The Flight of Swans

by Sarah McGuire

  She relaxed a little, shoulders lowering, gaze clearing. She waved a hand as if dismissing her anger, and I saw she wore gloves. Of course she did, in a cottage overrun by nettles.

  “Don’t mind an old woman’s grief. My snowy one’s done harm, but I can’t stop loving her, can I? And I can’t help hating you. The blackness fills my heart just to see you.” She scraped her gloved hand across her cheek. “But I’ll tell you what you need to know. Perhaps it will gain me forgiveness for what I’ve done.”

  Snowy one, again. Did she mean the Queen?

  “Come with me,” she said, turning to go back through the nettles. She kept an arm extended to sweep nettles aside for me. “Hear my story.”

  I’d have turned and run if I didn’t think she could help my swan-brothers. So I followed her, stepping where she held the nettles back for me.

  But before I took the final step out of the nettles, she released them so that they slapped against my arm and face. I gritted my teeth, holding a hand over my mouth to stay quiet as I leaped out of the nettle patch.

  I couldn’t help it: I made one of Cadan’s favorite rude signs, though I was so ashamed that I lowered my hand before I finished it.

  The old woman cocked her head at me, just like the finch. “I know that sign! Many a man has gestured so when he’s frustrated by my ramblings. And you, you nearly made that same sign, but you’ve changed it some, I think.” She fingered a tear on my dirty dress and laughed. “Of course you would! A princess would be punished for such a rude sign. And I should be punished for letting the nettles touch you, but that’s not the last time you’ll feel their sting. Oh no.”

  She pushed the cottage door open and waved me in before her. “Sit, Princess! Sit, Swan-Keeper!”

  How did she know I was a princess? I paused on the threshold, the sun warm on my back.

  I didn’t want to talk to her! I thought she’d be a nice old woman with a cozy cottage. And a fire. And food. Real food that I hadn’t pulled the guts from only an hour earlier. This woman already hated me and had told me so.

  Yet she knew the Queen.

  More than that, the Queen knew her—and hated her.

  I leaned my walking stick against the outer wall and entered.

  The woman closed the door behind us and squinted at me in the dim. “Which will it be, I wonder? Princess or Swan-Keeper?”

  She was asking herself, not me, so I didn’t sign an answer. Instead, I looked around the surprisingly neat cottage: a dirt floor, covered with fresh reeds; a jumble of potted plants clustered around the two dingy windows; a much-used hearth.

  “You are Swan-Keeper, I think! They are your brothers, aren’t they? The black swans. Why else would a princess watch them?”

  She motioned me to sit at the small table beside the hearth. I slowly sat, and she dropped in the chair across from me, suddenly weak. “It’s all my fault. Can you forgive me, child? Can they?”

  She started crying before I could answer.

  My left hand and cheek burned with the nettle-stings, thanks to her, but she hadn’t grieved then. I folded my arms, using my anger the way Aiden used a shield.

  But she cried on, and I couldn’t help but pity her. Finally, I rested a hand on her arm, and her sobs slowed.

  “You’re a kind one, Swan-Keeper,” the woman said. “But then, so was I.”

  She stood and tottered over to a plant growing on a windowsill. She wrenched a few leaves off and popped them into her mouth, chewing noisily. Then she spat the leafy pulp into her hand. “Put this on the welts. It’ll ease the sting.”

  I shook my head. No.

  “I live among nettles, Swan-Keeper. Trust that I know how to deal with their sting. And then perhaps I’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

  I held out my hand to her.

  She globbed the mess over the welts, then reached to put it on my cheek as well, but I jerked away. I didn’t trust her so near me.

  She sighed and sat back in her chair, eyes fixed on the cluster of feathers on my belt.

  “Black swans. They’re safe if they need your silence to survive.” Her eyes dropped to the hand that I’d signed the curse with. “Yet you find your way of speaking, too, and all the better for your own soul!”

  I didn’t care about my soul. I cared about my brothers. I patted the table, impatient for her to go on.

  She nodded. “Yes, yes. You want to know about her. You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “What did she look like?” the woman demanded. “I need to know what my snowy one looked like before I tell you how to undo her!”

  Snowy one. So she had been talking about the Queen!

  I shook my head, unwilling to revisit the ugliness of what had happened.

  “Tell me!”

  I closed my eyes to steady myself. Think of it as a barter, one story for another.

  I slowly stood, just as I’d seen the Queen stand, iron in my spine, ice in my eyes. And I discovered that the iron and ice weren’t just from mimicking the Queen. They were in me too.

  I would get the wisdom I needed from this woman.

  Her eyes traveled over me hungrily as she rocked in her chair. “That’s her! That’s her!”

  She seemed so pleased that I took my braid and wrapped it around my head, like a crown.

  The woman buried her face in her hands. “So she still wears her hair like that. Surely she does. That’s when I knew she was lost to me.”

  I pounded the table with the flat of my hand to get her attention. When she looked up, cheeks wet with tears, I pointed at her: Your turn. Tell me what I want to know.

  “I was so lonely, you see, so lonely, and she was a bewitching little thing. She sang . . . she sang my loneliness away.” She pointed out to the garden. “She’d sit there, hour after hour, singing and watching me. How could I not love her? How couldn’t I give her everything she wanted?”

  But she said you made her beg.

  The woman wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “The Great Lady was so cruel to her before she escaped—taking, always taking! Sing this! Sing that! Is it so bad that she wanted something for her own? But I didn’t give it to her all at once! No, I wasn’t that foolish. I knew the cost. How could you wrench so much from nature and not have there be a cost? So I gave her speech, little by little, only a few words at a time. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  I touched my lips with my fingers. Words? How did you give the Queen words? She was already singing! And where had she come from?

  The old woman tugged on my arm, ignoring my questions with a shake of her head. “Tell me what happened first, Swan-Keeper! Tell me what happened to my snowy girl.”

  I clenched my jaw. Once again, it was my turn.

  I looked around the room, then went to the hearth with the sagging mantel. I swiped a finger through the soot, then began to draw on the empty hearthstone.

  The woman joined me and watched breathlessly, head bent over the pictures: The Queen finding Father in the forest . . . her marriage to him . . . an image of her speaking the spell while my brothers stood halfway between human and swan.

  Fury and terror grew inside me as I drew, the way my breath pushed for release when I swam with my brothers and stayed too long underwater.

  I stopped and gulped in a deep breath, wiping my tears with my sleeve.

  The woman stared at the drawings, then looked up at me. She raised a finger to my damp cheek. “How she’s wounded you . . .”

  I almost relaxed, for her touch was tender. Then the iron and ice returned, and I stepped back. I pointed to her, then touched my lips again. Your turn. Tell me more about the words!

  “I didn’t know what she’d become.” The woman looked at me with such sorrow that I almost softened. Then her grief pulled the madness up after it, and I watched her gaze shift back in time. “After the words, came the day that I gave her her first dress! How she danced, though she was clumsy at first! But she sang so prettily I didn’t mind, and how
could the Lady have ever refused to give such a pretty thing a way to dance when that was all she ever wanted?”

  A dress? Surely she hadn’t been naked the whole time! And why would dancing matter so much?

  “But that wasn’t enough, you see. I gave her words and a dress and feet to dance and then she wanted to dance in other places, places she’d seen earlier. She said they were so small when she saw them.” Another sob.

  She gave her feet? Had the Queen’s feet been hurt? Had the woman healed them somehow?

  “She said I didn’t love her, if I kept her here. She stopped singing, stopped dancing.” The woman covered her face with her hands, her voice breaking. “She said the garden disgusted her! That she loathed me! I, who taught her to dance! Who gave her words! What could I do but let her go?”

  A sickness settled inside me. Something awful had happened. Something ugly and dark that shouldn’t have seen the light of day.

  “I didn’t let her leave until I knew she’d be cared for. One day, a man came to my cottage, such a strong and handsome man! He was a king, I think.”

  Father! This was where he met the Queen.

  I pounded the table for her attention, not caring how she cried or whose turn it was. When she blinked watery eyes at me, I pointed to my hair.

  Still the woman blinked at me! I motioned as if setting a crown on my head, and then pointed to my hair. Did the king have black hair?

  After a moment, the woman slapped her thigh. “You’re almost as smart as she was, Swan-Keeper! No, the king didn’t have dark hair. His hair was gold, gold as his beard. Only a golden king for my girl.”

  I dropped back into the chair. It wasn’t Father, then.

  “I told him he’d find his way out of the forest if he’d take my snowy one and marry her. I knew she could show him the way, for she’d seen the path a thousand times.

  Her mind was slipping away.

  “So I kissed her on both pale cheeks, and I gave her what she wanted. That was before you were born, I think. I’ve spent all these years here alone.”

  Who was the man, then?

  “I’ve been so lonely . . . ,” sobbed the woman, “. . . no singing, no dancing . . .”

  I could’ve cried along with her from sheer disappointment—for a moment, it seemed like something in the Queen’s past might make sense. Yet I still had no idea who the Queen was or where she’d come from.

  I couldn’t give up. If this woman knew my brothers had been turned to swans, she might know how to save them.

  I marched over to the woman and took her by the shoulders. She sobbed a bit, but I made myself heartless and shook her till she looked at me. Then I jabbed a finger at the sooty picture of my swan-brothers on the hearthstone. What do I do?

  She shook her head and tried to turn away, but I wouldn’t let her. Another jab at the picture. Tell me!

  She finally looked at me.

  “I don’t want her to come back, that’s my secret,” she whispered, and gooseflesh prickled my arms at the fear in her voice. “She’s not my sweet one anymore. She wants to kill me so she can keep the words and the feet and the dress forever! And I won’t have that. I told her so when she came back.” She glanced fearfully at the dingy windows.

  The Queen came back? When? Was that when Father found her?

  “That’s why I let the nettles grow! She hates them. They remind her of when she’d sit beside the nettles and eat and sing for me . . . when she sang without words . . . before I gave her words . . .”

  Another shake, even though I winced at the pressure on my nettle-stung hand.

  “When she saw the nettles, she wouldn’t come closer. Just shouted to me. And her wolf men couldn’t come for me, either.”

  Wolf men! The wild-faced men who made up her guard. I patted my chest and drew the outline of a leather breastplate, then brandished an imaginary obsidian sword.

  “Oh, you’ve seen them, have you? Beware them, child—I fear for you if she ever sends them after you. She’s pulled them from the Great Hunt to hunt for her here. But she’s not so powerful that she can keep them when the Otherworld horns are sounded. She’s only strong enough to keep a few near.”

  Declan told tales of the Great Hunt and the Otherworldly creatures that rode across the earth, hidden by great storms. I didn’t remember much—only that I’d shivered with that comfortable sort of fear that disappeared when I pulled my blankets around me.

  But mortal or not, I didn’t see how nettles would stop anyone. I pointed to the nettle stings on my hand that she’d recently covered and then motioned to a crown on my head. Why did the Queen and her wolf men fear the nettles’ sting so much?

  The old woman wagged her head back and forth. “Oh, you’re a stupid one after all, Swan-Keeper! It isn’t the sting she fears, it’s the remembering—memories of Before, when she sat beside my nettles—that she pushes away. And since the wolf men are here at her call, they fear the nettles too.”

  She laughed, a sound almost as harsh as her weeping. “I told her I wouldn’t let her have her words forever, though ’twas just talk at the time. But lately, I’ve heard in wind and birdsong that a mite of a girl would undo her. Now that I see you, I know it’s true. And I hate you for it, for the hurt you’ll bring her.”

  I stepped back, hoping for a moment that she really had heard truth, that I’d be the one to undo the Queen.

  But my mind wasn’t broken like the old woman’s. Not yet. And I knew that dreams could lie.

  They can make you lose everything.

  “That’s how you’ll save your brothers,” she said, in a voice so sane it startled me.

  She gripped my wrist. “Knit tunics for your brothers, Swan-Keeper! Knit them out of nettles. How long did you give her your words?”

  I held up six fingers.

  “One year for each,” murmured the woman. “She always did like words. Little wonder she’d try to collect them.”

  The woman jumped up and walked to an overflowing cupboard. She trotted back to me and pressed something into my hand without giving me time to look at it.

  She took my face in her hands and pulled me so close our noses almost touched. “You can’t have those six years back. You cannot speak the word I should have said, oh no, but you can save your brothers. Have the tunics ready, and on the day you can speak, have your brothers wear them, the tunics made from nettles. They’ll be men and not swans. They’ll never be swans again. Do you understand me?”

  She released me and plucked at her shawl. “It can be done, Swan-Keeper, those tunics. I made this from nettles, using that spindle.”

  I looked down at what she’d given me. A slender rod of wood two hands high. It had an apple-sized disk of wood at one end. Wrapped around the middle was a small swell of yarn. Nettle yarn, apparently.

  She plucked the spindle from my hands, unwrapped a length of yarn, looped it over a hook at the other end, and set the spindle whirling, disk-end down, as it hung near her knees. The yarn twisted even tighter. “Like this, child. You use a drop spindle like this. No fancy spinning wheels now that you’re only a swan-keeper.”

  Fast as thought, she wrapped the tail of yarn around the spindle and handed it back to me.

  I’d sooner be able to spin a spiderweb than understand what she’d just done.

  “I made all my clothes from nettles! I don’t want her to lay a hand on me. Don’t want her wolf men to hunt me the way they’ll hunt you.” Her head drooped until her chin rested on her chest.

  Hunt me? How? I reached for her to shake the answer out of her, but she batted me away, and I saw she was done with me.

  “Go away, Swan-Keeper. Go away, Princess. Leave me to my grief. I’ll never hear her sing again.” Her voice dropped to a whisper as I walked toward the door, spindle in my hand. “I’ll never see her again.”

  Chapter 16

  The iron and ice I’d borrowed from the Queen fell away as I stepped outside and snatched my walking stick, dragging the door closed behind me.
/>   Sobs rasped through the door, and I peered back over my shoulder.

  She didn’t want my help or comfort.

  And then the sound of her sobs seemed like every dark thing that had chased me since I left the castle. I clutched the spindle closer and ran down the path through the nettles.

  I didn’t stop till I reached my little camp by the three rivers: my satchel slung over a tree branch to protect it from animals and thieves, the sooty remains of a fire in the hollow protected from the wind. I had to be at least a league from her cottage, but I still feared I’d somehow hear her cries and that maybe I’d become just like her.

  Don’t be silly, chided Gavyn. Think about what you’ve learned.

  I dropped my walking stick and sank down, my back against a tree. I hadn’t learned anything.

  I thought the old woman would tell me who the Queen was.

  I thought she’d tell me how to stop her.

  I thought she’d be sane.

  Think!

  Very well, then. I turned the spindle over in my hands.

  I’d learned that the Queen escaped from a mean mistress—or someone she thought was mean. And that the Queen sat by the nettles and sang.

  So she hadn’t always been royalty.

  Then the old woman had given her words . . . and a dress . . . and feet? Feet?

  I pressed my free hand against my forehead. I wanted to talk! If I could tell someone what I’d heard, I might begin to understand it.

  Not speaking was almost like not thinking.

  And then I was back in Roden’s dungeon with the Queen gloating over all that I’d lost.

  She’d said silence would open a chasm inside me.

  No.

  I leaped up, not minding that the spindle fell to the ground, and made Cadan’s rude gesture then—all of it—both hands held up to the pale slice of moon that hung in the blue sky. Let the Queen see that!

  I’d be quiet, but I wouldn’t be empty.

  And then I lowered my hands because it really was an awful gesture. Besides, it was time to think, not insult the empty air like a child.

  I dropped to my knees, plucked up a flat rock, and used it to strip moss from the ground. Then I patted the exposed earth as smooth as a piece of parchment.