“There is not enough pity in me for that man to keep me shackled here,” she said, and climbed aboard. “Let us leave this place.”
Those that saw them go never forgot it, and the incident very quickly passed into legend: The morning their turncoat Princess and two beldames who looked not a day over 110 stole into the King's stables and made off with the Prince's newest treasure, the latter two running alongside faster than anyone would have thought mortally possible. The guards were too stunned to stop them as they flashed by. Back through the great stone gate, over the drawbridge, and away down the open road they flew, where not even the dearly departed Sunspot could have kept up with their pace.
And that is almost the end of our tale, little downy toothlings. The Princess went back with the three beautiful sisters to their forest home, where she built a little crookety cabin in a sun-dappled clearing ringed ‘round with fern and foxglove and other plants that should not have gotten on together but made an exception in her presence. There she grew into the powerful witch-crone she had always longed to be, responsible for no-one's choices but her own unless they ventured into the forest and paid her for the privilege first. And many folk through the years did, driven either by desperation or lust or greed or a fear greater than that of the things that lived within the treeline. Those that returned spun wild tales of naked witches, feathered shadows that fluted and stalked and sang, and a little cabin that walked about on scaly toes tipped with shining sickle claws. Those that didn't kept their lies clenched between grinning white teeth, boring beetles and earthworms with their blather as the centuries wore on and the leaf drift deepened above.
Allie, Betty, and Ceecee were never again bothered by men's wiles or lack thereof. Through the Princess's counsel they learned to stop hunting sheep and cattle and other things that drew attention, focusing instead on deer and boar and those visitors that annoyed the Princess just a little too much. Sometimes they would hunt together, the Princess crouched naked astride Ceecee's back as they slipped through the trees, starlight flashing off her blade as she tensed for the spring. Other times the three would sun themselves in her front yard and she would brush the dried blood from their feathers with a fine-toothed mother-of-pearl comb, the only thing she had kept from her time as royalty. It was a good life, sprinkled with just the right amount of companionship and just the right amount of solitude, and none of them ever regretted their choices, which is a fine way to grow old if you can manage the trick.
But what of the Prince, you ask? What happened to that worthy? Oh, bless, what a stone-turner you are! No snail or vole will ever escape your jaws, small one, and no mistake. If you must know all things, I'll tell you of his fate.
They came upon him not far from the castle walls, returning from a late night at the pub. He was very pleased; he had chosen eight different ales all on his own and really felt himself on a roll with all the decision-making he had lately been engaged in. Why, maybe he wouldn't even need a council or a vizier or a Princess telling him what to do! Maybe he could handle everything on his own from here on out. The possibilities were suddenly, blindingly limitless. A little too blinding, really; he could feel the stirrings of a really impressively nasty headache coiling behind his eyeballs. He blamed it on the barkeep and made a mental note to have the man punished for allowing his sovereign ruler-to-be so much freedom. The morning sun couldn't be thrown into the stocks, but someone else could certainly pay.
Like the very firmament above had heard his request, a shadow fell across his princely brow, cool and blessedly dim. He luxuriated in it for a moment before cracking open one eye to see what presence had honored his unspoken demand.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello there. I don't… remember giving you permission to take my creature out for a ride, darling.”
“You didn't,” came the flat reply.
“Ahh. Well, that's good. I remember most decisions I make. They're all so good, and I'm getting such a knack for it.” The Prince squinted at them a little more closely, swaying like a cattail in the breeze. “And — I don't think I recognize your friends, have we been introduced? Aunties I've not yet met? Old wet nurses? Teachers from the convent, perhaps?”
“SHINY BLANK-EYED MAN.”
“SOFT ROUND PRINCE BELLY.”
“Very good, very good. Lovely to meet you both. Sorry that it had to be in this fashion.” He belched, staggered, nearly went over but righted himself just at the no-return point of his totter. The world was spinning merrily. “Now then. I — I don't think I like you taking Birdie out for a stroll without asking first — ”
“ — Birdie? You named her Birdie?”
“Thought of it myself. Another good decision.” He beamed blearily. “Please stop interrupting, it's hard for me to collect my thoughts when everything's whirling and you won't stop nattering on. Anyhow, if next time you maybe stop to ask me before taking liberties and borrowing my keys, I shall be as kind and fair as any queen could hope for from her lord and master. Disregard me, and — ”
“There's not going to be a next time.”
The Prince blinked.
“I'm sorry, what? You'll have to speak up, I didn't quite catch that.”
The Princess edged Ceecee closer, until the sister's breath stirred his golden locks and his rumpled coattails and the split ends of his little rolled mustache. She leaned down.
“There's not going to be a next time,” she repeated. “Ceecee is going back home, and I'm going with her. I'm glad you've learned the trick of making your own decisions, because I won't be around to monitor them for you anymore. Choose well in the future, sire. Someday your subjects will rely on you.”
She made a move to ride on by. The Prince squinted and furrowed on her words for long enough that she almost made it. Her stirrups were almost level with him by the time he finally puzzled out what was going on through the brewery haze and grabbed her by the leg.
“I've just made another decision,” he said. There was a new timbre to his words. The Princess didn't like it one bit.
“Is it to let go of my ankle before you get kicked in the face?”
“You've been a good princess. A fine lass, no matter what my counsel said. Beautiful to have around.” His grip grew tight and cold as iron. “But I don't need people to make my important decisions any longer. In fact, I don't have to listen to anybody, I'm so good at it now. I don't need you sticking your pies in all of my fingers.”
“That's excellent. Pies can always use more fingers, heaven knows. Can we be on our way, then?”
The Prince shook his head slowly, winced and thought better of it.
“You're riding my property,” he said.
“She isn't your property.”
“She is, and so are you. How's it going to look if you take off? How's it going to look if you take off with something that's rightfully mine by the really excellent choice I made, hm? I can't let you go. Wouldn't be proper. Wouldn't be fitting.” He cocked his head, his tone brightening somewhat. “Glory, look, I'm doing it again! Another decision!”
“How exactly do you plan on stopping me? I don't want to hurt you.” And the Princess didn't, either. It would be rather like hurting a mean, blundering possum caught menacing your hens one too many times: Necessary, maybe, but unpleasant. But the Prince, alas, gave her no choice.
“I'll send my father's soldiers into every forest between here and the mountains,” he said. “I'll catch up eventually, and when I do, it won't go easy for you, my darling. You can bet a coin with my father's head on it on THAT. That decision is in the bag. Already made.” His face contorted into a petulant human toddler's expression, a spoiled child teetering on the precipice of a tantrum. “I'll have my Birdie back. You should have heard the nice things people said about the way I sat her. I'll have crossbow bolts put through those other two and decorate our bed chamber with their heads. I will, see that I don't.”
The Prince's head wasn't the only thing spinning. The sisters had begun to circle, his
sing low and long. They knew enough of human speech and enough of the Prince to smell the threat in his words.
“HUNGRY,” said Allie.
“BLOOD,” said Betty.
RRRRRRRRRKT, said Ceecee, vibrating beneath the Princess with rage.
The Princess sighed. She shook her head sadly.
“Alright, then,” she said. “If that's your decision — and you are so very good at decisions, after all, the best — here is mine: Run.”
“What?”
“Run. Run fast. That is my final word of advice to you. We'll give you a head start. I can't hold them off for long, though, so you'd best be quick about it.”
The petulant child expression was slowly melting from the Prince's face as her words thudded home. He let go of her ankle like it had just come glowing from a blacksmith's forge.
“You — you wouldn't do that,” said he, staggering back. “You couldn't, you wouldn't, my father's soldiers would hunt you down anyway, you — ”
“I'll take that risk. The matter is already settled. You decided for me.” The sisters whistled in delight as he turned and stumbled down the road, making desperate little panicked noises. “Now, for the final time: Run.”
And the hunt was easy, but it was sweet — oh yes indeed, sweet as springwater and heart's blood. A cat may look at a king, but the three beautiful raptor sisters did far better than that. And they lived happily all the rest of their days, too, for there's no luck like that of those who have dined on tyrants and survived to sing the tale.
A Bird, a Song, a Revolution
Before the flute is a flute, it is a bird. This is the first act of magic. This is the first lesson the girl learns, when the world is still young and shaggy-coated with lingering winter. Sometimes things can be other things. An axehead hides in a chunk of flint. Before it is a meal, a mammoth is a squealing calf tagging along behind its mother. A fox is a white spirit barking curses until an arrow finds it and turns it into a friend that shields your ears from the wind’s teeth.
And before it is a flute, a bird is a song lodged in a treetop.
The girl listens to the song. Every day she listens, and it makes her feel things she can’t describe, like when the boar-dancers charge and prance and the fire flickers so they almost look real. She wants to share that feeling, but she’s no boar-dancer. She wants to take that feeling and hoard it deep down where the frost never thaws, beneath the roots and sod.
“Come play with us!” the other children tease. Warmer weather shuffles in, longshadow days when the sun lingers at the edge of the world like a wandering storyteller at the end of a feast. There are blue flowers in the grass like stars, a mosquito buzzing in every ear. “Come and pick hazelnuts! Come and hunt lark eggs! Come play Bear-And-Elk!”
But the girl sits beneath the tree, listening, head cocked to cup the notes in her left ear.
She turns a bundle of sticks and twigs and sinew from the midden pile into a cage. She watches the fisherwomen at their weaving, twisting reeds and tying knots with their flashing hands until a tangled nest of net nestles at their feet. Her twists are not so smooth and her knots fray and fuzz and the spaces between her links would barely keep a minnow from slithering through, but all she needs is all she needs, and it only needs to work once. She strips the grasses of their seeds and collects them in a little pouch until it bulges like a he-lemming’s sack. The other children have dismissed her as a lost cause; the adults are beginning to furrow and frown.
The weather turns. The songs in the tree grow hungry. She scatters a little of the seed every day, until they flitter and flutter and settle at her feet — not trusting, exactly, but side-eye greedy enough to risk a girl’s presence. Their bellies are round and splattered with speckles like mud on a hunter’s calves. That something so plain could sing so sweetly is also a marvelous magic. Nearness turns them into something familiar enough to seem attainable. It gives her the courage to at last one day throw her net.
She keeps the bird in its cage near the head of her sleeping place at night, and feeds it a little of the grass seeds every day. At night the music wraps around her dreams, twisting them into songs as well. The adults indulge her strangeness and hang an amusing name around her neck: Whistlecage, the girl who spent an entire season’s worth of warmth capturing a thing anyone could hear in the trees with no trouble at all.
But the sound is sweet, that they have to admit. When blizzards howl and stomp outside their shelters like the great sloths in rut, the bird’s song burbles unthawed, a reminder of green grass and yellow fat and longshadow days past and still to come.
Before the future child in her future city is a revolution, she is a dirty-faced mudlark picking through the sticky treasures of low tide. The shores are white with the bones of all the people she’s seen die — her mother and her father, her siblings, and so very many of her friends. The river’s edge is a wide-open dare. She comes back to it time and time again, too hungry and desperate not to take the wager. You can find useful things in the stained sagging crumple of buildings that line the shores. Linger too long and you’ll be drowned or picked off by drones. Dig deep, and sometimes you’ll be fed for a week by what you scrounge up.
There’s a half-submerged temple tilted half-in, half-out of the black water, algae crawling up its columns. Every evening bats spill from its cracked dome like midges rising from the river’s surface. The girl is intrigued by what may be inside, although most of her curiosity is because she’s so hungry she’s been eating half-rotted fish scavenged from the mud. She watches and waits for a time when the waterline is low enough to reveal the slimy marble of the great staircase, crouched nearby in the undergrowth like a forgotten, stave-ribbed gargoyle.
Before the flute is a flute, it is a stag’s death. It drops into the world like all deer, slippery and wobbling but soon swift-footed. It drinks mother’s milk, cuts the turf with its hooves, and grows into a great antlered thing that whistles and sings as sweetly as any bird in the trees. It meets hunters in the tall grass, and they work the magic that hunters work and turn it into meat and skin and handles for the people’s knives. Bones, too. Marrow fills the hollow places, so rich and good they save it for special occasions and special persons, like the wrinkled witch who wanders up out of the marshes one day, slimy to her gnarled knees.
Whistlecage has never seen her before, but others have. She is a gatekeeper, they say. She knows paths through the wet places that lead into other worlds. Many objects dangle at her belt. Bird feathers and seedpods. Polished oyster shells that turn the light, tiny pointed skulls with yellow incisors and empty eyes. A great flat oval of rock that roars like a bull mammoth when she spins it over her head on its rawhide tether, causing the children to cry out and flee. She laughs at them and her white teeth flash. How does she still have all her teeth, and how are they so startlingly bone-white? No one has ever seen a mouth like that.
They feast her and they house her and in return she tells them stories. She sees all things at once, she says. The days that have come and died, and the days yet to be born. Settlements where people swarm like termites in mounds that scrape the sky. Fevers and fires, all the lives in all the graves scattered across the yellow-grassed world and all the lives that will not end until the glaciers give up their dead. Her stories scare them. They shiver at the immensity of the things they were born too early for and will die too soon to see, edging closer to hear more.
The others point out Whistlecage to the witch and laugh. She does not join in. She watches the girl with eyes like bright burning drops of tar. Children should run and roll and fight like lion cubs, the elders say, not sit in front of a cage alone listening to stolen songs. If she keeps this up we’ll have to smash the thing, cage and bird together.
The witch simply watches. She is patient. Long life makes one patient. She sets a snare with her gaze and soon enough the girl stumbles into it. Passing by with her cage and her bird, near enough that the witch can tighten the noose and draw
her in with one crooked finger.
“Girl,” she growls, rasp-tongued as any old tigress. “What have you got in that cage, girl?”
Whistlecage stops dead in her tracks, startled. She’s used to teasing. Being teased by a witch, though — that seems a more dangerous business. She tries to make herself small. She thinks shrew-thoughts.
“A bird,” she mutters, staring at her feet. “A singing bird.”
“A singing bird.” The witch’s voice holds no mockery, but she’s a witch; perhaps that’s part of her magic. “And why, shaggy-skull, do you carry a singing bird about in a cage with you when there’s one of her kin singing in every tree?”
She shrugs. That’s easy enough to answer, at least. “Because of the way it makes me feel,” she says.
“I see.” The witch seems satisfied. She says nothing else, letting the fire’s crackle and the bird’s warble fill the gap between them. Whistlecage is about to take her leave and be glad of it when the old mother speaks once more.
“Would you like to hear my bird?”
Now the witch is mocking her, Whistlecage thinks. It’s almost a relief. But when she looks up at her, prepared to take her lumps as best she can, the witch is fumbling with one of the bits hanging at her belt. A smooth, hollow spar of bird bone, bored through with holes. She catches Whistlecage’s eye and holds it fast as she raises the thing to her lined lips. Her fingers dance spider steps down its length.
And the bone sings to the bird.
It starts as an imitation at first, good enough that the bird whistles back. But it doesn’t stop there. It takes the bird’s song and expands it like an unfurling pelt, twisting all sorts of new sounds and flourishes and ups and downs into the tune. The girl has never heard anything like it. There are drummers among her people, and those who sing stories on special days, but this is different. This is a sound that fills the contours of her insides like it was carved from ivory for the purpose, something she has never known she needed. It is an instant connection between her heart and the old woman’s. Just like that they are the same, because of the song.
The Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters Page 22