Free West of the Moon by Margi Preus

suspended between earth and sky, willing the tree to bend a little more, a little more. The ground rushes up. I wait … wait … then fling myself off the tree, arms wheeling, legs kicking. Deprived of my weight, the tree springs back, with the goatman still clinging to the trunk.
    Leaves flutter down. Among them, I see the Black Book, the wedding crumbs, the old potatoes, and many, many coins, tumbling and flipping in the air, catching the sunlight that breaks through the mist.
    As for me, I am a bird, a cloud, a falling star. As I hurtle through the sky, all that
was
burns up behind me in a hot white tail, and all that
will be
rushes toward me, cool and green. Good-bye, I say, to what was. Good-bye to the golden meadow and the lake of hammered copper. Good-bye to the emerald bracelets, the ruby earrings, and the jeweled necklaces strung between the branches.
    As the goatman scrambles down the tree and rushes about plucking up coin after scattered coin, I say good-bye to the treasure.
    Then I snatch up my dress and shoes and run up and over the hill, into the sun, west to Soria Moria.

The Magic Ball of Yarn
    stri,” Greta says, as we three girls struggle up the mountainside, “isn’t America terribly far away? How are we ever going to get all the way there?”
    â€œDo you know the story of the girl and the white bear?” I ask. “How, on her journey to find the bear she had lost, the girl was given things? A magic tablecloth. A pair of scissors that snipped and played so that pieces of silk and strips of velvet flew about her if she but clipped in the air.”
    â€œIn the story of the girl and the bear, it was the girl following the bear, not the other way around,” Greta says, glancing over her shoulder.
    I cast a glance behind me and see a speck moving up the mountain behind us. “Can you tell who that is?” I ask Greta.
    â€œIt’s him,” she says.
    â€œAll we need,” I tell her, “is a magic ball of yarn that, when you toss it in front of you, leads you where you want to go. Then we’ll be fine.”
    We have come upon a
seter
hut, so I say, “And perhaps here is where we’ll get that yarn.”
    Out comes the milkmaid, shoving up her sleeves.
“Hie!”
she says when she sees us. “Here are some tired lasses! Where are you bound, and from whence do you come?”
    I tell her where we’re from, and that we’re going to America.
    â€œAmerica! Nay!” she says, pulling her head back.
    â€œAye, that’s where we’re bound,” I repeat.
    â€œWhy, that’s very far away.”
    â€œThat it is,” I agree.
    â€œAnd costs ever so dearly! Why, folks sell their farms and all their stock and equipment to get enough money for a venture like that,” she says, eyeing our ragged clothes.
    â€œI suppose that’s so,” I tell her. “Nonetheless, that’s where we’re bound.”
    â€œBut say,” she says, “you must be frightfully hungry! Wouldn’t you like something to eat?”
    The girls look at me hopefully. There wasn’t any breakfast, nor, until now, any prospect of one. I glance over my shoulder. The speck is still but a speck.
    â€œI suppose you haven’t got a magic ball of yarn?” I ask. “That when you toss it in front of you leads you where you want to go?”
    The milkmaid laughs and says no, she hasn’t anything like that. “But wait right here,” she says. Into the hut she goes, and out she comes again carrying a bowl sloshing with milk.“Drink that,” she says, “before you perish from thirst. And when you’re finished, I’ll give you this.” She pulls a hairbrush from her pocket.
    â€œA hairbrush?” I ask, while Greta and Spinning Girl take turns slurping milk.
    â€œFor your hair! Once you get the tangles out, it will be devilish pretty to look at.”
    â€œPretty?” I touch my hair. I