Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse

by Susie Mander

  I shrugged. “Getting dinner.” I glanced at Hero and smiled. “This is Chase’s Gift Day, isn’t it?”

  We could barely control our laughter.

  “Gift Day celebrations are for Talents only. As neither of you have received your gift you are to eat in the dining room with the rest of the children.” She pointed down the hall with her chin. I hesitated. Now that the ballroom was closed to us, there was nowhere I would rather be.

  “Please. We will be on our bestest behaviour,” I said, trying to see past her. All I could make out was the warm glow of a thousand candles.

  “Absolutely not. Now go on, get.” She spun us around and pushed us towards the dining room.

  We trudged down the hall. I didn’t want to dine with the other children. I wanted to see Chase’s initiation. My curiosity was eating me from the inside out.

  We could hear the babble from within the dining room. I knew what was inside: the expectation of good table manners and tedious small talk—“Please pass me the caviar. Why thank you; isn’t this divine.”

  “I have an idea,” I said and followed an attendant as he exited the dining room carrying an empty tray over his head. Hero’s face was anxious but he fell in line behind me all the same. We followed the attendant down a long corridor, turned, and turned again. The smell of roast turtle and sweet crab got stronger and stronger. The attendant spun, placed his rear against a small swinging door and pushed, entering the kitchen backwards. “Wait here,” I said to Hero then, as an afterthought: “Yell if anyone comes.”

  He took hold of my sleeve, “Do you think this is a good idea? If Gelesia catches us it will shame our mothers.”

  I shrugged. “We won’t get caught.” I eased the door open and crept inside. The walls of the small kitchen were crumbling and dripping with grease. The air was filled with smoke. A large rump protruded from a jet-black woodfire oven. The rump was singing in a deep disharmonious voice.

  Young boys assembled plates of food at the benches running along the wall. Without thinking, I grabbed a whole queen crab from the nearest tray and escaped out the door before anyone had even noticed. At least I thought they hadn’t noticed. A moment later a voice bellowed, “You little chimera. Come back here!”

  “Come on!” I said, grabbing Hero’s arm and pulling him away. Hero’s breath came in short gasps. His eyes were wild. The cook’s feet were a heavy thumping behind us. I held the crab by one claw and as we skidded around a corner it swung, hitting the wall and leaving crab juice smeared over the marble veneer. I grimaced. “Oops.” We continued up the hall. I slowed to peer up at the ceiling. “I remember seeing a trapdoor,” I said. “Tides, where is it?”

  “There,” Hero said, pointing.

  “Quick,” I said as Hero looked around for something to open it. A pole was secured to the wall. He wrestled it out of the bracket and poked at the ceiling with the hook at one end. He missed the latch the first go his hands were trembling so badly.

  Cook rounded the corner and I saw her face for the first time. She had pig-eyes and a bulbous nose complete with blue cobwebbed veins. She was carrying a rolling pin. She stopped to run her finger through the smear of crab on the wall, sniffed her finger and furrowed her brow.

  “Quick!” I yelled. Hero got the latch the second go and pulled. A ladder clattered to the ground making us jump back in fright.

  “You!” The cook had spotted us.

  Hero was first up. I put the crab’s claw between my teeth to free my hands and followed him up. When he got halfway, his foot slipped and struck me in the face. “I’m fine. Just go,” I mumbled with a mouth full of crab. The cook was getting closer. I could hear her striking her palm with the rolling pin: Thwak! Thwak! Thwak!

  I looked down and realised the pole was lying on the ground. We were doomed if she got her hands on it. She would simply pull the trapdoor open and come after us.

  The beast of a woman was only a few feet away. I clambered back down the ladder and snatched up the pole. I removed the crab from my mouth long enough to yell, “Hero. Catch.” I threw up the pole and Hero caught it in one hand. Thankfully.

  I scrambled after my new friend with my crab in my mouth. I reached the top rung. A hand closed around my ankle. “Got you, you little thief.” I glanced down and saw the woman’s leering face. I tried to shake her off but her grip was firm. I bent my knee and kicked with all my might, connecting with her bulbous nose. Too startled to scream, the woman let go of the ladder to bring her hands to her bloody face. She lost her balance. Hands grasped for something to hold onto but found only air. She fell backwards. In slow motion. There was a loud thud. Then a deafening howl.

  “My mother is going to kill us.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, closing the trapdoor to seal us in. It was not the last time I would be trapped like a rabbit in a hole. “Follow me.”

  We tried to ignore the pounding from below—someone had fetched a broom and was banging it against the ceiling—and explored the roof cavity. Beams of light shone through the timber at our feet. A warm draught whispered through the cracks in the roof shingles. I held the crab in one hand and pointed with the other. “This way.”

  We retraced our steps, occasionally kneeling and pressing our ears to the ground until I was certain we were above the ballroom. I tossed the crab to the ground and got down on hands and knees. I ran my palm over the rough floorboards, searching. Hero stood watching me with a concerned look on his face. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for a hole.”

  He hesitated before pulling his tunic out of the way and getting slowly to his knees. After searching up and down, up and down, he stopped. “Take a look at this,” he said poking at a divot in the timber board. We removed the dust and fluff to reveal a hole where a knot in the wood had fallen away.

  “Nice,” I said, lying on the ground to peer through. I could just make out the rows of tables and flickering candlelight below.

  “What are they doing down there?”

  “Just eating,” I said and got up to find my crab. I returned and sat cross-legged by the hole. “Would you care to join me?”

  Hero grinned and sat opposite me, accepting a claw. We spoke with crab juice running down our chins and between our fingers. “You’re only seven. But I’m nine. Chase is nine and he already has his gift.”

  “Nine is young for a Talent.”

  “True, but if I’m to be queen I should have an important gift—” I bit off my words before I accidently said anything about being tested by the high priestess. I didn’t want to lie to my new friend but my mother had sworn me to secrecy. “The people will expect a great display of my ability. I can’t disappoint them.”

  “It will come. You can be sure of it. And yours will be a mighty gift, just you wait and see.” He broke a knuckle then sucked out the flesh from the crab’s tubular leg.

  “Whatever the case, I was born to lead.”

  Hero showed me his courage for the first time. “Don’t you think you’re being a bit…?” he trailed off.

  “A bit what?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Ambition is important. But not if it—”

  There was a sound from below. I got onto my stomach and squinted through the hole.

  “What are they doing?” Hero said.

  “They are dragging the tables out of the way…”

  “Who?”

  “About thirty people. Our family and a bunch of people I don’t know.”

  “They must be Talents from the other islands.”

  “They have left a table in the middle of the room. There’s the high priestess. Strange. My mother hates the high priestess.” I waited. I could feel Hero breathing next to me.

  “What’s happening?” he whispered.

  “Chase has taken off his tunic,” I giggled. “He’s completely naked. I am not lying.”

  “Let me have a look.”

  I rolled to the side to let Hero have a go. But I was impatient and soon nudged him aside.
I watched as Chase climbed onto the table and lay on his stomach. I pulled back from the hole. “I can’t…I don’t want to look.”

  “What is it?” Hero said, kneeling to look down at the ballroom below. “Oh…”

  My mother was standing over Chase’s body piercing his skin again and again with wide flattened bronze needles to create patterns of multiple dots all over his back while the high priestess rubbed a black substance into the wound. I later learnt it was a mixture of soot and breast milk and his would be a fine tattoo running across his back. The lines were red and sore. Chase neither flinched nor cried out. To do so would imply cowardice. It would suggest that the gods had been wrong to bless him with his gift.

  Chapter four

  If Drayk was my first friend and Hero was my second then Harryet Nathos—Nathos meaning “lineage unknown”—was my third. I must have been ten or so when I met her because I remember her tending a cut on my knee from the immortal’s blade on our first day of sword fighting. When I asked her to read me a story as my father once had, I discovered she did not know her letters so I taught her. In return, she taught me my first swearword. She told me stories about growing up in poverty in Veraura and I complained about being a princess. I dreamt of switching lives.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start with this: my uncle King Jace Steele of Caspius was expected with a convoy of ships laden with supplies from the mainland, mostly timber but also food we were lacking such as flour and almond meal, rice and barley, which he would exchange for Tibutan Gold Marble, which is unique because of the way it absorbs the sun during the day so it glows at night. The best cuts also have a gold seam running through them. Outside the sun had reached its pinnacle and was making its descent across the sky. I sat in front of the obsidian mirror while Nanny Blan pulled a brush through my hair. “Imagine having five brothers and sisters,” I said. Nanny Blan was a source of endless information about my cousins from the mainland.

  “Yer Aunt Aria must be a strong woman t’ have all them babes,” she said. “Tis a shame she moved to Caspius. In Tibuta so many girls’s a blessing.”

  “I want to meet Laylani most. How old is Asher?”

  “Your age. I have heard it said he is very handsome and well-mannered too, so yer better be on yer best behaviour. I imagine yer mother has plans for you two,” she said, tugging at a knot. She sighed nostalgically. “I’d be content t’see you with babes of yer own. I only hope t’live long enough t’nurse ’em myself.”

  “Of course you will,” I said because it was impossible to imagine a world without her in it.

  Nanny Blan finished brushing my hair. She wove golden ribbon into two long plaits then secured them in a crown around my head. She pulled my tunic off and replaced it with a black-and-gold woollen peplos and a heavy golden cloak, which I flung over one arm. Though it was spring, or eiar, and the days were tinged with a blushing heat, the evenings were cool and could take you unawares. “Pretty,” she said, inspecting her handiwork. She pinched my cheeks. “Yer going to make a beautiful queen one day.” There was a long blast of the shofar that echoed throughout the palace: a-whoo! “And just in time, too. Off yer go.”

  I gave her a kiss and ran downstairs, my soft slippers sliding on the polished floor. There was another blast of the shofar—a-whoo!—and then silence. By the time I reached the base of the Throne Room my chest was heaving and my ribbons had fallen out.

  House Golding was in position in the lower ward with their backs to me. My mother adjusted her black sable himation. Her hair was pulled up to reveal her slender neck. Her crown was tall, a golden trident directed at the sky.

  Hero shot me a lopsided grin as I elbowed past his mother to stand in place beside the queen. “I didn’t know you were here,” I whispered.

  “We arrived this morning. To meet the king. My mother wouldn’t let me leave my room. She said you’re a bad influence.”

  Thera silenced us with her eyes.

  My father kept his gaze straight ahead. I knew he had seen me—he had glanced my way—but he would not acknowledge me.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  “Angelfish,” he said in mock surprise. I turned away, shaking my head in disgust. Though he still looked like he was privy to a joke that none of us understood, his light was fading. His long black hair was flecked with grey. His smile no longer reached his eyes and his movements were less energetic, less alive.

  Ice entered my heart.

  “Verne. There you are. Good,” my mother said, then returned her gaze to the West Gate. Her bony hands were blue with cold.

  Gelesia Golding of Veraura and Minesend was there with her shock of curls, her loud, hand-made jewellery, and feathers poking from her hair. Chase sulked beside her. He scowled at me then at Hero. He hated all of us. He said only Berenice was authentic. The rest of us were fakes.

  My eyes came to rest on a familiar face and I couldn’t help but stare. The high priestess hardly looked like someone I should fear. Her old body, leaning on a stick, was wrapped tightly against the cold; her white hair contrasted with her black cloak. A breath of wind could knock her over. She saw me, smiled and beckoned for me to come closer. I hesitated, remembering my mother’s words, but I could speak with her here, couldn’t I? I wasn’t visiting her, not if my mother had invited her to the palace.

  My curiosity got the better of me and I stepped out of line.

  “Verne Golding, come back here,” my mother called. I ignored her and ran along the line of people to stop in front of the high priestess. I felt for her hand.

  “What are you doing, child?” the old woman said, laughing in confusion.

  “I have to kiss your ring.”

  She shook her head incredulously and held out her hand. “Right you are.” Her eyes were bright and full of mirth. Once I had curtsied low to show my deference, she plunged her hand into the many folds of her black peplos until she found what she was looking for. “I was hoping I might see you. I brought you this,” she said, holding out a small book with black leather binding. “It is a book of prayers. Chant them over and over. It will help you find rayta.”

  “Will they protect me, or someone, from Icelos?”

  She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “If someone has been cursed. If Icelos is going to take them. It’s not for me. Say I had a friend. Could you protect them by saying these prayers?”

  “Verne, who has been cursed?”

  I shook my head and took the small, tattered book. It barely fit in my palm. “No one. It was a joke. Just speculation. Thank you.” I turned to leave.

  “Why don’t you visit me in the temple?” It was both an invitation and a criticism. “If you come to the temple you can explain to me what’s going on. I can help you.”

  “I’m not allowed. Mother said you spread lies and damnation.” I clapped my hand over my mouth. “I mean, I wasn’t supposed to say that. I…She…”

  The high priestess frowned. She spoke very slowly, as if picking this piece of information from her teeth: “What else has she said?”

  I made no response.

  “Was it your mother who placed you, I mean your friend, under this curse?”

  I looked around for a way out. “No. I don’t know. I’ve got to go. Thanks for the book.”

  That was the last time I, or anyone else for that matter, saw the high priestess outside the temple. My mother expelled the gerousia, had my uncle’s statue defaced, tore down Kratos’s Arch and turned Kratos’s Haven into a leper colony. She sent soldiers to find him—in retrospect I suspect they were assassins—but they returned empty-handed. She never spoke of her brother again except to say, “He is dead to me.”

  As I ran back to my mother’s side there was another startling blast of the shofar. The entire court looked towards the gate. I leant forwards, heart beating, eager to see the king but also fearing I had invited Icelos’s wrath into my life.

  The first of the king’s procession to appear beneath the portcullis was
the herald, wearing a floppy felt hat to protect his ears from the cold. He was followed by the standard bearer with the Steele flag fluttering in the icy breeze: the red-winged argutan reared against a white background.

  Next came the sovereign’s escort and by now I had all but forgotten my indiscretion. The king’s men poured through the gates until I thought I would die from impatience: their red linen tunics were soiled from weeks at sea, their leather greaves splattered with mud and their bronze breastplates in need of a polish.

  Then, finally, came the king’s palanquin, a heavy timber box on two horizontal poles. Six tired fleets placed the litter gracelessly on the ground in front of us.

  They were followed by a procession of the king’s attendants: chefs laden with pots and pans, a barber and porters carrying cases and trunks. Our soldiers, Drayk being among them, were the last through the gate.

  All eyes fell on the palanquin. The curtains were swept aside and out stepped a jovial-looking man with a dimple in his chin. His hair fell in cherubic ringlets around his smooth face. His lips, equally angelic, were two bows pressed lightly together. He put his chubby arms on the small of his back and stretched.

  As one, house Golding genuflected. Hero and I giggled. “He’s so fat,” Hero whispered.

  King Jace Steele rubbed his hands together. “Ashaylah, dear sister,” he said, bowing. He ignored my mother’s extended hand and pulled her into a warm embrace.

  “This is my daughter,” my mother said, pushing me forwards.

  “Where are the children?” I said.

  “My brood are in Caspius with their mother.” The king tussled my hair, which was already a mess. He seemed oblivious to my mother’s look of disapproval.

  “But I want to meet my cousins.”

  The big man ignored this comment, ignored my father too, and moved his attention back to my mother. “And where are your sons, dear sister-in-law? When will you let a man take over this vipers’ nest?”