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

by Susie Mander

  My mother spoke through pursed lips. “A queen will always rule in Tibuta, you know that.”

  The king laughed then slapped my mother on the shoulder. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  “Why didn’t my cousins come?” I said, trying to interrupt them but my mother pushed me aside.

  “Your aunt Aria suffers from terrible seasickness,” Thera said, yanking my shoulder. “Leave your mother to talk to the king.”

  “But I want to meet my cousins,” I said, on the verge of a tantrum.

  Thera took my wrist and her nails bit into my skin. “It can’t be helped. When you are old enough you can take the journey yourself.”

  I pulled my wrist free. Thera stepped in front of me. I was the bull and she the matador; I went right, feigned a step to the left then darted past her. Hero saw that I was making a run for it and rushed after me.

  “Verne Golding the Third. Herodotus. Come back here now.” Thera’s voice was lost in the wind that raced past our ears. It carried us swiftly away from the West Gate, up the Walk and around the Throne Room to the solace of my garden.

  We sat by the fountain and enjoyed the last breath of light before the sun went out with a puff. In this magical world of green and blue it was easy to forget that my mother and father had turned against me, that my only friends were a man twice my age, a nanny people called a xenolith, and my cousin Hero. It was possible to forget that other children our age were getting their gifts while ours refused to come.

  We thumbed through the prayer book Maud Lias had given me but quickly grew bored. More interesting was talk of serpent stones.

  “If I don’t get mine I am going in search of a serpent,” I said.

  “Not me. I heard they were extinct.”

  The gate creaked open. Nanny Blan pushed the curtain of ivy aside and beckoned to us. I glanced left, wondering if I could run.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said—she knew me too well—and so I came, if reluctantly. Hero followed.

  Nanny Blan walked so quickly we had to trot to keep up. “What were yer thinking runnin’ away while the king was in attendance? Yer mother is furious. And you. Hero, you should know better.”

  “I don’t know why we have to go. None of our cousins will be there,” I said, my feet crunching on the gravel.

  “Don’t y’ wan t’see yer uncle?”

  “No. He’s old,” I said, elbowing Hero, who dutifully laughed.

  Nanny Blan bent down to pick the leaves from my dress. She licked her thumb and wiped the dirt from my cheeks then held me at arm’s length. “I know yer disappointed because yer don’t get to see yer cousins but that aint no excuse for being a ruffian, you hear.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “That will just have to do. Now hurry. They have already started.” She kissed me on the top of the head and pushed me towards the ballroom. I hurried in that general direction. Hero pretended to hurry after me. When Nanny Blan was out of sight we ran. Where we intended to run to, I do not remember. We skirted along a colonnade outside the ballroom, came around a corner and…crashed straight into a serving girl who was coming from the kitchen carrying a plate piled with roast baby seal. We clattered to the floor in a slippery mess of meat and grease. The girl’s roughspun tunic was covered in gravy. She stood, offered me her slippery hand and pulled me to my feet.

  Hero and I were laughing.

  The girl wiped her oily hand on her thigh then burst into tears. “Please don’t tell the queen. I can’t be dismissed. I have nowhere else to go. My ma and pa are dead. Please. This is all I have.”

  I was ashamed that I was the cause of the girl’s tears. “I won’t tell the queen anything, you are perfectly—”

  “What won’t you tell the queen?” said a voice behind me. Hero and I spun around and came face to face with my mother. She examined my spoiled dress and took me by the elbow. “Verne Golding, you are a disgrace. You know King Jace’s son is heir to the Caspian throne. He will never take you off my hands looking like this.” To Hero she said, “Get inside.” He ducked beneath her arm and into the ballroom. To the serving girl she said, “And you, girl. Is it your fault my daughter is late? Look at her.”

  Harryet wiped her greasy hand on her apron. “I’m sorry y’majesty. I didn’t mean no harm.”

  “It’s my fault. I was running through the halls,” I said.

  “It’s any harm,” my mother said. “And what have I said about running in the halls?”

  “I am sorry, Mother.” I held my breath waiting for her to explode. The serving girl would not look up from her feet. She twirled a long blond curl around her finger.

  My mother fought with her anger. Finally, she expelled a long stream of air. Escorting me into the ballroom, she muttered, “We don’t have time for this.”

  Two massive columns, shooting into the sky, framed a grand archway. In the yawning space beyond, long tables were crowded with Jace’s men and members of our own court. Serving boys squeezed between the rows of benches, their drab tunics hidden beneath long white aprons, each one carrying at least two plates on each hand.

  At one end of the hall a group of flautists played a trilling tune. The sound of gold-plated cutlery scraping against ceramic bowls, each decorated with the Tibutan snake, could be heard above a gentle murmur of conversation.

  “Mother, could I please have that girl as my lady-in-waiting?” I said as she steered me towards the high table, where I would hopefully get to side beside Hero.

  “Not now, Verne.”

  “Please? I can see to it myself. I am old enough.” I could see she was losing composure again. “Ever since father stopped coming, I have been ever so lonely. It would be nice to have someone my own age to talk to.” She pulled me around to look at her. Anger and pain streaked her face.

  “You know your father’s busy.”

  “I know. But since he cannot see me…”

  She shook her head, perhaps wondering how I had become so manipulative. Finally she spoke. “If you behave yourself and listen to everything King Jace has to say and keep your mouth shut about what you really think and if you and Hero don’t make a mess of things then you can have that girl as your lady-in-waiting. But”—she pointed her finger at me—“you have to train her yourself.”

  I agreed.

  “Now stand up straight.”

  Harryet moved in to the room next to my solar the very next day. It was such a wonderful event I could barely contain my joy. I helped her move her things—meagre that they were—from the servants’ quarters. We left her small case in the hall while I gave her a tour of her new home. I started with the solar, moved through to my chamber and my study.

  As we passed Nanny Blan’s room, which adjoined my apartments, I realised there was something wrong. The smell was different. The sound too. It was like the room of someone deceased: eerily empty but still humming with a sense of them.

  I knocked on the door.

  “Nanny Blan,” I called.

  I turned to my new friend Harryet, who had remained quiet throughout her tour. She was terrified. She kept twisting her curls around her finger.

  “My nanny lives here. You will love her. She makes the most amazing honey cakes.” I knocked again and called, “Nanny Blan?”

  Strange, I thought. It was not like her to leave the Royal Apartments. She said there was no need to. She had everything she wanted as long as she had me.

  I moved slowly into her room, which was big enough for only a single cot and a dresser. It was unusually tidy—though Nanny Blan insisted on keeping my apartments spotless, her own room was always a mess. The bed was made. There was nothing to tie the room to her: not a sprig of rosemary from her nosegay, not a ribbon or a headscarf dropped on her way out. She was a mere residue.

  The jingling of bells made me turn. My mother’s messenger Piebald stood in the doorway with his hands in his belt. His face was ruddy and the bright colours of his tunic made it seem redder still. He rocked on his hee
ls. “Highness, the seneschal sent me to check Harryet is to your pleasing,” he said, indicating the girl. Then to Harryet he said, “You will do whatever the princess tells you, understood? You are the princess’s companion now.”

  Harryet’s big blue eyes darted between me and my mother’s messenger. “Yessir.”

  I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile then to Piebald said, “Where is Nanny Blan? Where are her things?”

  Piebald smiled. “Hasn’t anyone told you?” he said.

  “Told me what?”

  Now he chuckled. “I am surprised no one mentioned it.”

  I stamped my foot. “Will you get to the point?”

  “All right, princess, all right. No need to get feisty. Your mother says if you are old enough to choose your own staff then you are too old to have a nurse. Madam Blan has been sold to a family in Elea Bay.”

  My heart stopped. I could see only pinpricks of light and a great dark tunnel opening in front of me. “But I…She said nothing, and we agreed…” I looked around me, hardly believing it could be true. “But I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

  Piebald shrugged.

  “But I…I don’t want her to go.” A single tear wriggled down my cheek.

  Piebald snickered. His voice was like vinegar on a fresh wound, “I am so sorry, highness. I imagine it must come as a terrible surprise. Is there anything I can do?”

  When I did not respond he turned to leave then, remembering something, turned back. “Also, your mother wanted me to tell you, she found a satryx in your room.”

  “That’s Stax,” I said, finding my voice. “My father gave her to me.”

  “Stax, you say? A pet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that is a shame.” His eyes gleamed with delight. “She had it exterminated.”

  Days passed, one after the other, a succession of marching hoplites off to die, and still the pain sat heavy in my chest. My small self, always the victor, rejoiced in it. My defiant self was defeated, angry and full of self-loathing. I buried the memory of Nanny Blan’s hands stained with turmeric. I chose to forget the way she dropped into her native tongue whenever she was impassioned. I pushed away thoughts of her kneeling at my shrine but praying to the god of the mountains. In time, the part of me that knew and loved Nanny Blan shrivelled like a severed lamb’s tail, the stump left to scar.

  Even though whenever I passed her room I felt a lump grow in the back of my throat, even though I could not speak her name and even though I would never, never forgive my mother for what she had done, in time I was able to laugh without guilt. I was thankful that the gods had given me friends and I prayed that those same gods would stop my mother from taking them away too.

  The bird arrived not long after my twelfth Name Day, when Harryet was eleven and Hero was ten, in the winter of 2994 AB in the Tibutan reckoning, my mother’s twenty-fifth year on the throne. We were in the kitchen, a long immaculately clean domed building lined with shelves holding every imaginable ingredient in clay pots or copper jars. A woodfired oven took up much of one wall. A low, recently scrubbed table ran the length of the building and we sat at this, cupping hot bowls of fish chowder to fight the cold that whipped through the buildings outside and snuck under the door to coil around our legs and inside our collars.

  “Highness,” said Cook, throwing me a piece of hot bread, which I caught in one fist. “You know you shouldn’t be down here.” He threw another piece of bread, which Harryet caught, and another, which Hero missed. He picked it up, dusted it off and dipped it into his soup.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  “You won’t get her in the dining room unless her mother insists,” Harryet said. I hated dining with the nobility. I hated Odell’s orotund pronouncements and Arkantha’s criticisms of my table manners. But more than that I hated sitting beneath my mother’s hawk-like gaze.

  “And as if that’s going to happen. My mother hates me,” I said, locking eyes with her. We both laughed.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” Hero said.

  “But it’s true.”

  I suspected Mother was glad I ate in the kitchen. My presence was a cruel reminder of her mortality, her limited time on the throne, and her growing irrelevance. Plus, when I was there, my father would sometimes talk to me.

  No, Cook was far more interesting than anyone you would find in the dining room. He had seen things that made him question life. He had seen the battlefields of the Black Strip, had watched his brother die, had run around the inside of his own mind and nearly fallen into the abyss of madness. He expressed scepticism about everything and could laugh at the most serious—or apparently serious—things because to him they held no meaning. He was fond of saying, “What will it matter once yer dead?” and it was common knowledge that he never visited the temple. “The gods weren’t with us in Caspius so why would they show themselves now?” he would say with a grin, making it impossible to castigate him, though Harryet often tried.

  Cook kept his kitchen like an armoury—polishing and shining his weapons—and spoke to his staff like a drill sergeant. Yet for all his show of inflexibility he was the go-to-man for any soldier with a broken heart. Harryet and I would often find ourselves at his table with our little hands wrapped around a hot bowl of something-or-other discussing the pros and cons of the phalanx formation, the proper etiquette for duelling, and whether Cook thought, in all honesty, that I could take the throne without a gift.

  To this he said, “Of course you can. And so what if you’re not a Talent? Does it impact on your ability to be the best queen you can be? No. Their approval means nothing.”

  Harryet and Hero adamantly agreed.

  Nothing meant anything to Cook and for this I was glad. In my world everything meant something. Still, I had a sinking suspicion he was wrong. I thought of the woman with the missing tooth and her friends who had saved me from the Shark’s Teeth at Antoine’s initiation ceremony. The people’s approval meant everything.

  On this particular bitter afternoon Cook was up to his elbows in soapy water. The wind was howling through the eaves and sleet was splattering against the side of the building. Harryet, Hero and I were laughing at Odell’s new outfit, which his mother had made him wear to the recent banquet that had brought Hero and his family to the visitors’ apartments. It was all frilly layers and blue ruffles, but what was particularly humorous was the long sleeves.

  “You should have seen him,” I said, clapping my hands. “He tried to shoot ice at me from across the table but instead he put a gaping hole in his new cloak. Thera was furious.”

  “Mother had it made especially,” Hero said.

  There was a screech outside. Cook flung back the animal skin over the window, threw back the shutters and peered into the whirling white. “Well, Heritia damn my soul.”

  “Cook,” Harryet scolded, then made the sign of Ayfra to ward off evil. No one paid her any attention.

  “What is it?” I said, jumping to my feet to stand on a stool beside him. Hero climbed up and stood so close I could feel his warmth. Cook pointed. Through the swirls of sleet we could see a shearwater. Like a kite on the end of a string the seabird fought against the wind’s violent attacks.

  “What in the tides is it doing here this time of year?” Cook said.

  “Blown off course, perhaps. Or sent by the gods,” Harryet said.

  “Poor thing. It should really…” Hero didn’t finish his sentence. With a flick of its hand the wind whipped the bird up and out of sight. “Where has it—?” I started but was cut off. There was a thud on the door. Harryet and I looked at each other with wide eyes.

  “Do you think—?” Hero started.

  “You’d better—” Cook said but I had already jumped off the stool and run to open the door. The seabird lay in a crumpled heap of feathers at my feet. I picked it up like it was broken glass and carried it to the table.

  “Is it dead?” Harryet said in a voice thick with concern.

 
“It looks it,” Hero said.

  “It is almost frozen,” Cook said, prodding it. Its brown-tipped wings were solid. Its webbed feet were ice. “Done for, if you ask me.”

  “No, it’s alive,” I said. I don’t know what made me so sure, but it was almost as if I could sense the bird’s life-force flowing from its heart down to the tips of its wings.

  Harryet’s bottom lip trembled and tears welled in her eyes. Both Cook and I looked at her then at each other. “Harry, you better get a blanket and put it near the oven,” I said, making my friend grin with relief. “And Hero, can you find a box or crate?”

  “I’ll fetch Epoul,” Cook said.

  Epoul was a healer and a xenolith from the furthest reaches of Isbis; she had short spiky black hair and epicanthic folds in her eyelids. When she arrived having fought against the wind and hail, she was hardly impressed to discover her patient was a bird. But Cook fixed her with a look that said, “Refuse and you have no heart.”

  “What does it matter anyway? It means nothing if your patients are human or animal,” I said, borrowing from Cook’s philosophy.

  “And Ayfra is watching,” Harryet added. “Please, please will you heal her?”

  Hero was nodding in earnest.

  Epoul looked at each of us, shook her head and said, “How can I refuse?” As she worked she tut-tutted, mumbling about us wasting her time and valuable resources. She tended the bird’s broken wing and compounded knitbone, rue and salt to feed to the bird daily in a paste of fish and shrimp. Then she wiped her hands and rested her fists on her hips. “I wouldn’t be too optimistic. She’s far from her flock and it’s mid-winter.”

  But optimism was what Harryet did best. She shook the healer’s hand, thanking her again and again. Epoul couldn’t leave quickly enough. “I have one of Edric’s argutan with an abyss under its tooth and Odell has the runs after gorging himself on this evening’s pudding”—Hero and I exchanged a look and could barely contain our laughter—“so I had better be off.”

  For the entire winter Cook let the bird nest in an old apple crate by the oven. Hero visited every day until he had to return to Bidwell Heights. Then Harryet and I continued the vigil, coming three times a day if we could. We nursed it to health until, in eiar when the air filled with pollen and our eyes began to water, the bird became restless. Cook insisted we liberate it and even the threat of Harryet’s tears would not make him change him mind. “It’s not natural for a wild thing to be cooped up like this. But if you give her a name she will come back to you, I promise.”