Aloren Read online

  Three

  As I wept, darkness fell and the stars above me grew bright. The last of the light went, and dust blew up from the ground, catching in my throat. The shadows on the walls lengthened.

  I turned and there they stood, bodies whole, hands and feet solid. Hair wildly mussed, tunics askew––it looked as though they had been standing in a great wind. They were white-eyed with shock.

  “I don’t understand,” said Tem, looking at his hands.

  “Starlight.” Mordan looked out the broken roof. “It’s a new moon.”

  The new moon was a traditional time of magic and strangeness. Or it could’ve been the starlight. The Elde had worshiped the stars before humans came and brought the sun.

  Tem stuck his hand into a shadow and out of the starlight, and a few transparent pinion feathers took its place. “All right.” He sounded remarkably calm. “Stay out of the shadows.” He looked at Mordan. “Let's put Father on the river while we still can.”

  “Why? This is his fault.” Arin didn’t move, and the freckles stood out from his white face.

  “You’ll help us,” said Tem quietly, “or I’ll thump you.”

  Arin said no more about it, and the older boys picked Father up and carried him down to the murmuring Gael River to give him a proper Gralde goodbye.

  With numb fingers we tied bunches of last autumn’s rushes into a pallet, and for lack of our family’s wild-roses, threaded it through with snow glories and larkspur while Liskara nickered in the night. We placed Father upon it with his sword on his breast, and set him afloat on the black water.

  I wiped my nose and looked away before he drifted out of sight. My hand found Tem’s and he held me next to him.

  At some point I realized Floy wasn’t there. I ran back up the steps and into the tower.

  She stood against the wall, white-faced in the starlight. When she saw me, she slipped half into a shadow and I saw half of her disappear. I grappled for her hand and pulled her into the light.

  “What happened to you?” I said.

  She told me the whole story. I gaped at her, and the boys came in, keeping clear of the shadows. “All right,” Arin said shakily. “What are we going to do?”

  “Stay out of the wind,” said Mordan. “Try not to die. Watch the country fall apart.”

  “We’ve got instructions,” said Tem. He pointed to the signet ring glinting on the stone. “And that.”

  “You could just put it on,” Arin said, “march down to Ellyned––”

  “Not in a night. This is temporary––we have until morning.” He put his arm into a shadow, and it became a wing.

  “You’re birds,” I said, staring at the feathers. “All of you. You’re all birds.”

  Arin eyed me sullenly. “What about you? Always skiving off family occasions.”

  “You locked me in the privy.”

  “It is strange,” Mordan said, “that we should be birds. And Floy––she’s an actual bird.” He turned to Floy. “Are you dumb like a beast?”

  “Dumb like a beast?” She shoved him away from her. “Straight out of hell this came.”

  She hid her face in her hands, and I kept quiet; and Tem said to me: “We sent Floy to look for you when we found Father. As she was a real bird. Solid, I mean. The hall was burning, she told us.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe this,” he said to Mordan. “Outlaws and some bitch’s curse on the same day?”

  “Could be more than a coincidence,” said Mordan.

  Tem touched a bruise at the nape of my neck. “This is a wicked piece of work.”

  “From a cupboard,” I said. “Nilsa did it.”

  He pulled his hand away. “Nilsa?”

  “Hardly matters now, does it?” I blinked back tears.

  “How’d you get out?” said Mordan. “You’re wet.”

  “The toilet.” Arin’s eyes bugged. Before he could say anything, I said viciously, “I didn’t have feathers, at least”

  They all stared at me solemnly.

  I backed away and cut the arch of my left foot. I looked down: the ring glinted.

  “You’ll have to keep it. You’re the only one left.” Tem’s eyes didn’t move from the ring.

  “Did you understand any of what Father said?” Mordan said.

  “Don’t talk about Father.”

  “Once we uproot the Marione,” said Mordan, “we’ve only got five years to find the ice asters.”

  “While we’re searching for those, you’ll be sowing the Marione seeds,” said Tem, “so you have enough of a crop to weave tunics.”

  “Stop it,” I said. “I’d kill us.”

  “And you can’t speak about yourself to anyone,” said Mordan, “except us, I expect, once we’ve broken––”

  “You believed him?” Tears wet my face. “Mordan, he was out of his mind.”

  A silence followed, unbearably tense. “I’d rather be dead than have this disease,” said Arin. Leode started to cry again, and Mordan took hold of his wrist. Outside the wind picked up and slipped through the cracks, and Floy, still pinned to the wall, grew bold.

  “Let her be,” she said. “See how small she is? She’d get no help at all.”

  “We’ll won’t do the country any good as dust,” Mordan said.

  Tem nodded. “If she’s willing––”

  “She’s right, you know.” Arin didn’t look at them. “We’re done for, we’re through, whether or not she decides to do it.”

  “Thank you, Arin. Your optimism is appreciated.” Mordan turned to everyone else: “Anything she does later––it can’t get much worse than this.”

  “Yes it can,” said Arin. “Reyna with all our Marione?”

  I looked at Arin and licked my lips. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it.” My heart lurched up and hammered in my throat.

  “You won’t last a day,” Arin said to me. “You won’t be able to tell anyone your name, who you are, what’s your favorite color, whether or not you murdered someone––”

  “I said I’ll do it.”

  He wiped spit off his nose.

  “You’ll go hungry, Reyna. You don’t know how horrible it is,” said Floy. My hand crept up to run over the back of my neck.

  “Make sure you understand,” said Tem. “A broken spirit––it’s supposed to feel truly awful.”

  This was beyond my comprehension. “Can’t you help me? Even a bit?”

  “When it’s moonless. Twelve nights a year.” He sounded more miserable than I’d ever heard him.

  “Let me try it, Tem,” I said. “Do. Let me just try.”

  “And then there’re the ice asters,” said Arin, as though that put the cap on it.

  “They’re real,” said Tem.

  “How’re you so cocksure?”

  “Because the Cam Belnech are, obviously enough.”

  A wind caught in Tem’s hair and he turned toward the window. “It’s late,” he said. The first pale light shone through, coloring the floor green.

  I backed against the wall and waited. Their fingertips caught the light and changed, lengthened into feathers that spread down their arms like sleeves.

  Tem’s arms became long, wide, an egret’s wings. Mordan’s nose curved into the beak of a raven, Arin grew the slender neck of a swan, and the dove that used to be Leode waited for the others to be done.

  I wondered what bird I might have been. The sparrow, the only solid one, sat on her windowsill and looked at me.

  I picked up Father’s ring, put it in my chemise pocket. I walked out the door, turned, and called back into it, not sure they could understand me, “I’m uprooting our Marione. You come and watch.”

  Four

  The morning was windy and chill, but a balm sweetened the air and heralded the arrival of milder days. Stars shone in the west, faint in the green. The birds flew in front of me, and the wind flew behind. It moved through my brothers with such a roar I feared they would be blown asunder, and I started into a run.


  The hill swam with mist. Its foot was strewn with gigantic granite stones, grey-green and starry as the rim of the sky. The only stone still standing was rosy gneiss, brought to that place time out of mind to mark the wheeling of stars.

  It jutted from the side of the hill like the last tooth in an ancient gum. “Old Mother’s Snaggletooth,” I had heard someone call it, and I wondered if Old Mother was the earth, or a giant saebel under the ground. “Excuse me, Mother,” I said on my way up.

  The hill was bald, and eons of wind had stripped the west side to mostly rock. I kept to that side––the red stone was to the east, and I feared it.

  I found them near the crown, growing in a circle among the stones: bright blue gentians and tiny saxifrage, columbine, nettle, and wood sorrel. They had each a blood-red throat.

  I stood still, sweat running down my nose. I had no right to disturb them, couldn’t believe I was looking at them.

  My brothers gathered near my feet, nipping at each other, Floy standing a little to the side. The standing stones glowered up at us, a disapproving jury come to witness my blasphemy. My hands shook. The sun reached the hill, and light fell through the boys.

  Wind blew into my back, lifting my skirts. A great gust rocked the trees. The birds shook and wavered; I reached for them as they vanished, and dove into the circle, bloodying my knees.

  I broke stems and roots, and the wind changed to wings, a flurry of them falling round my shoulders. I reached the nettles last, and the spines sank into my forearms, palms. And then it happened.

  My lungs blew from my mouth, or so it felt. A flaming rope stretched out from my chest, thin and brittle, unraveling, twisting, and breaking until only a string stretched taut.

  I lay down, chest afire with pain. Ice followed the fire and spread through me, dulling the hurt. My senses heightened so that I could hear the new grass struggling to stand beneath me. And they were nearby, still birds, still yoked to my wish.

  “I think the bell flowers were mine,” one of them said. “Reyna must be the nettles.”

  “What feels different? I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Won’t put your finger on anything for a while, Tem.”

  “Beasts act on instinct, and people on obligation and ration, and I’m thinking rationally enough––”

  “Stop hurting my head.”

  “––but I wonder if presently we’ll lose all idea of words and have to resort to base––”

  I lifted my head. Tem, Mordan, Arin, and Leode had ceased to fade, but only Mordan the raven was comfortable in a black suit. Leode could have been a pigeon, but Arin and Tem looked ridiculous. Floy sat before me, just as she had been.

  “Corps’ eyes from a tomb in Tinop.” The white at her throat leapt. “Broken anything?”

  “I’m talking to a sparrow.” I got to my feet and touched a scraped knee. “I’m talking to a sparrow.” I wasn’t doing it consciously. The morphemes organized themselves like clockwork in my mouth, as well as in my fingers and eyes. “Was this supposed to happen?”

  “Don’t know,” said Mordan. They gathered around me, feathers moving in the wind, looking ready to dissolve at a touch.

  “May I?” I asked Tem. I sank my fingers into his plumage and closed my eyes.

  “Let’s go away from this place.” Tem stepped away from me and folded in his neck.

  I gathered up the scraps of our Marione and crept down through columns of shadow. Most of them took flight, but not so high we couldn’t continue talking.

  Tem said, “How do you suppose she found us?” We all knew he was talking about the Queen.

  “They’re likely both dead,” said Floy, referring to Biador and Nilsa.

  We were quiet for a while. Then Arin suggested Master Tippelain, our tutor, who had tried to teach to me real dances, poetry, music, and how to sit up straight. I wasn’t fond of him.

  “No,” said Tem. “He was one of Father’s oldest friends. Nilsa, though––”

  “What about big, slow Dwithy,” said Arin. “Came on the cart every month? Brought us food and clothes. Had a face puckered like a cat’s arse––”

  “He was simple,” said Mordan.

  “Maybe he only acted simple.”

  “Only you act simple, Arin. It was probably Hal. He was given the boot, after all.”

  I could feel Tem readying a reply, but whatever it was he kept it silent.

  My stomach growled, but there was no food, and I didn’t much feel like eating anything. I doggedly walked forward, making for the river. When I tripped over a root, I stopped, and thought of sitting down to have another cry. “Where am I going?” I said.

  “Don’t worry so,” said Tem, but he was worried.

  Liskara hadn’t strayed far. I unbuckled a saddlebag full of provisions that Mordan assured me I would be unhappy without. I put it on the ground, and the horse sneezed at me.

  “You needn’t ask,” I said. “Wherever you go, someone will take care of you.” I put the Marione at the bottom of the saddlebag, and studied Father’s ring. Gold, with a green stone carved like a wild rose.

  I untied a blanket from the saddle and sat down in the sun next to the river. I rubbed my dirty arms all over the blanket, wrapped it around me, and yawned hugely.

  ***

  When I woke, the stars shone, and a sliver of waxing moon. Leode roosted in an oak, his beak in his breast. The others spoke softly with their heads together, and I closed my eyes, heard my name, and turned on my side to listen.

  “She’ll starve to death, or freeze.”

  “We’ll find her a place before winter. A farm.”

  “Ha! Farming?”

  “Not as though she’s never dug up a turnip for Biador.”

  “You can hardly compare a kitchen garden to a field––”

  “It’s not so difficult––you’ve just never done it before.”

  “Watch it. Raven’s bigger than a sparrow.”

  “I can fly faster.”

  “You’re just a pot girl.”

  “Where, though?” the egret cut in. “We’re in the middle of the wild.”

  “There’s a village north of here,” said the swan. “Up the road, Hal said once.”

  “We’ll fly that way tomorrow.”

  “Reyna can’t fly.”

  I sat up at this. “I can walk.”

  Suddenly hungry, I rummaged through the saddlebag and found a piece of bread stuffed with salted pork. I ate it slowly.

  “Once she’s established herself somewhere,” said Tem, “we’ll scout out the country.”

  “Maybe Floy and Mordan,” I said. “But how’s a black egret going to scout out anything?”

  “Go back to sleep,” Tem said.

  ***

  “Mordan,” I said the next morning, “I still know who I am and what I am and where I am.”

  He told me this was good evidence that I was still sane.

  He, Floy, and I walked up the road, or rather, they flew from tree to tree and I walked. We’d forgotten to tie Liskara the night before, and when I woke she was gone. The others hadn’t come along. I refused to take a step towards civilization with black egrets, swans and doves.

  “Why should I not be crazy?” I stopped and looked up at him. “I’ve pulled my Marionin. I’m not dead––why shouldn’t I be crazy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you are. All the more reason to do exactly as I say.”

  “That’ll go over smoothly,” Floy said.

  All the morning I listened to the arguments and jeers pouring from the trees: sounds I’d never thought more than birdsong.

  Around midday we stopped for a rest in a hollow dark with pines. I should have known better, been more wary––the place felt old, resentful. Such places were often thick with saebels, but I sat thoughtlessly upon a boulder jutting out from a little stream.

  The boulder flung arms of shingle from the ice. I leapt up quick as a snake.

  He dislodged his bulk from the stream and the water gnaw
ed into my feet. He towered over me, a mammoth cairn. His eyes were blue-black tunnels, and his teeth ground together like a lake in midwinter: Does warm heart care to know what it feels like to be sat on?

  “No,” I said.

  Does she taste nice? Her haunches were tender. We are hungry after our sleep, always hungry.

  I thought of tumbling around his belly, and dumped the food from the saddlebag at his feet. Mordan cackled so hard he threatened to fall out of his yew. The saebel ate all my bread and salt pork, then he gave a burp like an avalanche, clamped himself over the stream, and went back to sleep.

  Mordan was still laughing.

  “You big tit.” I rubbed my cold feet. “A rock ate all my food.”

  “Let’s keep to the road,” said Floy. “The monsters don’t like ways and roads. And there’s food up the road.”

  The road scarcely hinted at food. It climbed all day, and became slick with a ceaseless, miserable drizzle. My brothers and I had sometimes played at being travelers, journeying as far as we dared on the deer paths, always with sausage and cheese, and heading back as soon as it was eaten. This was the real road, though. I hadn’t sausage or cheese, and I half expected a city, or at least a soft, green country beyond the first rise to the north. I neared the top, walked up a stair broken up by juniper roots, and stopped short in dismay. Black mountains rolled away on all sides, fading to blue on the horizon. The road wound down and disappeared into a muddle of pines, crumbling towers, and old walls keeping nothing out and leading nowhere. As I slogged on, the day waned and the drizzle clouded the view, and I kept to the middle of the path.

  “Do you suppose,” I remember grumbling to Floy, “that this village is one of those that appear for a day and then fade into the mist for another thousand years?”

  ***

  As the last of the light fled west I smelled the tang of smoke. My heart lifted.

  Farther up the road light came from windows in the mountain’s very arm. There was a fortress of some sort, atop the arm’s nub and long fallen into ruin. Some of the stones had been rebuilt into the second story of a building. The first story was dug out from the hillside.