The Flight of Swans

by Sarah McGuire

  Trust Gavyn to reference a book. I shot him a withering look. “It doesn’t have to be a box mentioned in the Annals. It just has to be better than the water-stained silk you wrapped it in.”

  Aiden peered at the silk, worried.

  I backed away from them. “You go to her! I’m going to find a proper box and then I’ll join you.”

  Aiden nodded.

  I started to run away, calling over my shoulder, “It might take a little while, but don’t worry! I’ll be there soon!”

  Then I ran for the east wing, hurrying up the three flights. I’d done it! I’d have an hour with Father in the library before my brothers missed me.

  Yet as I stepped onto the corridor’s lush carpet, I felt a prick of fear like a finger pressed between my shoulder blades.

  The Queen was coming.

  The feeling was so strong that I looked back down the tight curve of the stone staircase. I could only see a half-turn’s worth of stairs in either direction, but everything was silent.

  I held my breath, straining to hear footfalls. A voice.

  Nothing.

  Of course there was nothing.

  Think of cloves. Think of Father. Think of the world made right again.

  My steps didn’t falter as I walked down the corridor to the library doors. My fingers brushed the crest carved into the wood: three swans, wings outstretched in flight, one for each of the valiant Cynwrig brothers who established Lacharra over two centuries ago.

  Father used to say there were spaces between heartbeats and breaths, between the smallest moments of time. That those were the places we did most of our living.

  I thought I could feel the moment open before me. If I could just see clearly enough, if I could find the right words, I’d be able to save my family.

  Help me be brave.

  Help me be smart.

  Help me free my father.

  I pushed open the library door.

  * * *

  The normal murmur of voices was hushed, the clerks darting like frightened cats from shelf to shelf. I peered at the raised alcove at the far end of the library where Father always read.

  Father sat there unmoving, his head half-bent over his folded hands. He reminded me of a stone monument placed on a tomb.

  He was still, but he wasn’t silent. He hummed a lurching, distorted tune with the devotion of a priest.

  This wasn’t my father. This wasn’t the man who had nicknames for the different tomes . . . who could recite entire passages by memory . . . who chewed cloves while he read because it was a low habit for a king and this was the only place where no one would notice.

  Something was horribly, horribly wrong.

  I slipped my hand through the pocket slit in my gown and felt for the bag of cloves. They were a pitifully small weapon. Hardly anything against what the Queen had done.

  Help me!

  Then I strode across the room and stepped up into the alcove beside Father’s table, a table piled with untouched books.

  Father didn’t move, didn’t stop humming.

  I looked down at the table and the bent heads of the swans that formed the table legs. Their arched wooden necks were glossy from years of me petting them as Father read. I stroked the nearest one once for luck.

  “Father?” I whispered. “It’s me, your Ryn.”

  “Andaryn?” He looked up, squinting in the light that streamed through the broad windows. “Oh. How nice. I was just reading.” He gestured toward the tower of books on the table behind me. Then his head dropped down again, chin nearly on his chest.

  “You look too tired to read. You’ve been tired ever since you’ve been back.”

  Father nodded. “It was awful. I can’t forget how dark it was beneath those trees.”

  I tried to speak gently, though I could feel my pulse in my throat, I was so frightened. “I haven’t seen much of you since you returned. You’re always with—”

  “Don’t speak against my wife, Andaryn!” he barked out. “I won’t have it.”

  It knocked the breath from me. Father had been angry at me before—and for good reason, most times—but he’d never flashed out like that before.

  I didn’t know what to do. So I set The Annals of Lacharra in his lap.

  “I’ll read to you, then,” I said quietly and opened the book.

  The scent of cloves rose from its pages. Small surprise, for Father read the Annals often. I paused, hand on the pages, and breathed in the scent, trying to remember the times Father and I had read this book together.

  I quickly flipped past the sedate parts of the book: the drawing of the Cynwrig family tree and the chapter describing how, over two centuries ago, the Cynwrig brothers had served as chiefs to the old king of Brisson.

  I stopped when I reached the war. This would do. Perhaps Father would remember some of his own valor as he read about the valor of our ancestors.

  “Cloves,” he murmured.

  “What did you say?”

  “Cloves,” he repeated, in a voice like the one I remembered.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the clerks stand straighter. They’d heard Father. Then they scurried to the far side of the room as if even hearing the word cloves discussed might earn them a beating.

  “I missed them while I was lost. Once, when . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t remember. It was dark. I thought if I could only have cloves I’d be able to find my way back here to you. But I was still so sick and needed rest. She sang me back to sleep and said we’d return to the castle soon. Sometimes I still hum that song just to make the darkness go away.”

  The tune I’d heard him humming.

  Could she have forbidden cloves simply because they’d help Father remember who he was? “If you want them so much, why were they banned—”

  “There are none left, she says.”

  I risked another question. “What about Rees and his stable boy last night?”

  Father shook his head, puzzled. “I was too tired to tend to them, but my beloved did all that was needed.”

  They needed a flogging?

  But it would be useless to argue while Father was still enchanted.

  One last glance around the library. The clerks must have left, slipping silently out the door.

  Help me be brave.

  Help me be smart.

  Help me free my father.

  I slipped my hand through my pocket slit, fingering the bag of cloves.

  “Father?”

  He turned to me, his face his own again.

  “I used to keep cloves just for when we read together. Would you like one?”

  “I should have known my Ryn would have the solution! Yes, let me have one. The forest dark still presses in sometimes.”

  Fingers trembling, I opened the bag and pulled out a clove. Such a small brown bud!

  Slowly, he opened his hand, and I placed it in his palm.

  He pulled the scent inside him, eyes already brightening, then popped the clove in his mouth, closing his eyes as he savored it.

  He smiled.

  Cloves were a potent reminder of some of my best times with Father. Was it really as simple as helping Father remember? Very well, then.

  If the Queen wanted Father to forget everything but her, I’d do all I could to remind him.

  Beginning with Father’s favorite story. I swept my hand over the open book before us.

  “Will you read to me, Father?” I asked. “I’ve missed that as much as you have missed your cloves.”

  He cleared his throat, looked at the page I’d opened to, and grinned up at me.

  “This is a good part. You always knew how to find the exciting passages.” He cleared his throat and read in a clear, steady voice:

  The king of Brisson called the Cynwrig brothers his game of swans, for they were fierce but beautiful in the battles they fought for him. But the king became corrupt and demanded Hafwen, their sister, as his concubine. When she refused, he gathered his forces to take her from h
er brothers’ manor by force.

  The Cynwrig brothers would not fight their king, but they would not abandon their sister. They refused to act as his chiefs and fled the land he’d given them before he could claim Hafwen.

  And so a game of swans, bearing swords, flew up from the south.

  The House of Cynwrig settled among the lakes of the north and all the lands in between, establishing their fortress at Roden and naming the land Lacharra. Then the King of Brisson gathered his allies, lords from the east and west and princes of the River Cities. They brought their might against the brothers Cynwrig.

  I sat on the arm of his chair and leaned close so I could read over Father’s shoulder, just as I’d always done.

  And the scattered fragments of my world began to knit back together.

  Father looked up at me, his face inches from mine. “Do you know why the Cynwrig brothers were called a ‘game of swans,’ Ryn?”

  I did. He asked it every time he read this to me. And every time, I had told him to keep reading and not stop in the middle of the good part.

  But not this time. “Tell me.”

  He kissed the tip of my nose, and I smiled at the scent of cloves. “By calling them his ‘game of swans,’ the King of Brisson made them no different from the other game on his lands: the deer, the fish, the quail. The phrase transformed them into creatures that lived only by his goodwill.”

  It was a golden moment—whole and shining—but I didn’t know how to keep it from shattering.

  “Would you like another clove?” I asked.

  He put his finger on the place where he’d been reading and nodded.

  I handed him another, keeping a few in my hand so I wouldn’t have to open the bag every time he wanted one.

  He took it with a smile. “Now attend to what the brothers are called now as they challenge the king who has brought war to them. Not a game of swans—”

  “—but a flight,” I finished for him. “So they no longer belonged to the king, but to themselves.”

  “That’s my girl! Now we read on:

  The flight of swans, bearing swords, met the King of Brisson and his allies in combat. When the battle was at its thickest, when the dust from the warriors smeared the sky brown and red, Emrys ap Cynwrig looked up and saw white against the dark: swans soaring over the battle, untouched by the arrows that flew as thick as gadflies.

  Emrys gathered his brothers . . .

  “What is this?” The Queen stood before us, dark eyes watching Father and me.

  Oh, she was beautiful, with moonlight-pale hair braided and twisted into a crown on her head. Her face was as smooth as a girl’s, but her dark eyes were as old as memory.

  I’d never seen her so angry. Not even last night as she ordered Rees away.

  I stood, but I kept my arm around Father’s neck. I felt the strength and purpose drain out of him the moment he saw her.

  “I thought you were finding me the box for the lovely brooch your brothers gave me, Ryn. And yet you are here with your father, when he is still not recovered from his ordeal in the forest.”

  I glanced at Father. He hadn’t seemed weak until she said that he was.

  “He’s reading to me,” I answered. “It’s the story about the House of Cynwrig settling here in Lacharra. Why we have three swans on our family crest.”

  “Your father is too tired for such things.”

  Father faltered, hands moving to close the book.

  I put my hand, palm down, on the pages to keep him from doing it. “He didn’t seem tired to me.”

  She didn’t reply, just studied us, taking in every detail before her: me standing beside Father, the still-open book. She stiffened when she saw a stray clove that had fallen into the crease between the pages.

  “Ah, little cygnet,” she murmured. “You have no idea what you’ve begun. I cannot let this go unchallenged.”

  I glanced at Father, half-fearful that he’d send me off for a beating. But he smiled gently up at his wife. “She found some cloves and brought them to me. Imagine that, when we thought they’d all been used!” He pinched the stray clove between his fingers and held it up as proof.

  I turned to her, triumphant. What would she say now?

  She didn’t say anything, just stepped forward and traced a gentle finger along Father’s jaw.

  “My dear, dear husband. You poor, silly man. Cloves make you sick. Your stomach twists. The bile rises . . .”

  I could feel my own stomach turn.

  I closed my eyes till I could clearly remember Father and me reading and eating cloves.

  My stomach calmed.

  But Father was looking ill.

  “You just ate some, Father!” I whispered. “You told me you missed them.”

  “He missed the idea of them. He talked about cloves while he recovered, but he gagged while he did so.”

  The base of Father’s throat worked, as if the sickness was already rising.

  The Queen’s gaze danced between the two of us. Fast as lightning, she plucked the clove from Father’s fingers. I grabbed for it but wasn’t quick enough.

  But she didn’t snatch it away. She pressed it into Father’s mouth, holding her palm against his lips until he retched.

  It was the work of a moment, and in that moment between heartbeats, I lost Father.

  By the time I grabbed her wrist, she’d pulled her hand away from Father’s face and he spat the clove out, mouth twisted with disgust.

  She straightened, staring at my hand still wrapped around her wrist as if she couldn’t believe I’d dare touch her.

  But I didn’t release her.

  I squeezed tighter, hating her beautiful face and her pale-as-moonlight hair and her too-dark eyes with nothing shining in them.

  “Go away,” I said. “Go away, and leave us alone!”

  Her eyes widened, and I saw her fury rise. But there was fear too.

  I stepped closer. “Go away! You’re not wanted—”

  “Silence! How dare you speak to me so?”

  She wrenched her hand free and slapped me so hard my vision danced.

  I staggered back but regained my footing, blinking away tears of rage and surprise. “Father!”

  Surely he’d do something. Say something.

  He simply stared, his eyes dull and sightless.

  But she wasn’t finished.

  “A child as insolent as you ought to be punished.” She stepped closer and slapped me again. I threw the cloves I’d been holding in her face, hoping they had some power to stop her.

  There was no broken spell, no diminishing of her power.

  The cloves might have reminded Father of me, but they only infuriated the Queen.

  She backhanded me so hard that I fell. “You can’t really believe that your father would choose you over me.”

  I realized then that she meant to beat me.

  And Father would watch. Only watch.

  I scrabbled away, but the Queen planted a slippered foot on my skirt, pinning me in place. She blocked the alcove so that I couldn’t see the window, couldn’t see Father. All I saw was her—a dark pillar against a flood of light—and the Cynwrig crest on the ceiling above her: three white swans flying to freedom while I cringed at her feet.

  She pulled her pale hand back for another blow. Fear gave me strength. I yanked my skirt free, sending her stumbling backward.

  I didn’t wait to see if she fell.

  I had to get away. I had to tell Aiden.

  I leaped to my feet and ran.

  Chapter 3

  “Ryn!” Aiden exclaimed when I burst into his privy chambers. “What happened? She was dismayed when you didn’t come—”

  I stood before him, trembling and breathless from my run. He needed to see the Queen’s handiwork.

  Disheveled hair.

  Bloody lip.

  Torn skirt.

  “Did Owain do that?” he thundered. “He can’t just tussle with you anymore—he doesn’t know his own strength.”r />
  I shook my head. “The Queen found me, Aiden. She found me in the library with Father.”

  Aiden recoiled. “What did you do?”

  “What did I do? Can’t you see what she’s done?”

  “I can’t believe you’d provoke her—”

  “Look at me!” I stomped my foot like a child, but it made Aiden stop. I knew somehow it was important that he truly see me, remember what he knew. “What do you see when you look at me?”

  “I see . . .” He folded his arms. “. . . a silly girl who won’t accept that her father can marry whomever he chooses.”

  I thought of Father in the library with the Queen and redoubled my attack. “What color are my eyes?”

  He rolled his eyes in response, but I could see something change the longer Aiden looked at me. “Your eyes are hazel. Your hair is black, just like Father’s. Just like Mother’s.” He winced then, as if remembering the mother who’d died birthing Owain and me. “Just like mine.”

  “And do I have Father or Mother’s mouth?”

  “Mother’s.” He focused on my mouth, eyes widening when he saw the blood. “Good heavens, Ryn! What happened?”

  And this time, he meant it.

  “She found me with Father and she hit me.” I spoke slowly, afraid he’d blame me again.

  “Let me see.” Aiden tipped my chin so that the light from the window shone on my throbbing cheek and bloody mouth.

  He pulled a kerchief from inside his tunic, poured water on it from a pitcher, and handed it to me. “Tell me everything.”

  I did, my words sometimes muffled by the kerchief. Aiden’s eyes didn’t leave my face as I told him about Father sitting like a stone and humming the tune the Queen had sung to him. He didn’t blink when I told him I’d brought Father cloves, and that I thought the Queen had forbidden them because they made Father remember us.

  “You’re not angry about the cloves?”

  “Oh, I’m furious,” he said. “What were you thinking, endangering yourself with that sorceress? What would have happened if you hadn’t been able to run?”

  “You told me an hour ago that Rees deserved his beating!”

  “Perhaps she really did enchant us.” He shook his head. “But I’m back, Ryn-girl. What happened next?”