Free Zel by Donna Jo Napoli

exactly one hundred days. Mother carried up the hay for her mattress and covered it with a single sheet embroidered in vine leaves.
    Zel insisted on hay for her mattress, not straw, because hay smells sweet. And hay is what horses eat. Zel remembers the horse at the smithy, the smooth coat on the mare’s back and the dark splotches on her thin, fine legs. She remembers the youth, how he looked at her. In her sleep she sees him eating the bread she gave him. Sometimes she is overcome with the urge to touch his dimple, just lightly, with one fingertip.
    Her nights on that mattress are never peaceful. She misses being lulled to sleep by the fiddle. She missesMother’s cool kiss and the rabbits’ thick fur and the goats’ nipping and butting. She misses climbing high until her throat aches in the cool, dry air and stepping barefoot from slippery rock to slippery rock in icy streams. She misses dirt, leaves, rain in her upturned face. Oh, she misses so much.
    Zel pushes up her left sleeve. She holds her arm out and tilts it until her fine gold hairs catch the weak sunlight. She counts the hairs from wristbone to elbow. Sometimes she sits back on her heels and rocks as she counts.
    She knows many numbers. The number of stones that make up the floor of this tower room: forty-four. Large and smooth. The number of days in this tower. One hundred days are many.
    Zel stands in her birthday dress. Mother has explained that she chose green for hope. Zel is hopeful. Mother will conquer the threat outside. Or Zel will conquer it herself. She makes a fist. Zel is a fighter. But she’d rather not fight alone.
    Mother will be here at noon.
    If only Zel could tell time from the sky. But the sky changes with the seasons and the wind. Right there, for instance, just moments ago that cloud was flat on the bottom and lacy on top. But now the cloud has formed into lumps, and Zel predicts that a breeze will soon scatter the lumps. What reward can she give herself if she’sright? Oh, she can get Mother to massage her neck. Her neck hurts these days from the weight of her hair, which grows unnaturally quickly. Every day she can see how much longer it is; she can feel how much heavier it is. She has asked Mother to cut it, but Mother says her hair will come in handy. When Zel asks what for, Mother doesn’t answer.
    Zel lies down on the hay mattress to rest her tired neck. She folds her hands on her chest. Now she can see nothing but her tower room, and that is the worst pain of all. She looks at her folded hands. She smiles. Her hands make drawings and paintings that confound her. Zel feels mystery enter her body, as though she harbors secrets even she cannot be allowed to know. Her bones grow heavy; they would merge with the stone of the tower if she stayed still too long. These thoughts alarm her; she does not recognize the girl who thinks them. She sits up suddenly, her back straight as a pine.
    Most mornings Zel paints. When it was still summer, she painted the orange poppies, the yellow ranunculus, the blue gentian. She propped her paintings up along the bottom of the walls, as if they grew there.
    Now, in early fall, she paints the greens and blues of the spruce, the browns of the occasional passing bear, the spotted yellows of the leaves that clutter the ground.
    Mother gave her these paints. Generous Mother. Zel rises and takes a sheet of paper from the stack. She lays iton the window ledge. “What would you like painted on you today?”
    A squirrel chatters from the walnut tree. Zel laughs. He flicks his tail, bushy thick for the approaching winter. “Don’t go away. Please.” Zel goes to her mattress and grabs the roll from her breakfast package. She rushes back to the window.
    Zel pinches the inner part from the roll. She shapes it in the form of a walnut. “A delicious nut just for you.” She tosses the dough pellet. It hits the tree below the squirrel. The squirrel darts upward, then stops, paws extended, skin stretched out in