Clever fled. She ran madly and without thought to the mill, inside, to where her brother and sister sat up beneath gentle wings and rubbed their sleepy eyes.
She grasped their hands, jerked them upright, pulled them stumbling after her, across beaten ground, onto green, toward the footbridge.
The Golden Bird cried, “Look not! Look not!”
By the groaning wheel a crush of avian bodies roiled and beat. An aura of loose feathers lofted above. Feathers of all sizes and colors — soft, suspended — each one gamboling inside a puff of air.
The Golden Bird flew, up and out and over and beyond, for the children to follow.