The Turnaway Girls

by Hayley Chewins

  There’s so much beauty here, it’s distracting. My eyes have never seen so many shards of hushingstone shaped like fingers, so many trays of steaming gold and glass. One of the faces halts my gazing, though. Gray eyes and ashed skin. Silence around him like a storm of flickermoths. It’s Mr. Crowwith. He’s standing at the tip of the giant feather. Watching.

  “To live behind stone is to make a life of watching,” I whisper to myself.

  But Mr. Crowwith doesn’t live behind walls. He has no excuse.

  I step back. Back and back and back. I drift, unseen, into an unlit lane, lost in the throbbing crowd. I want to watch, but I want to hide, too.

  I can’t help but find the othergirls in the swell — the ones who were chosen by the best Masters. Mother Nine taught us that this dance is supposed to celebrate them, but the othergirls don’t react. They stand in a row, their eyes unmoving. They are as empty as ever.

  I’m still staring at the othergirls when Bly grabs my arm and yanks me toward him, splitting a seam at my shoulder. I push away, but he wraps his fingers around my wrist. My torn thumb is awake again, and I’m remembering clamps, kicks, slaps. I bare my teeth and scratch at his neck. He lets go, looking at the rip in my sleeve with regret. His mouth opens, wordless. We’re surrounded by people and music, but there’s a line of silence between us.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” I say.

  Bly swallows. “I have looked for gold in shadowed places and I have found only you,” he says.

  “What?”

  “That’s the Ninth King. A poem he wrote for the Sea-Singer. His statue’s there, at the entrance to the Featherrut.” He points through the crowd to the dancing Masters.

  I fold my arms, narrow my eyes.

  “I didn’t mean —” he says. “I was worried. Scared. I didn’t know where you’d gone. I’m sorry, Delphernia.”

  He takes my hand, folds my fingers into his, and even though I’m still simmering inside, I get that feeling again: that I’m as rooted as my old hollow tree.

  Before I can tell him it’s all right, he taps my shoulder and says “Follow me!” And then we’re twisting along glit-flitter streets speeding through the night-blue, the shimmer and shift. I’ve never felt so feverish, as if every vein in my body is a thin line of fire, but doubt presses at my back like a howling wind. The stone houses on either side of us dip their heads. The sky churns. All the colors forget their names.

  I slow to a stop. “Aren’t you going to dance?” I say. “The Festival of Bells?”

  “No,” he says. “No.” But he doesn’t explain.

  He turns down a crooked street. I follow, but he’s not making any sense. Masters are obliged to dance in the Festival of Bells. That’s what I’ve been taught. I don’t know what I’ll do if Bly isn’t really a Master. Mother Nine has not prepared me for that. Mother Nine has not prepared me for anything.

  By the time we stop at a garden, the hum of Blightsend’s festival like distant birds, my slippers have loosened around my skinless toes. I wince as I walk.

  You’d think I’d feel at home with trees all around me. But there’s something different about this garden. Something that tugs at my sleeve but won’t show its face. Moonlight reflects off the leaves, and I have to narrow my eyes because it’s giving me a headache, and then I realize —

  It’s silent. No sounds of growing. No insect-whirrings. No birds.

  Through black branches I can see a long, low building with hundreds of small windows, a central arch separating one side from the other. I pull back, but Bly urges me on through the garden’s clinging.

  I stop short and founder. My cheek smacks against smooth stone, a thin sheen of lungmoss. My face stings. But I stand, determined to know what it is about this garden — what it is that I can’t quite grasp. Bly waits for me, watching. The sky tilts. I touch one of the leaves at my side. Its edges are sharp, its surface smooth. Smooth as metal.

  And then I know where I am.

  I know that every leaf, every branch, every flower, is made of gold. And I know why it’s silent. This is the First King’s gold-fashioned garden. The Garden of All Silences. Bly has brought me to Sorrowhall. To where the Sea-Singer sang.

  The crash of the ocean fills me. A mourning song travels on the wind. I can hear Mother Nine’s voice in my head.

  Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

  I close my eyes.

  When I open them again, Bly is still looking at me. “Weary are those who shed the skin of their old life,” he says.

  The garden crowds me, and I want to be calm and quiet; I want to turn Mother Nine’s words to mulch, but I have to ask —

  “Bly,” I say, “please answer me.” My teeth clatter. I wriggle my sore toes in my shoes. “Who are you? Who are you really?”

  “You don’t know me?” The night makes a mask of his face. “You are like me, Delphernia Undersea. I do not know myself.”

  “But what is your name?” I say. And my heart repeats the question. What is your name? What is your name?

  “I am Bly Harpermall,” he says. “The Prince of Blightsend.”

  Hours later, I climb out of bed, slide my feet back into their slippers. I want to walk on music, want music to carry me away from here — even if it blisters my toes.

  Bly — Prince Bly — assured me that I would soon adjust to life at Sorrowhall. This was after I started running through the hard tangle of the garden, its branches scratching my arms, my neck, my back.

  Until then, I hadn’t known that gardens could have claws.

  Bly showed me to my sleeping-room — a small space with a stone bed and gold-carved walls, collecting dust in every gouge and hollow.

  “Sleep among ghosts and you will sleep well,” he said, motioning to the walls. They told some sort of story about waves and hands and mouths. Right in the center there was a tree with keys for leaves.

  “Did you carve these?” I asked, running my finger along the crest of a wave.

  “They’re all my dreams,” he said. “And my nightmares.” As he left the room, he called back, “Sleep well, fellow dreamer. Sleep facing the sea. Even dreamers —”

  “Must be watchful,” I called back.

  But sleep was not something I could accomplish.

  For hours I stared at the walls, trying to understand their language. Hook-toothed vines furling into corners and trees sprouting flames. Hands with frightened eyes on their fingertips, reaching for glass-shard waves and frowning suns. My eyes were scratchy with tiredness — but I kept starting, thinking the walls had come alive. They felt alive.

  They feel alive still.

  I imagine them slithering closer to me, their eyes blinking like Bly’s eye on the other side of the cloister’s wall. I want to get out, to get away — to be anywhere but this place. Because Bly is wrong. I won’t adjust to life at Sorrowhall — not if I can’t make shimmer. He’ll soon know that I can’t. And if I disappoint him, he’ll tell the Childer-Queen he heard me singing. He will. He will.

  The sea will find me on its tongue soon enough.

  I wrestle with the musty quilt, wrap it around me to hide my turnaway dress. I slip the case off its pillow and fold it into a strip, tying it over my forehead and ears to hide my turnaway piercing. My ear is so tender that I have to bite my tongue when the silk touches it. I cannot handle pain — certainly not well enough for someone who flouts every known law in Blightsend.

  Mother Nine would say I am a cowardly criminal.

  I creep out into the wide passageway, my dress and the gilded edge of the quilt trailing a path through dirt.

  The Garden of All Silences is a strange, sad thing — a garden that does not grow. A garden must have life in it to be one. My forest inside the cloister might have been almost-dead, but at least it had the beating of wings, the soil-churn of mudworms, the flit and shimmer of flickermoths.

  I didn’t even say good-bye to the cloisterwings, and now I will never see them again. They will wither and die in
side the cloister, caged by Mother Nine. They will never know what it is to crease the sky with their wings.

  Wings — the wind lifts at the word, tearing at angles to rip the quilt from around me.

  And I run, I run.

  The city’s streets are deserted, but I still step awkwardly, avoiding rhythms. In case someone’s listening. In case someone’s watching.

  I thought Blightsend would take me into its hands and stroke my head, but even here there’s no safe place for me. The sky’s always glaring. The sea rushes, rushes. I struggle against a wall of wind.

  I want to escape. To find a way to leave. But one look at the boundless gray that surrounds the island is all I need to know that isn’t possible — not even a little, not even in dreams.

  I walk, trying to ignore the gnaw in my heart, until I get to the edge of the Featherrut. I follow the curve of it until I reach the steps and the statue of the bent-necked man — arms outstretched, palms to sky. Flickermoths twirl around him. There’s a little plaque at the statue’s base that says:

  RULLUN HARPERMALL

  THE NINTH KING

  The wind dies down, turning to a hushing waft. The flickermoths drift off, and the sea flattens out like a stretched sheet of silk. I watch abandoned bells rolling across the bottom of the Featherrut, jingling faintly so that what’s left of the wind — a gentle breeze — sounds like it’s wearing Master-garb.

  Then I see a girl.

  She’s thin as cut shadow, staring at me with her chin cocked. Her skin is white as stars. She’s wearing a soapstress’s dress — silk dyed with the red juice of tongue-fruit. A silent jacket swamps her shoulders.

  She unsticks her lips. I rearrange my quilt, trying to hide my turnaway dress, and start to walk away. But her footsteps follow me — light footsteps, as though she’s tripping across a sheltered strait on the smooth backs of rocks, her stone heels tapping musically against the ground.

  “Wait!” she calls.

  I stop, turning toward the shadow-girl — hoping she will be quiet.

  The wind lifts again. The moon hits the soapstress’s face and it’s — it’s her. The girl-Master, whose dress, only hours ago, was sewn with hundreds of golden bells. The girl who played her stone-flute so beautifully that Mr. Crowwith threw it to the lungmoss.

  “I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she says.

  “I’m not frightened,” I say, but I start walking again, toward Sorrowhall — to my place, as Mother Nine would say.

  I’ll sleep in the garden if I have to, to avoid those creep-pressing walls. I’ll sleep in the place where the Sea-Singer sang and pretend her song still lives there, spun among the branches of bent-gold trees like an eight-legger’s web. I cannot afford to break more rules. More than that, I cannot afford to have another person witness me breaking them.

  The girl-Master trots alongside me, extending a hand. “I’m Linna,” she says. “Linna Lundd.”

  “I know. You announced your own name in the cloister.”

  “Only because Mr. Crowwith would’ve said it wrong.”

  This makes me stop. “What do you mean?”

  “I had a different name before. Before I chose a new one for myself. Before I chose one that was true. Do you like it?”

  I love it. It’s like two sung notes — perfect for a girl who can play the stone-flute like she can. But I don’t say that. I look down and nod.

  “What do you mean — true?” I ask.

  “A name must fit a person like the right size shoe. Mine didn’t, before. So I changed it.”

  For a thousand seconds, I do not know what to do with my eyes, my hands, my feet.

  “I didn’t rescue your stone-flute,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  Cowards are not supposed to admit to their cowardice. I know that. But there’s something about Linna that makes me feel calm, as if I could go to sleep at her feet, not worry about being kicked.

  She shrugs. “I’m taking it as a sign from the sky,” she says, smiling widely. “No music for a little while.”

  “It was lying there, and I — I could have. But he — the Master. He was waiting, and —”

  “Can you play?” Linna asks.

  I shake my head frantically. “Of course not.”

  Linna is smiling again — for no reason — and her smile is louder than any music I’ve ever heard. I remember the music she played in the cloister, and my bones start rushing with the notes.

  There’s an ache inside me that’s hunger and also not hunger: an emptiness of the heart. I don’t want to return to that room of dust, don’t want to sit in the Garden of All Silences. The Sea-Singer might have sung there, but the Sea-Singer was swallowed by the sea.

  I can’t help but glance at Linna’s dress again.

  “What happened to the bells?”

  “Oh, that was a costume I made for the Festival. But it seemed wiser, after Mr. Crowwith spat his threats, to wear more silent attire.” She pronounces the words as the Custodian would, full of mocking seriousness, then flings her arms open and dances a triplet of steps across stone. Her palms are dusted with gold.

  “Are you in hiding? Where will you live?” I call. My heart does its own frightened waltz. Everything Mother Nine’s told me says that there’s no space in Blightsend for those who don’t fit like the right key for the right lock. And Linna — girl-Master and soapstress — doesn’t fit.

  Like a shimmerless turnaway girl.

  Linna pirouettes back. “I’ve already told you a few secrets and you haven’t told me any of yours,” she says, straightening her shoulders. “Haven’t you heard the saying? Secrets must be exchanged, not given. A secret for a secret. Otherwise someone’ll go telling.” She raises an eyebrow.

  I blink at her.

  Then she shrugs and whispers against my cheek, as though she can’t resist. “I won’t tell you where, but I will tell you this: I live in a cloister of my own.”

  “A cloister?” My throat feels full of the word.

  “You’re horrified,” she says, laughing again.

  I can’t stop myself from laughing with her. I’m surprised by the music of it: two voices becoming one. But I brush the thought away. I can’t risk making music with anyone. I can’t risk making music at all. I’m not like Linna. I’m not a girl-Master. I could never wear a dress sewn with bells.

  Linna’s eyes are full of light — it’s as though she’s siphoned off moonlight to make her irises. I can’t picture this girl in a cloister, even if it is one she built for herself. She is made of the ringing sky. She is made of a thousand bells, all strung against red silk.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “Are you still one of Blightsend’s best Masters? I mean, you must have been, right? You were invited to the cloister to choose a turnaway girl.”

  “I was. But I’m not anymore. You heard what Mr. Crowwith said. Music doesn’t belong to me anymore — all because I’m wearing a dress.” She snorts, then sighs. “The sad thing is, it’s not like I don’t want to make music. But I couldn’t be a Master and be me at the same time.”

  She says the words — couldn’t be a Master and be me — as if they’re poisonous, but I can think of worse things. Worse words. Words like swallowed by the sea. Words like gone and dead.

  “Besides,” she continues, “I wanted to make shimmer, too. Like you. Like the turnaway girls. So I taught myself how. The First Mother said —”

  “Why would you care what the First Mother said?” I say, surprised by my own words.

  This makes Linna close her mouth.

  I unwind the bandage from my thumb, show her the raw flesh.

  She hovers her hand over it, doesn’t touch. “What happened?” she whispers.

  “Mother Nine. With a wooden clamp.” I picture the First Mother’s eyes flickering, lit by lanterns in the whisper-room. “Mother Nine, the First Mother — they’re all the same.”

  “But the First Mother didn’t — she never would’ve —”

  Hearing Linna
defend the First Mother when she never had to sit under her gaze in the whisper-room fills my throat with fire. “Never would’ve what?” I tie the bandage around my thumb again.

  “She’d never have hurt someone,” says Linna. “The First Mother wrote that anyone could make shimmer. She believed in equality, freedom —”

  The words rattle at stone. Blightsend is folding in on me. Its leaning houses turn into waves that tower and twist and shatter and dip.

  I cover my head with my hands.

  “Are you all right?” says Linna. “You look ill.”

  There’s stone all around me like the rising dead, spinning and circling, and a sky that’s laughing with a star-scattered tongue. The sea is a twisting pit of severed wings. Of course I’m ill.

  I turn from her, and the wind protests, pulling at my dress and the quilt at my shoulders, spinning gold pins from my hair. The wind’s been kneading at my bun since I left the cloister, and now half-plaited curls dance at my back.

  I run, trying not to think about how, for the first time ever, I feel as though I have met someone whose soul-shape matches mine. A heart-gale batters my insides. I’ll probably never see her again. I shouldn’t. I’ve already broken so many rules. The wind hisses at my ankles.

  “Wait,” says Linna. “Wait.”

  But I don’t look back.

  Morning fills my sleeping-room with brilliant shrieks of light. I watch the walls, hoping there’s something I didn’t see before — a piece that makes all the pictures fit together. But the twisting patterns only twist more, muddling my vision. I blink until my eyes clear.

  And then I hear the stone-flute.

  I follow the sound and find Bly in a dust-coated room.

  The ceilings and walls are covered in dirt-edged gold — gold that has been carved with images. Gardens flooded with jagged waves, books with keys dangling from their pages, girls with flaming lungs.

  Hanging on the gold-carved walls are rectangles of polished stone with portraits carved into them.

  Cold settles at my neck like a scarf.