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When Ayda was ten, she found a portrait of a Before Ayda (not Right Before Ayda, but maybe Twice Before Ayda or Thrice Before Ayda) tucked away in the stacks of the Compass Points. The portrait was aged and done in what Ayda, as an adult, would recognize as a particular antiquated watercolor technique, but Ayda at the time had merely thought was charming. Ayda looked at the painting for approximately fifteen seconds and promptly burst into tears. This greatly alarmed Garthy O’Brien, who was sitting in the aisle as she searched through her tomes. “Darling,” Garthy said, holding out their arms, into which Ayda threw herself. “What’s wrong, lovey? Did you hurt yourself?”
Ayda hiccuped, angling away from Garthy so as not to burn them with the burp of fire from her mouth, and shook her head. Garthy rubbed a hand over her back between her wings as they waited.
The problem with the portrait, which was both beautiful and tastefully done, was that the Ayda painted there was a grown-up, mid-thirties, with much of a flat chest left bare and a beard of fire at the chin and a broadness in the shoulders—in short, the Ayda painted there belonged to the paradigm of “man” rather than the paradigm of “woman.” The Ayda sobbing into Garthy O’Brien’s shoulder belonged to the paradigm of “girl” and not the paradigm of “boy.” She had decided so, and Garthy had said that was perfectly alright, but this was the only adult Ayda she had ever seen and a girl was supposed to grow up into a woman, not a man, and if Ayda didn’t grow up into a woman that meant Garthy was wrong and she couldn’t be a girl after all, and this was a deeply distressing thought. Ayda enjoyed being a girl. Ayda did not want to be a boy.
When she slid out of Garthy’s grasp onto the floor, rubbing her eyes free from tears, she saw Garthy pick up the painting which Ayda had dropped on the ground. “Oh, Aydie, my girl, is this what’s got you so worked up?”
Ayda nodded miserably, bringing up her knees to wrap them in her arms. “I don’t understand,” she admitted. “I am a girl. I am a girl.”
“Quite right, darling,” said Garthy. “That you are.”
“But girls do not—this is not what girls grow up to be,” Ayda said, tapping a talon on the parchment, puncturing a little hole on the edge as punctuation. “And I will grow up to be this. Do you understand?”
“Well, not necessarily, lovey. Not if you don’t want to.”
Ayda frowned. “I am Ayda Aguefort. This person is Ayda Aguefort. It is reasonable that I would grow up from a smaller Ayda Aguefort into a larger Ayda Aguefort.”
“Yes,” Garthy agreed, “but this isn’t anything like the larger Ayda Aguefort I knew. And I knew her very well, I’d like to think, and she was certainly a woman, no doubt about that, and no offense to your predecessor here, but she wouldn’t’ve been caught dead in anything like this, either.” They gestured to the robes Portrait Ayda was wearing, which were indeed a bit much for Ayda’s tastes.
“But I don’t understand,” Ayda said again, with more vehemence. “How is one Ayda not the same as another Ayda?”
“My darling.” Garthy touched her chin with their cool fingers and brought her head up. “None of us are just who we are all alone, yeah? So you and this Ayda, you started out the same when you were hatched and all, but everything that’s happened in your life has changed you. Made you who you are.” They punctuated this with a tap on the tip of her nose. “You’re unique, lovey. And you may be a phoenix, but you’re half human too. You won’t always end up the same bird.”
“And being a boy or a girl, that’s something that…that can change?”
Garthy shrugged. Some shrugs meant that the shrugger did not care to know or share an answer, which Ayda hated deeply, but Garthy rarely shrugged in a manner that seemed to dismiss or diminish her. Instead their brows were knit in a way that meant that they were thinking. “I reckon so. Or maybe it’s less that who you are changes, and more how you understand yourself. You know,” they said, in the tone of a close confidante, “I was a pipsqueak like you when I knew I wasn’t a girl. That was easy. But for years and years, I thought I was a boy instead. And maybe I was one, I don’t know; I didn’t mind being a boy, at any rate. And I was much older than you are now when I decided that I didn’t fancy being a boy anymore. And now I know I’m neither. But maybe if I’d made some other choices in my life, I’d be calling myself a man instead. You never know, dearie, you never do.”
“It’s…” Ayda sought the right word, because there was a right word, she knew. “It’s interpretation. Is that what you mean?”
“A matter of interpretation,” Garthy agreed. “Same information, different conclusion.”
Ayda worked to reconcile that. She knew that although the world worked optimally with logical and clear-cut answers, much of the world was less than optimal, which meant she had to accustom herself to the uncomfortable lack of precise and perfect clarity. On a page there was one meaning per word, up until there wasn’t, up until she had to be the arbiter of which meaning a word meant. “Yes,” she said decisively. “Fascinating. A challenging riddle.”
Garthy chuckled, and a ridiculous impulse rose in Ayda’s chest to somehow wrap herself in that laugh like a blanket, which was an impossibility that she deeply desired in that moment and in many others. She settled for scooting closer and bumping her hand against their shoulder in a familiar silent sign of affection. “You know, my darling girl,” they said, “I’ve never met a riddle you couldn’t solve if you put your mind to it.”
“Yes,” Ayda agreed. “I am rather remarkable.” And she resolved, on the constellations and on the seven winds of the nine stars and on the wide waters of the world, that she would do precisely that.