The Turnaway Girls

by Hayley Chewins

  I’ve made this.

  I’ve pushed my own voice through marrow.

  The cloisterwings must have wanted me to know. They must have wanted me to open my eyes. To see it. This.

  My fingers are pulsing with stick-of-pin tingles, and the slice on the back of my hand itches and stings as if my skin’s speaking its own language, but eventually I’m able to knead the light-strand into gold. At least — I think it’s gold. But as I cup it like a warm egg, something crimps in my hands like a heartbeat.

  Pa-pum.

  A flickermoth must be buzzing its wings at my skin.

  It happens again — three sets of couplet beats this time.

  Pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum.

  That’s no flickermoth.

  I open my hands, and there, sitting all folded up, is a small golden bird.

  It lifts off my palm to drift on air-tides as if it were made for flying. As if I made it for flying.

  Because that’s what I did.

  Instead of making a dead clump of gold — gold for a door handle, an earring, a spoon — I have sung a bird with a beating heart.

  I can’t make shimmer — but I can make something living. Now the living thing dives overhead.

  “Hello, little bird,” I say. “Where did you come from?” I hold out my finger, and the bird lands there, tilts its head. “Don’t worry,” I whisper. “I’ll look after you.”

  I’m about to fold it in my hands again when it flies straight up through the light-strands I haven’t yet kneaded, out of the hollow tree.

  “Wait!” I cry, gripping the inside of the tree trunk with my fingernails, pulling myself up and out.

  I land in the wet and slip and fall, my sliced hand smacked between my chest and the ground. Pain crackles like snapping twigs beneath my skin. I scramble to my feet.

  The golden bird floats in a dipping line along the cloister’s outer wall, spinning ribbons of light against stone.

  “Don’t go,” I call. “Don’t —”

  When I reach the bird, its wings are brushing the wall as though it wants to escape. I hold my hand out, but it hurries away, as if it’s following a sound or a smell. For a moment, I hear it. A stone-flute. Even though nothing I’ve ever learned in Histories says that a Master would be out here this late at night.

  I press my cheek against the wall and wait. And wait. And wait. Wait for the sound to come back. I forget about the bird as it flits above my head. I forget about my bruises, too — forget all the bruises I’ve ever had.

  When the Master begins to play again, melodies gather on the end of my tongue. I can’t stop them — they drop off, note by note, and I am singing. I keep my eyes open this time, waiting for the strands of light to run right through me. Within moments, they are mellowing at my back, blowing around me like a skirt. I take one in my hands and knead it. There it is again: pa-pum, pa-pum. Another bird escapes through my fingers. My bones feel lit from the inside.

  Strand after strand, the light knits in my palms. My voice sets the night ablaze, the wings of more and more golden birds shivering into being until they’re brushing against my knuckles, eyelashes, earlobes, shaking moonlight from delicate feathers. Until I am surrounded by them.

  Then they disperse and gather again, flying from me in a cloud of whispered chirrups. They push through a gap in the cloister’s outer wall.

  “But how?” I breathe.

  I stagger in their direction, reach for them, reach for the birds I sang into living, but the last one escapes before I can get to it.

  The cloisterwings, twirling through the branches above my head, twitch as though they’re flying and sleeping at the same time, ruffling their feathers and snapping their beaks, cawing at a sky they’ll never swoop against.

  I press my eye to the slit, blinking against stone. Gold wings float over the sea. Float away from me.

  And then the stone-flute falls silent.

  And I hear the sound of someone swallowing. All at once it’s as though I’m looking into a mirror and not through a wall, not at the sea, not at the wings of birds that I have made and lost.

  Because on the other side of the wall is an eye, sunken against brown skin. Wide and looking at the world as if it hurts to see it, to see anything at all. Dark as dark will ever be.

  It looks like my eye, but it can only be the eye of the stone-flautist. The eye of the boy who made music on the other side of the wall, the sea sucking at his back as I’ve always imagined. A Master.

  My eye stays open, frozen against the gap, while the boy’s eye blinks. Pa-pum. This time it’s my own heart. Pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum.

  And that beating pulls me back into the world I know.

  I press off the wall.

  I turn and run, trampling soil and lungmoss, ducking under low-hanging branches, until I am standing on Teeth Row again, my breath wound up like thread on a spool within me.

  My tongue is a piece of bitter fish in my mouth.

  I sprint again, back to the sleeping-room. I huddle under salt-clean quilts, nursing all my sore places — my swollen cheek, my burning heart — and it’s only once the black soil and bits of lungmoss have dried on my toes that I’m taken by sleep, dragged through dreams about sliced-off fingers, walls with eyes, and sad, unflying birds.

  Usually I don’t like Histories, but today’s lesson might as well have wings. Because today we are learning about the Sea-Singer — as a warning and a warning only.

  One thing Mother Nine has told me about the Sea-Singer is that the hollow tree’s death was all her fault. That she was the one who started the fire in the cloister when she was my age. (Easy enough to do, in a place made of hushingstone, which blares into flame if struck at any suitable angle.)

  Mother Nine wants me to hate the Sea-Singer and her singing and the way she went to the waves for it. Mother Nine raised her and she says she was always trouble, trouble, trouble. But I can’t think of the Sea-Singer as a strife-maker. Her fire made a space for me to sing.

  And the truth is, I dream of fires.

  Of burning the cloister down.

  Don’t tell.

  Don’t tell.

  Don’t tell.

  Mother Nine’s staring is like a graze.

  “I knew her best,” she says.

  She means she’s counted the Sea-Singer’s faults as keenly as she’s counted mine. Which is part of the reason I love the Sea-Singer, even if she’s dead and gone like the First Mother. She must have known what it was like to wear Mother Nine’s words, always, like a wet-clinging dress.

  Mother Nine lets us stand in a scatter on Teeth Row, tells us to look up. We’ve always seen the Sea-Singer — since cribhood we’ve been seeing her there, carved into the cloister’s high, smooth dome, the skydoor over her heart. Waves crash around her. She’s wearing the sea as a dress. Accents of gold brush her cheeks and brow, and stings of light twinkle through tiny holes in the stone around her head, so that she’s crowned by the sun itself. In my dreams, she hums lullabies against my hurtless cheeks. Don’t be silent, she says. Sing.

  But Mother Nine carved her there with her own hands to remind us that girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

  No matter. My heart can do its own reading.

  I shake my head, trying to rid my mind of thoughts — thoughts about singing in the hollow tree, about those spark-birds skimming moon-trailed waves. Thoughts about the eye I saw on the other side of the wall and the boy it belonged to — the Master who saw me. The Master who heard me.

  “Of the Sea-Singer,” says Mother Nine, “I will tell you three things.” Her tongue clenches around the syllables. She clears her throat, and it sounds like she’s clearing her chest of dust.

  Three things in twelve years. Mother Nine is stingy with her secrets.

  “The first is that she was born of a good family — let them not be blamed.”

  She dips her chin, touches fingers to lips — a blessing for the Sea-Singer’s kin — and so do the othergirls. I stare at their face
s, turned cheek after turned cheek.

  I’ve known them all my life — since we were brought here, placed in lungmossy cribs — but I’ve never spoken to any of them for more than a few minutes. When we do speak, it’s to point out things we already know. They don’t have thoughts of their own, the othergirls. I’ve learned to speak to trees — and to birds — instead.

  “The second,” says Mother Nine, “is this. The Sea-Singer was the Ninth King’s turnaway girl — before she became his wife and queen. She reigned well until she conspired to sing a song at Sorrowhall twelve years ago. A song of her own making. She desecrated the Garden of All Silences in front of Blightsend’s Masters, and the sea punished her that very night. A storm rose — the worst in our island’s history — to snatch her from her bed. Ever since, the beds in the palace have been arranged so that the sleeper always faces the sea. Even dreamers must be watchful.”

  I force my lips into a dry pucker to stop my smile — eyes watering, ears ringing. The fire-setter sang in the Ninth King’s own home. I am not supposed to be impressed, of course. I am supposed to be appalled. Or, at least, uninterested, as the othergirls are.

  “And the third,” says Mother Nine.

  I want her not to say the third. Not yet. I want to wait. I don’t want it to be over. I imagine the words delivered to me on the wings of a bird — not a golden bird. Don’t think it, Delphernia. Don’t tell.

  Mother Nine is careful to make her words deliberate and slow. But underneath them I can hear the growl of hating. “Let it be known that the Sea-Singer, devoured by waves for her disobedience, so shamed the royal family that the Ninth King grew ill with a case of crinkle-lung and died a terrible, unbreathing death. In the Sea-Singer’s palm rests his last day.”

  Mother Nine pauses. She swallows as if she’s got a lump of hardened tree sap stuck in her throat.

  “Thank the First Mother that treachery doesn’t run in the blood. The Sea-Singer came from a good family, and from her came the Childer-Queen — a strong ruler who knows that Blightsend’s laws are made to be kept.”

  A queen. A Childer-Queen. That’s the first I’ve heard of her.

  I look up at the Sea-Singer. You’d think her face would be a slant of horror, but there’s something else in her eyes. I know it and I have always known it: she was glad to die for singing. She knew that the sea would take her if she sang. She made a sound anyway. My heart fills with the rustling of feathers.

  I’m so busy staring up at her face — staring and staring and definitely not thinking about walls and stone-flutes and dark-eyed Masters — that I can’t stop the question from escaping my lips: “Why did Mother Nine carve your eyes with fighting in them?”

  And then the othergirls have scattered and I know Mother Nine has heard.

  She grabs my right hand — hard. I yelp and try to wrench away, but she only grips my already hurt fingers tighter. She pulls a twisted wooden clamp, bent like a bird’s broken beak, from the folds of her skirt.

  She tears the nail from my thumb with it.

  I heave, falling to my knees. It’s not only my hand that’s in pain — it’s my whole body, from the roots of my curls to my clenched toes, all burning, burning, burning.

  This has never happened before. Mother Nine has bruised me for opening my mouth, she’s made me bleed for not making shimmer, but she’s never torn a part of me away.

  I want to ask her why she did it, but I already know the answer. The question itself holds its reply, like the yolk inside a boiled cloisterwing egg.

  She did it because she hates the Sea-Singer.

  She did it because she hates me.

  I’m glad when Mother Nine chooses the babies’ sleeping-room as my scolding place — you can’t use switches there.

  The little ones are silent in their lungmossy cribs until one of them opens her mouth, makes a sound that could split a ceiling — even the ceiling of hushingstone that looms over our heads. Mother Nine picks her up, swaying her back and forth to soothe her. “In there,” she says, nodding toward a chest, scuffed and stained after years of salted damp. “Bandages.”

  My hands quake as I search for a strip of cloth to stop the bleeding.

  Mother Nine only speaks again once I’ve wound the flickermoth silk around my thumb. “Do you know what our rules are for, Delphernia?”

  My eyes are bleary with tears and I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care what they’re for. The bawling baby seems to feel the same way.

  The room is full of babies, but this one is the newest. Every girl who’s born in Blightsend is given a mirror on the day of her birth. And what she does with it determines whether she ends up here or out in the world, scrubbing the floors the Masters tread their shoes on.

  This baby was dropped off last week, wrapped in an embroidered cloak. She must have turned away from her reflection, like the rest of us did. That’s why they call us turnaway girls. Because we turned our faces from polished gold instead of scouring it for our own eyes.

  Girls who make shimmer need to be selfless, need to hold whole worlds in their bones, need to listen, listen, listen. They need to turn away from who they are and who they wish to be.

  “The rules,” says Mother Nine, “are there to teach you how to survive. You want to live, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  But that’s only partly true.

  Because what I do not say is this: I want to live outside.

  “Right,” says Mother Nine. “Here’s an education for your eyes.”

  She marches to the back of the room, where she places the baby, spine bent with screaming, on a table engraved with crashing waves.

  “What are you going to do?” I say. A hurting’s coming, I’m sure of it. My thumb beats in an aching counterpoint to my heart.

  “After the Sea-Singer was swallowed by the sea,” says Mother Nine, circling a thumb and index finger around each of the baby’s white wrists, “the Ninth King passed a law. It requires that part of every turnaway girl’s heart be removed.”

  “Removed?” I am clutching my own wrist now.

  A hurting’s coming, a hurting’s coming —

  Mother Nine goes on holding the baby’s wrists. She stands very still, closes her metallic eyes, dips her chin, her palms facing the child.

  And then I see what she’s doing.

  Sometimes I forget that Mother Nine used to be a girl like me.

  The baby’s sobs are coming out hoarse like a soughing wind.

  And Mother Nine is letting them drift through her bones.

  She’s making shimmer.

  But the strands at her back are not lustrous gold — they’re crooked bands of silver and shadow. They jerk in the air like birds with broken wings.

  She turns toward the grime-gleaming strands, takes them in her hands and kneads them. I stand on my tiptoes to see what she’s doing — what she’s making.

  When her fingers unfurl, I see it — a small bracelet of dull silver.

  She puts it around the baby’s wrist, leaves it there for a few breaths, and the little thing falls silent — her lips a neat line, her blue eyes dripping blank-blinking tears. Mother Nine takes the bracelet off again and pockets it. There’s a faint darkness where the metal used to be, as though storming clouds have mistaken the baby’s skin for the sky.

  A bead of bitterness collects behind my tongue. “You took out the part of her that cries.”

  Mother Nine undresses the baby and crumples up her sleeping-robe, fetching a mud-dyed smock for her instead.

  “You took out the part of her that cries,” I say again.

  “I’ve rid her of questions,” Mother Nine says, holding the baby up. “She’s satisfied now. She’s content.”

  I look around the room. All the other babies are sleeping peacefully, as though sleep itself is dreaming of them.

  And I know that she’s taken their questions, too.

  I run along the rows of cribs.

  Every single one has a ring of cloudy grayne
ss sweeping her skin.

  “You’ve done it to all of them,” I say. My voice is a fist.

  I’ve never seen a scar on my arm, but maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough. I didn’t even know I needed to look. I start to roll up my sleeves.

  Then Mother Nine is kneeling before me, smoothing my cuffs. “You don’t have one,” she says.

  I stare at the wrinkled space between her eyebrows. “I don’t?”

  “The day the Sea-Singer’s death was announced,” she says, looking past me, “was the day you arrived at the cloister. There was a festival in Blightsend to celebrate the new law — the Festival of Questions. There was music while I did it. Your class was the first. I bundled you into your crib — you always slept so deeply, as though you had lullabies swirling your veins — and, as the others began to cry, I drew it out of them. All their wanting and all their needing. I made warped silver of their longings. I bound them with it. I showed them how useless it was — just dead metal to them and nothing warm, nothing that would ever make anything better. And they stopped. One by one, they stopped. No tantrums since.”

  “I don’t understand. Did you remove their ability to cry? Or their ability to ask?”

  “A cry and a question come from the same place in a girl’s heart.”

  “And me —”

  “I couldn’t. I couldn’t.”

  Mother Nine said the baby was satisfied. Content. But I am not. I have questions like claw tips in my stomach. I have a buzzing in my blood that never stops. A buzzing I can’t portion into words now. I swallow and swallow, but my tongue stays fat, filling my mouth like a spoonful of seaflower stew.

  “Do you know who the Sea-Singer was, Delphernia?” Mother Nine is whispering. Her eyes are brimming with unfalling tears. “She was a girl who asked questions. She became a woman who asked questions. And there is nothing Blightsend hates more than that.”

  She gets to her feet. She runs a hand over the top of my head.

  “I gave you a gift, Delphernia. I left your heart alone. For the First Mother’s sake, don’t waste all that by drenching your own lungs.”

  Gift. A soft kiss of a word. Mother Nine could never give a gift. What she gave me was a burden, heavy as a spadeful of soil. What she gave me was a way of knowing what I lack. If I didn’t have questions, I’d be like the othergirls. I’d be good at making shimmer and I’d be chosen by one of the Masters and I’d never know that I was missing singing.