The back of my neck pinched with the memory of Liam holding my shirt collar.
“You don’t know how bad things had to get,” I said.
“You don’t know how bad they are now,” she said, her voice rasping into a whisper.
That was when I found it, the glint of something else. The flick of light off her eyes was familiar not because I’d seen it in her before.
I’d felt it, weeks earlier.
That first spark of something desperate flared and brightened. It wasn’t how her hair looked, like she’d been pulling her hands through it. Or how her shirt had gotten wrinkled from her fingers grabbing it. Or her lipstick drying and fading on her mouth. These things were just Roja, like how the back hems of her jeans dragged on the ground, the mud and rain soaking halfway up to her knees.
It was the widening of her eyes. How her stare never flinched away from me. How the brown of them seemed both bluer and redder, like the way the colors of the stars shifted depending on the time of year.
The possibility of becoming something else, of letting the woods turn her into something that belonged more to them than to herself, that was the only thing she could get her hands around. She wouldn’t have been here otherwise.
“It may not work,” I said. “If the woods don’t want you, they won’t take you.”
“I know that,” she said. “And it’s not the woods deciding this time, anyway.”
“Even if it does work, you won’t like it,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“It hurts.”
“I know.”
“And you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
I didn’t know why I asked it. It wasn’t up to me to look out for her. Even if I’d wanted to, there was so much I didn’t know about this family that called swans their relatives, and this girl who told lies as easily as she said her own name.
“I know what I’m doing,” she said.
It was the way she said all the words back—I know what I’m doing, not just Yes, or I do—that made me sure.
I stepped back into that day, how my body and my heart felt both splintered into pieces and reclaimed into something else. It was pain and relief, fight and giving in all at the same time.
“It felt like”—I shut my eyes, slipping back into the memory—“when there’s nothing left at the center of you, when it feels like the only things holding you together are things you don’t even want to remember, and there was just this second of something skimming past me. You ever been in a river and had a fish brush by you? It was kind of like that.” I fell back into the feeling of it, close enough to remember, but with the distance of knowing the woods would never take me again. “It started that small and it just got bigger. Like when you find a part of the water that’s colder than the rest of it, and you choose whether to swim away from it or go into it. It was like that. Like a current I could fight or go with.”
It was a current that had broken me apart. I had been a comet burned up, a meteor vaporized into dust. I had been scrapped and made into something else.
I opened my eyes, watching those last minutes of Roja as she was. Her hair that looked black at night and dark red during the day. Her mouth set, and her eyes in that stare that could sear the woods into a wildfire.
Shock and wonder moved over her face, like she was willing herself into freezing water. She was holding back how much it hurt, and in that will, I knew she understood how much this would cost her, how much it had cost me.
She followed what I told her like a map. I could feel her tracing the thread of my words. I felt her effort, like she was fighting up through water.
The edges of her blurred and glowed, like she was made of light, not flesh.
She tipped her head back, breathing in as though she welcomed it.
In the next second, her hair looked less like hair and more like black feathers, her arms less like arms and more like wings.
ROJA
I always wondered how it might happen. I wondered if the humming of wings would pronounce one of us a girl and one of us a swan, and the wind would twirl the swan daughter’s body into feathers right then.
But I wasn’t waiting for the swans to decide.
I followed what Yearling told me, like picking out the shape of a constellation.
To Yearling, Blanca and I were probably sisters in a half-remembered story, Snow-White and Rose-Red.
We had been like that once, sisters in a fairy tale. We had been as different from each other as sweet-tempered Snow was from never-quiet Rose, but we had been close and entwined as two growing-together trees.
But there was another story interlaced with that story. One filled with swans and nightmares and sisters too skittish to tell each other the truth. That was the one Yearling didn’t know. That was the one I had to find a way back from.
I looked to the clouds, where I thought I could see the far-off shadowing of swans’ wings.
“I’m ready,” I whispered into the sky, to all the swans I could see and couldn’t, every one who might have once been our family.
I said it again, so quietly the voice sounded outside of me, an echo. I whispered it with as much defiance as willingness.
In the last moment of being myself, I let go of this boy who’d taught me how. I let go of the moment he came back, smelling like the fur of the bear he’d been and the sweat of the boy he’d just become again. And I wondered if maybe this was the way bloodied and broken-down boys hid from the world. I wondered about the weeks Yearling and Page made their homes in the bodies of foxes or stags. I wondered if Yearling lived in the dark as an odd-eyed bird, shivering on a stripped-bare branch, and I had never noticed.
And in wondering, I became lost. The possibility of becoming a swan took me the way the woods had taken them.
I slipped into that sense Yearling had told me about, that ribbon of cold current.
I took with me the questions I would never get to ask Blanca.
Can I save you the way you wanted to save me?
Do I have the reckless love in me to do what you would have done?
Can I be the sister to you that you’ve been to me this whole time?
My body answered.
The pain of my skin turning to feathers was victory and vindication.
The swans always claimed a daughter.
And it would have one. But this time I wouldn’t wait for them to choose.
I gave in to it, and the relief of no longer fighting was so sharp it was its own pain.
The ache splintered through me. My body bloomed into feathers and wings. And I lifted my face to the sky.
PART FIVE
Those of Us with Wings
ROJA
I didn’t forget. Anything I wanted to take with me, I held inside my feathered body.
My mother reading newspapers even though nobody else did, even though the ink grayed the tips of her fingers.
My father letting me hold the fountain pen he’d spent a year saving for, and then another few months for the ink, because a pewter-barreled pen deserved the deepest green-gold.
A boy putting glass glitter in my hands in a way that made me believe it was as enchanted as polvo de hadas.
Luring my sister into the pond with me, promising her that the fish she hated brushing her shins were actually tiny mermaids, finned women as small as fairies.
My sister.
My sister.
My sister.
Because I could not say these words, my heart said them over and over.
I parted my lips only to remember that they were a swan’s beak. I spoke, and heard the sharp pitch of a birdcall. My thin, feathered neck stung as I remembered I had neither my own mouth nor my own voice.
But I found a chilled freedom in how the wind held me. With each flick of my muscles, I lost the memory of ever having arms. I felt the shape and power of my own wings, how the air skirted past them, flowing through my feathers. With each draft of wind, I forgot how it felt to wal
k. Flying became my first language. I rode the sky like it was water, the leading edge of my wings cutting through the gray. My speed turned still air into wind.
My new lungs felt so much smaller, but they took in enough air to keep me soaring. Each flush of breath lit me up. My breaths came quickly, like I was drinking the whole sky.
The tips of my wings flashed at the corners of my vision, black, when I had always thought I would be forced into a white-down body. Black, the color of my hair if my mother and the señoras had ever managed to strip away the red.
My swan-body felt heated, like each feather met my skin in a spark. My heart felt so heavy in this new body that I thought it would rip through, a raw jewel in a bag of weak netting. But it held. My hollow bones and my shell of dark feathers kept it.
I could live this way. I could hold my jewel-heavy heart in my swan’s body and I could still fly.
I just needed Blanca to see me. If she found me at the pond, if she recognized me in the black swan waiting for her on the water, she’d know she was free.
A song of approaching calls opened through the sky. The swans were coming. They would take me. I lifted my wings, ready to join their flock.
But as they neared me, their call sharpened. It charged the air around them. It was a shift as strong as the moment between one season and the next.
A long time ago, swans had given my great-great-great-grandmother two daughters, in exchange for how, someday, they would take one back. And one from the next two daughters, and the next two, and the next.
But this time, I had stolen the choice of which they would take.
I should have known the swans hadn’t finished with me.
BLANCA
I had dreamed it every night since the swans came. I dreamed of the moment los cisnes would weave my girl-body into a bird’s form, like the fairy tales of straw spun to gold.
But now all those dreams fell away, and in front of me, the truth of what was happening took on a glare as hard as daylight.
My body stayed. Instead of watching pale feathers grow from my arms and fingers, the corner of my vision flickered with wings that weren’t mine.
Roja. Her hair had become the longest feathers. Her body had grown a coat of down, shining and dark. She gleamed like a spill of ink, a swan with black plumes instead of white.
She flitted to the pond, her low flight through the trees carrying her to the water.
The inside of me broke watching her, this girl who was both my sister and my mirror, now lost to wings.
I had underestimated my little sister, both in what truth she could bear and what will she had in her.
Papá. How would I tell my father that his Roja was no longer a girl but a swan? To Papá, she had been the one with teeth and with a will as sharp as broken glass, and I had lost her.
I followed my sister’s path through the trees, making her out against the dark water.
Sheets of white drifted down over the pond. The swans, with their wide, magnificent wings, landed on the water. They surrounded my sister, their feathers forming a white ring.
I watched for them to welcome her. I waited for them to lift her into the sky so she could fly with them.
Within the flurry of their wings, their necks lashed out at her. Their feathers both sheltered and confined her. Their beaks prodded her, bills nipping at her.
I ran to the edge of the pond.
“Stop it!” I yelled at them.
But I was not one of them, so they did not hear me.
Roja beat her wings to fight them off.
These pale birds did not like her. She was the deep-ocean black of the rarest swans. They both hated the sheen of her feathers and envied it. They understood her as apart from them not only in color but for having once been a girl.
She was both different from these white swans and more beautiful, so they trapped her within their wall of wings.
Even in a swan’s voice, I recognized my sister’s cry, her frightened call.
I waded into the water, splashing to startle the swans. “Leave her alone.”
But they turned their feathered backs to me.
I rushed to the house, grabbed Tess’s Winchester, and ran back to the pond.
“Blanca.” I heard my own name in Page’s voice, the stock of the shotgun already in the hollow of my shoulder, my feet already anchored to absorb the force.
Roja was trying to rise off the water, but their white wings beat her down.
I aimed the barrel at the proudest swan, the most vicious. She hovered low in the water, nipping at Roja’s dark-feathered belly so she could not fly. If I wounded this swan, the rest would fall back.
It wasn’t until my shoulder took the recoil that I remembered what Page had taught me.
How shotguns kicked up when they fired.
How I had to aim lower than I thought I had to.
And how, if I didn’t, the birdshot Roja had set inside the chamber would strike higher than I meant it.
At the first low click, the other birds reeled back, leaving my sister unshielded.
Roja drew down, comprehending the same danger they did, a shared swan-instinct built over generations of surviving hunters.
But the spray off the round opened.
The edge of its burst caught her.
Roja made no noise as she took the beads. She only flailed under the pain and impact.
My next breath came as a sharp gasp.
Page appeared, as suddenly as if the gray sky had made her. She grabbed the gun from my hands, but I was already dropping it. I filled with the understanding of how I had torn into my own sister’s new swan-body.
In trying to save my sister from these spiteful, perfect swans, I had wounded her.
The truth of it pinched. It clawed at my throat. But I did not cry. I was too emptied.
The shot’s echo faded. Page’s raw breathing filled the space.
With a bird’s cry, shrill and sharp, Roja lifted off the pond, her wounds keeping her path low and heavy.
The white swans rose up on the water, their wings taking their weight from the surface. They stretched their necks the way Roja had flown.
They took flight, riding the wind toward the other side of the sky. Every promise I had ever made my sister, my wild hope that we could keep each other, she now carried it all on her wings. She left me here to watch the sky at night, looking for a single black swan. She left me to touch my fingers to the windowpanes, reaching for the raw heart of me that would always live in her.
PAGE
If it hadn’t been for the way Blanca looked at the black swan, I might not have known. But she watched like her heart was held within those dark feathers, and I understood.
I felt Blanca’s longing to speak the language of the other swans, to tell them to leave her sister alone. In the clenching and unclenching of her hands, I felt the rage that made her want to wring all their necks.
In the sheen on her eyes, I saw her fear that the swans would pursue her sister for as long as she survived her wounds. In the slight way she inclined forward, I saw her wanting to be one of them, like she was waiting for her own arms to become wings.
My grandmother had told me once that swans could migrate four thousand miles.
Four thousand miles. Many times farther than I’d ever been from my family’s apple trees.
Four thousand miles. But if I didn’t do this, if I held Blanca back when I could have helped her, I would lose her to a distance neither of us could measure. The far-off longing in her eyes would stay, and I would never get her back.
“You want to follow her, don’t you?” I asked before I’d even decided to.
Blanca turned to me, her face full of more fear and hope than I thought could exist in one girl at the same time.
No matter what body held it, Blanca’s heart would always be trued to her sister.
I had to let her go.
My fingers brushed Blanca’s. Her touch sparked through me, reminding me of how badly I had
wanted to follow Barclay. She wanted something so close to what I’d wanted that I could feel it.
I had wanted the woods to take me so I could go after the closest thing I had to a brother.
She wanted a new body—feathered, winged—that would let her fly after the sister she was losing.
“You have to want this more than you want yourself,” I told her.
I knew the words I would say only as I said them. I had to make her understand that Roja turning had left a door barely open, and Blanca had the smallest chance to follow her through.
It was how I had gone after Barclay.
“You know her,” I said. “And you know how to go after her.”
Even in the sickening anticipation of losing Blanca, my sureness took root. It grew sapling branches and tendrils.
I held Blanca’s hand, our fingers barely interlacing.
She kissed me, her mouth on mine certain and calm. That was how I knew she’d heard the words I didn’t know how to say.
The door is open. Just go through it.
I didn’t say this, because it wasn’t that easy, and I didn’t want to make it sound that easy. Following Barclay had torn away part of me that I still hadn’t found. When I slept, I dreamed of wandering the woods looking for it.
But I had gone after him, because standing by, doing nothing, would have taken more of me. It would have left me hollow and crumbling.
Blanca and I were the same. Doing nothing for the people we loved would have diminished us to nothing.
She pulled her lips away from mine. She let go of my hand so slowly that I felt the first brush of her hands becoming feathers.
BLANCA
When we were growing up, I used to swear Roja and I could feel the things that lived in each other’s bodies. Sometimes a faint clenching between my hip bones warned me when her cramps were coming. Sometimes she woke up with pressure in her forehead and knew I had a fever before I did.
Now I felt that again, my wings not only mine but hers, the span of us like one great bird. The wind’s updraft combed through my pale down and I swore I could feel it in her dark feathers.
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