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Of course the guards let Leander through—though he had been missing he was certainly not banished, and they took Aerie for a plaything he had brought home. It was simple as a child’s wooden blocks. They crept through the upper rooms, past door after door bolted with great brass locks. Suddenly, the Prince stopped.
“Wait,” he whispered, and disappeared behind one of the heavy doors. It was his own bedroom, and Leander stood within it as though he had never seen it before. He was not the man who had slept here; what he knew could not live in these velvet walls. He shook his head, trying to hold to his purpose.
“It is the function,” he told himself silently, “of a Prince to kill monsters. If the derivative of a Prince is set to zero, the kingdom survives.”
He straightened his spine and opened the carved teak table beside his brocade bed. He had what he had come for. From the drawer he drew a long silver knife with a curving handle of bone. It shone now with a pure light; it glimmered in his mind, heavy with meaning. He had taken it as a child for a toy, from the heaps of knives and daggers and stilettos in the vaults. It had called to him, and in the blade he felt uneasily that he had no choice in the story of this night, that he had strained towards it all his life, and never of his own will.
“Come on,” he said to his sister, whose eyes were beginning to take on the panting sheen of the hunt, “we will go to the Wizard first.”
They slipped through the door that led into the Wizard’s quarters—easily picked, easily entered. It should not be so easy, he thought. Killing should be hard and horrible work, not like this, less effort than drawing water from a well. It had no right being anything but thudding and blood and cries. But there was no sound save the heavy breathing of Aerie behind her brother. She saw the knife glinting at his belt and had already resolved to steal it. She could wait.
The Wizard Omir lay peacefully, prone as a baby, sleeping among white furs, his lips still full and firm. But the rest of him had long ago slid into old age swiftly as a knife slides through ribs. Leander had seen this man nearly every day of his life, but now he saw how deep the lines and wrinkles ran, how terrible the sores were that strange, hidden experiments had inflicted on his flesh. He remembered those sallow, piscine eyes always watching him, and he remembered the tale his mother told him, how Omir had killed Grandmother Bent-Bow with as little thought as baiting a hook. He reached for the knife, certain that he could do the deed.
But the blade was gone.
Aerie sat perched on one of the high tables with its gnarled wood. She breathed in long, sighing gasps, and in her pale fist was the bone-handled knife. She must have known it from the moment she saw it—known it for her own, for her grandmother’s blade. It must have called to her like a feather, and now they were together, knife and woman, and Leander could not stand before them.
With a soft cry, no more than a gosling gives upon seeing its flock in the distance, she fell on the sleeping form of the Wizard, plunging the knife into him. The old man opened his rheumy eyes in time to behold her, hair streaming, skin flushed with fury and triumph. She leaned down close to him, as though she were going to kiss his rasping lips, and whispered sinuously in his withered ear:
“Death has found you.”
Omir saw her, the bird-maiden, crouching over him like a nightmarish falcon, her eyes burning in her skull.
“I knew!” he breathed, choking as she twisted the knife in him. “I knew she could do it! The Witch, she lied, but I knew!”
Slowly, Aerie touched his face, gently, like a child. Her nails parted his flesh easily, as though it were water. She put her fingers to her mouth and sucked greedily at his blood.
“Slave,” she hissed, “always a slave, whispering in the dark, stealing what isn’t yours.”
“Perhaps… perhaps he should not be blamed,” Leander murmured. “My father, after all, was the one who commanded him.”
Aerie did not hear him. Omir chuckled, and blood spattered his chin. “Your father is a fool among fools. And the girl knows, she knows, she knows. Her mother told her about the tower, she knows I did much that was not commanded. But she won’t kill me. She knows that I hear tales, too, and I know about her Firebird and how he left her; she knows I had his feather. I kept him in this very room, in an ivory cage.”
Aerie’s eyes narrowed to silver slivers. Omir tried to sit up, but was pinned by the blade, and simply collapsed again in another fit of coughing. “Oh, yes, girl, just over there, in the corner.”
She leaned on the bone hilt, and for the first time, Omir cried out, with real anguish, his white eyebrows arching, his lips peeling back from his teeth. “Where is he?” she growled.
“I don’t… I don’t have him. I swear it. I sold him, him and his feather and his cage, to a man in the city of Ajanabh, I sold him, I sold him, I swear. Please.” The Wizard’s hands flapped uselessly at the knife. “But listen to me, listen! After all these years I have the secret: I can make you a Firebird; I can make any willow into an Ixora for you, light your wings, and send you to him. I can even change you so that he can quicken your nest, and you will never need the trees. But if you kill me, you will remain this wretched girl, and never fly again, and you’ll never find him without me. You will stay in this awful body, with only your little brother to keep you company—and I assure you, he is dreadful company.”
Aerie was weeping, her tears falling on the Wizard’s weak hands. Her shoulders shook like bare branches, and she looked at him with a terrible hope flaming in her dark eyes. She leaned in, very close, and put her arms around the old man. Through his rattling cough and the dark stain spreading across his belly, he tried to pat her back paternally. He could only manage to lift his arm once and let it flop back to the bed. But he could still speak, and his voice was like leeches suckling.
“There, there, your uncle will make all things well, you’ll see. No need to speak; I already know what you want, love. All manner of things will be well.”
Aerie raised her silvery head and whispered in his ear. “Mother.”
Then Aerie, who had never had hands since her first breath, seized him by the scalp in an expert fist, snatched the knife from his belly, and cut his throat.
The blood was hot and thick, and though it flowed over her hands like mud, Aerie would not let go of the knife. Leander could not pry it from her fingers. He pulled her from the corpse and into the hall—her eyes glittered brightly, ecstatic, wild.
They would never be admitted to the King’s quarters at night, so they inched across the stone wall windowsill by windowsill, ivy-cove
red stair, and finally mere toe-holds in the granite. Finally, they crouched below the King’s window, and Leander looked at his sister meaningfully before he swung up and into the chamber. She was not to follow.
So, of course, she slid in behind him as noiselessly as the space between breaths.
The King lay on his bed, alone, still robust and strong, perfectly awake. He turned to his son.
“Certainly I have taught you better than to eschew the use of doors.”
