emily Whitman

“I’ll find a way.”
    My heart catches. In that moment I almost tell him he’s already found a way to help me, that he found it years ago. But I bite my tongue. I won’t endanger my plan with anyone’s ideas of what’s safe or proper or wise.
    I force myself to wait, washing the breakfast dishes and dusting the drawing room, until I’m sure he’s truly gone for the day. Then I pull out my keys and walk down the hall to the library. For the second time in fifteen years the door opens.
    The lift rises in the center of that circle blown clear of dust, like a tree inside a fairy ring, or a stone for ancientrites towering on an altar. Something sharp and strong shivers through me, and for a moment I’m frozen on the threshold. An invention, I tell myself. Not magic, but science and math, knobs and dials. I take a step forward?and there’s that shiver again, almost an electric shock, as if some tremendous power waits in those bits of steel and wire, reaching out to me. I need a minute before I touch it again.
    I turn my steps to the wall where an oval frame tells me a mirror is hiding. I wipe it off and stare at the girl looking back at me: her hungry green eyes, her stubborn mouth.
    You, I think. I know what you want. You want to start over, like this breath, the one you’re breathing now, is the first you ever took. And the step you’re about to take is the first time your foot touched the earth, and the word you’re about to speak is the very first time you ever heard the sound of your voice ringing in the just-born air
    And all you have to do is go in that lift and shut the door
    I tie the door to the lift open with twine so it doesn’t slip shut and whirl me back before I’m ready. Then I step inside and start examining the panel with its dials and labels. On the top row, the word TODAY is engraved on a small copper plate, followed by boxes for day, month, and year, looking for all the world like the board in a railway station where thenumbers flip over as trains arrive and depart. The date reads, 11 OCTOBER 1913, still accurate after all these years. A small clock ticks away as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
    Next come dials for how many days or years you wish to travel into the past. I’ll leave it the same as it was yesterday, 673 years. I do the numbers in my head. It’s the year 1240 I’ll be living in soon.
    There’s one last row on the bottom, but the print is so small, I have to sit on the bench and lean forward to read it. MANUAL ADJUSTMENT , it says. RETURN TIME PLUS , and then the dials. It seems you can choose to stay in the past a week—or a year—before you return. That could be useful, I think, coming to my feet.
    I walk to the desk and start sorting through the typed pages, the scribbled notes, the books and journals. An ancient map shows Little Pembleton, the road, and the bridge; a circle of ink outlines the empty spot where this house stands now—the exact spot where the lift waited in the past, as if it always stayed in one place and the years whipped by around it. There’s a calendar labeled “Julian” and another labeled “Gregorian,” and a paper on determining the age of trees, and page after page in a scrawling hand with mathematical equations and sketches of the liftand wiring diagrams. I thumb through books on medieval manners, clothing, farming, battles.
    I throw the last book down with a bang, sending up another cloud of dust. I could read for weeks and not learn a fraction of all there is here. Don’t I know enough already? The lift will take me to the past, where all I need is one nicely woven cloak and I’m a lady. And that was just a tablecloth. There’s a red and gold gown hanging back in the costume room, and it fits me just right. I wonder how people will treat me if I go back dressed like a queen.
    I clean the room until the lions are bright-eyed and the books stand proudly at attention on the shelves. I’m not sure why I do it. Perhaps so