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“I, of course, was not invited to the festival or the execution…”
THE COURT GLEAMED LIKE A GREAT ICED CAKE, AND you were bounced on a hundred shoulders, kissed by a thousand lips while I lay bound in golden cords in the tower. But when the night was full as a sail, and everyone had drunk as much wine as goats will gobble their bearded nanny’s milk, I cut my ropes on a sharp stone and, tucking the rough blade into my dress, crept out of the tower, down those old familiar stairs, one last time into the dark of the prisons where Aerie was born.
They looked out at me, terrified, from their cells. I was a stranger to them, hideous as a ghoul in all my various shades of gold. I had to speak softly, to tell them I was not the Queen at all, but their own Knife, and as their knife I would cut them free. They didn’t believe it. That ragged child who chewed raw meat and scampered after crows to catch their feathers could not be draped in silk and smell of violets growing in soft moss. They asked me how to tell a doe’s prints from a stag’s, and how many wildcats I had killed before my marriage, and what my grandmother’s name had been, and both my sisters’.
I answered them all. And one by one, I broke their locks until they sat quivering around me like a flock of wild birds. Only some forty of them were left, of all our hundreds of warriors.
“I can’t let you go under the King’s axe like cattle tomorrow. I can buy your lives at a better price than that. Only… oh, I’m not sure I can. The Wizard cut me and cut me and there was nothing. I don’t know, but I will try. I will try. Come closer, I think I must be able to touch you—”
They pressed me heavily; the smell of their sweat and dying penetrated me like a slow poison. All those faces, cheekbones sharp and high, all those eyes, all those bony fingers grabbing at me! They did not know what they reached for, only that they reached for me, their Knife, and for salvation.
I closed my eyes and spoke in my heart to the Black Mare, who foaled the stars in the beginning of the world. I begged her for the power to which I had no right, for light which was not mine.
Slowly, I took the sharp stone and dug at my breast, cutting through the skin and into the meat of myself, as deep as I could stand it. And the blood flowed, red, and darker, but not silver, never silver.
I cut deeper, driving the rock into myself until I could hear it scrape the bone. I cried out, and my voice echoed in the dark, an echo of an echo, of all my cries when my daughter was born, of all my cries when I let her go.
Something pale dribbled from me, small drops like pearls. Nothing like my grandmother’s wealth of light, but it was there, at the bottom of my body.
With my tribe huddled around me as though my body alone could keep them warm, I bent low and showed them that they had to taste it, they had to suckle at me as a dying woman in the desert will suckle at the blood of her horse to survive.
One by one, they took their few drops, and as they did I became weaker and weaker, for forty men and women can drink a great deal when they are frightened. I was
faint and wobbling on my heels, crouched among them, and one by one I took their frail bodies into my hands and shaped them as I had seen Grandmother do, shaped them like clay on a stone table.
They changed, more slowly than Aerie had, since I was so weak, since I did not have the light of the cave and the stars. But the great silver wings came, the beaks lengthened from their lips, their legs disappeared under pale down. One by one, they staggered upright and squeezed between the window bars, into the night scented with festival fireworks, the moon under their wings, honking under the stars.
And I sat in the damp trickle of the dungeon, sobbing and laughing, skin flaming with light, my arms flung out to them as they spiraled up and up and up.
LEANDER FELT THE HEAT AND WEIGHT OF DOZENS OF black eyes on him. The wild geese that had formed his mother’s bed linens stared at him with a disconcerting light, full of veiled secrets. Knife stroked their long necks.
“You know the rest. I was punished; you were taken from me and given over to my maid. But she ran from my pyre and saw nothing. When I was left to burn, my flock came and braved the licking flames to cut me loose and bear me away to the Forest. The poor things—they could hold no part of their own selves in these feathered bodies. They didn’t know why they did it, why they were compelled to dive into the fire—some died—but they did. They knew only that they loved me, and could not be apart from me. And so we are a tribe again, after all.”
Leander shut his eyes against the gazes of all those long-necked creatures.
“And now we come to it, my son,” she said, crossing her arms over her broad chest. “I told you that you might prefer death to any salvation I might offer. I could not buy my people’s vengeance, only their lives. You must purchase a better end than I. When a knife is buried in your father’s chest, then I shall count myself satisfied, and you forgiven. You must swear it to me.”
He had thought that her price would be more terrible somehow, that he would not already burn with the desire to avenge this hut of birds. He felt no hesitation, only relief that he could, at the last, do something for them. Leander placed his arms over his mother, smelling her wild, sharp scent and feeling her thick bones under his hands. After all he had heard he could not swear other than this, and he murmured his assent. She clapped her hands behind his back and pushed him off of her.
“Well, then, I think the moon has risen, and you may wrap your poor sister in her skin, so she may be whole. Don’t forget to keep the skin on her, to tie it close to her, or it will be for nothing. Make it tight, for she will have to break out of it with her own strength, or not at all.”
“It is magic. You should do it, not I.”
The Witch coughed hoarsely and spat.
“I will do it. I am her mother. You will manage the grass and leaves, boy, and I will manage the blood.”
In the Garden
THE BOY STARED AT THE GIRL, HER FACE FRAMED BY AN EXPLOSION OF white stars, trailing in the sky like sea foam. Her eyes were shut; she was enchanted by her own voice, which moved back and forth across his skin like a violin bow. If she had asked him to sprout Aerie’s own wings and fly from the tower, he would have leapt from the window, if it meant she would never stop speaking.
Mesmerized by her cloaked eyes and the waterfall of her shadowy hair, he ventured once again to lie beside her on the wide stone sill, and place his head in her lap, like a young lion in a tamer’s trance.
LEANDER LOOKED AT HIS SISTER’S CORPSE, WHICH despite his long travels had not changed at all, had not even begun to rot—she still bore the same pale skin and silver hair, flawless and fair. When he put his hands on her, the flesh was cool, but it had not yet grown hard.
The Prince wrapped her in the scarlet skin as his mother told him. He made sure her hands were folded against her chest, and her hair pulled away from the sticky skin. He tucked her feet up and pulled the red stuff under her. When he tucked the last corner into itself, the whole fleshy shape became hard and round as an egg, shining like a malevolent star on the summer grass. He sat against a knotted oak, sweating.
Knife knelt on the dark grass, setting a bundle wrapped in cloth at her side. Her bones creaked like windows pried open in winter. She stroked the egg, and leaned against it, putting her arms around the thing and crooning quietly to it. She shut her eyes and the Prince thought, for a moment, that she wept—but surely not, surely not.
