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Of course I understood. No child of an Ixora could miss it—the tree had dropped its seeds in the earth, and no soil is richer than that of a forest after a fire. A new tree had been born, and a new mistress.
I gave her the seeds. It was all I could do.
She thought they were very pretty.
“BUT YOUR FEATHER,” I WHISPERED, AS A COLD AND snowy lake country fluttered below us like a huge white flock.
Lantern shook his glittering head. “Ravhi didn’t have it, and it was no use asking her where it went—she remembered nothing of the old tree, or the old gardener. I think the Wizard must have taken it when he played Death. I feel it still, like an eye or an ear I have misplaced. It was not burned, but it is not near, and no one has called me with it.”
I flew a little closer to the warm bird, basking in his heat. Snow melted from my beak. “I’m sorry she couldn’t nest with you, like you wanted,” I said bashfully.
He smiled and squinted in the flying flakes. “Drakes aren’t meant to nest. It was a silly hope. And if she had, we should never have met, little web-foot, and that would have been very sad.”
He flew with me all winter and into the spring, fed me grasses and mice and dandelion heads, until I grew, and my neck was long. When the geese came back, I did not want to go with them, and he did not make me go. I flew under his wings, which were wide as sunset clouds, as chapel doors or cedar shades, and I was safe from Falcons. Together we crossed the wide purple sea and back again, and rested in the fronds of palm trees. He taught me many songs and the language of the Starlings, and the Storks, and the Seagulls. And he did teach me to steal as well as any burglar. I never wanted for cherries.
For us there was no time, only the flying, and the clouds in our mouths. I was happy. I was his. We needed no others. I did not cry. But after two summers I saw that the trees were familiar, and the shadows of the birth-nest were again on the horizon. I shivered in fear.
“I have brought you back home, little one,” Lantern said, “for there is a new flock, and they are calling on the moon and sun to find you.”
“I want to stay with you.” I wept, and he held me in his wings, which were as the evening sky closing over me.
He shifted wretchedly from foot to foot. “We are not the same, gray-heart. Only those who share feather and beak can remain together always. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken care of you at all, but you were so poor, and so dear, and I have never had a chick to love. You will be all right now, I know it. You should have a flock, and a nest. I could give you only a burning tree and cold fruit. And… there is something pulling at me, here, like a finger hooked into my breastbone. My feather wants me, and I cannot refuse.”
“But I don’t want a new flock! And you can refuse; you can turn around and fly the other way as fast as you can.”
He sighed, and even his brilliant colors, his oranges and golds that lit my world, seemed muted and dull. “It isn’t like that, my love. When my feather calls, I have to go. I can n
o more fly in the other direction than I can fly underwater.”
I still did not cry, but it was very hard. We perched on a crooked oak stump outside a great courtyard, and something was there, on the cobblestones, something that smelled like memory. A curl of smoke was rising from it, smoke, and then bright fire, sparking in the morning fog.
“We are not the same,” Lantern repeated, “but there is fire, and you can go towards it without dread, and be born again with your own birds, born in fire just like me. There will be a little of what made me, in you.”
The smell pulled at me—I knew it, I knew it, and the air above the pyre was now filled with birds, birds with the maddening, wonderful smell on their wings. It was like horses, horses and milk and damp, dark rooms.
It was my mother’s smell, and Lantern put his hearth-warm head to my back and pushed me towards it. I flapped my wings slowly and glided into the mist. I did not look behind me; I knew he did not want me to, and there was Mother before me, Mother, whom I had given up all hope of finding. But it was as though my own feathers were ripped from me, each dripping with dark blood.
When my mother burned, I was not afraid. I cut her bonds with my mouth and kissed her flaming lips. All around me were birds that looked just like me, with long necks and gray feathers and webbed feet. They were my flock, they knew me for their own, and she was my flock, and I loved her. I felt no fire, only the path to her, and I helped her rise up from the ash, just as Lantern must have risen when he was a little black chick; I helped her rise up and steal away into the night.
“I WAS THEIRS. I AM NOT YOURS. ONLY FLOCK CARES for flock.” Aerie looked at him with her large black eyes, full of mourning and distrust.
“But we are family; we are the same… clutch,” Leander protested quietly.
“We are not the same. Your father you will put under the claw. He is not my father.”
Leander’s cheeks darkened. His father’s face floated in his vision, and he felt no love for it. “He harmed our mother. And all her people. He destroys everything.”
“Why should I care what is done on the earth? This is not my place. I belong to the air. I belong to all these ghosts.”
“Aerie, you are a woman now; you are on the earth, both feet. You cannot ignore it because you remember when they were wings.”
“He is not my father, not my duty,” she insisted, staring at the moon-speckled grass.
“No. But it is our mother, and she gave you the wind and the clouds so you could live. I have done so much wrong, Aerie. All I wanted was a Quest—and this one has led only back to the Castle I wished to escape. But if that is what is written, that is what is written. And it is written that because we left the Castle separately, we must return together. There is the Wizard to think of, who killed our grandmother and ravaged her bones. All this is ours, the nest that made us. I am yours. You are my duty. Come with me.”
Leander put his hand out to her, glimmering in the dark, and slowly, she clasped it with her own, still streaked in blood. “Grandmother,” she whispered, “and the flock that once had no wings.”
Journeying back towards the Castle, Leander marveled that Aerie could move entirely without sound. Her feet made no impact on the earth as they ran from the Witch’s Glen, back and back and back towards the place of their birth.
