Page 105 of Skysong

The sudden certainty of her potential rose within Andala. She was not just agirl, like Terault thought. She was not even just a nightingale.

She was a god.368

So how should she punish him? How should she make him pay for the pain he’d caused and the chaos he’d sown?

Perhaps,she mused,Ishouldtakehiseyes.If he desired her power so much, why not give him the darkness? Let him live in it forever?

But even as she pictured it – the stabbing blows, the flowing blood – she knew that she would not do it.

The old Andala might have done it. Might have considered it a fitting punishment, a poetic final blow. But the person she was now, the person she wanted to be – the nightingale, whole and integral and secure in her power – knew that darkness was not a punishment, not even one to be doled out by a vengeful god. It was impartial, inevitable, nothing but a part of life and of those who lived.

So instead, without knowing entirely why, she beat her wings and rose high again, and sang.

It was not time for the nightingale’s song. The sun was barely risen, still climbing in the sky. Oriane’s own music still lingered in her ears. But the notes streamed forth just the same. It was not the unstoppable impulse it usually was; Andala was in control, and so sure that this was right.

A shadow began to fall across the sun.

She had never seen anything like it. It was still daytime; the sun still shone. But something was stretching across it like a great dark canvas. The light was fading, turning fey and eerie.

In wonder, Andala realised it was the new moon passing across the sky. Drawn up from where it had begun to sink into slumber, it was sailing the skies as if they were a sea, and it a great celestial ship.

And finally, as she had somehow known they would, they aligned: sun and moon, night and day. A perfect fit. A palimpsest.369

Andala hovered in the air, song still streaming from her throat as the disc of darkness slipped into place, ringed around its edge by pure white light.

Below her, all hell broke loose once more.

Terault’s people were panicking. They ran, screamed, stumbled around in the fresh darkness. Perhaps they thought they’d angered the gods, or that those gods had forsaken them entirely. Many of them surged towards the cliff’s edge in search of the seneschal, and Andala could not tell if they sought solace or retribution.

She flew down over Terault as his limbs convulsed, not giving him a second look. She dipped towards Tomas instead. He had dragged himself to his knees. As he raised his head towards her, Andala directed the last notes of her song his way, hoping he’d understand what it said. Terault had wronged Tomas too, perhaps more than any of them. The traitor was his to deal with as he would; the future of his kingdom would be what he made of it, and with luck, he’d have his sister by his side.

Tomas nodded to her. Then he staggered to his feet, looking every inch a king.

As Andala rose back above the bluff, her song wound its way to a graceful end. The moon and the darkness receded. The sun emerged once more, bright and bold as a victor from a hard-won battle.

The clifftop had half emptied; most of Terault’s followers had deserted him, now nowhere to be seen. But the person she sought was still here. Kitt, on his knees at the promontory’s edge, blood on his shirt and a dagger dangling limply from his hand.

He turned his face up to her as she approached, looking shaken but unharmed. Andala alighted on the ground before him. She could have tried to transform back to talk to him one last time, to say a proper goodbye, but there was no need. Something unspoken passed370between them as Kitt looked down at her. He grinned, radiant as the daylight, his eyes lined silver-bright.

‘Go find her,’ he said. And with a sweep of her wings, Andala was airborne again.

She turned to face the water. The sun was fully risen, and the nightingale rose to greet it, a silhouette against its light. And then she was flying, outward, onward.

She thought of Kitt as she did; of how she’d miss her friend. She thought of her mother, and of Girard.

She thought of Amie.

Someday she might come back here. Back to all she’d left behind, back to right the wrongs she’d done. Perhaps they’d both come back, she and Oriane, to reckon with their pasts and bury their ghosts together. But for now, Andala would face forward, and fly for the horizon.

Somewhere beyond it, the skylark was waiting.

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Epilogue

When the people of Cielore talked of what had become of the skylark, they might have shared any of a dozen tales.

Some said she had gone far away, somewhere she could sing without being disturbed.

Others said she had never existed at all.

Still others knew of the nightingale, and spoke not of a lone songbird, but of two: two women with the power to change the skies, who lived together in a castle on an island in the middle of the sea.

The most imaginative, or the most keen-eyed, said that both birds returned to Cielore on occasion; that if you knew where to look, you might see them on the solstice, or hear them sing together on those rare, rare days when the moon passed across the sun.

But there was one thing in common between all who told stories of the skysingers: they were sure that the sun would rise and the moon thereafter – a dawn, a dusk, a golden day, a velvet night, and never one of them without the other.

The world will go on,the lark and the nightingale sang, into light, into darkness, into light.372