The Turnaway Girls

by Hayley Chewins

  They remind me of the portraits of the Mothers in the whisper-room. But these show men and boys holding stone-flutes, women with their hands in their laps, their dresses swallowing them in folds of white silk the way water swirls about rocks. There’s even a portrait of the Sea-Singer. I recognize her — painted black eyes filled with fight. Her belly is round as a full moon. Beside her, a tiny Childer-Queen stands, her hair adorned with seaflowers. The portrait must have been carved shortly before the Sea-Singer sang in the Garden of All Silences.

  I turn to Bly.

  He’s sitting on a scuff-cracked chair, playing a rambling, quick-footed song. He hasn’t looked up since I walked in. It’s as though the music is holding its hands over his eyes.

  I sit down on a flickermoth-eaten cushion. A filigree of dust blooms around me and settles again before Bly flicks his eyes up to meet mine.

  “Oh,” he says, embarrassed. “I didn’t see you.” He lowers his stone-flute.

  I clear my throat. “Good morning, Prince Harpermall.”

  “I have many names, but that one I hate the most,” says Bly. “I see you found the clothes I left out for you.”

  “Yes,” I say, feeling as though all the carved faces on the walls have turned their eyes toward me at the same time. I’m wearing a shirt that is softer than my own scrubbed skin. It buttons at the back instead of the front, and it took me forever to bend into it. Then there are trousers and a thick silk jacket with cuffs that ripple like the crests of waves.

  It’s strange to be wearing trousers and a jacket. Even stranger to be wearing pale silks. But it’s a comfort, too. I’m dressed like Bly — though my clothes have swirls of embroidery on them, and his are plain as clouded heaven. I want to feel that this is a kinship, but Mother Nine’s voice is in my head, pounding like a fist against a door, saying that it’s only Bly’s way of reminding me that I’m different from the othergirls.

  That he knows I sing.

  I won’t, I won’t. I won’t lift my voice. Ever. I will hide my desire for music like a cloisterwing sitting on her egg.

  There’s a bowl of tongue-fruit at Bly’s feet. I reach for one, unthinking — I hate tongue-fruit, but I’m starving — when Bly lifts a hand.

  “Wait,” he says, and Linna’s voice fills my mind: Wait, wait, wait. I can’t imagine her in a cloister. I picture her dancing under stars. I picture me dancing with her — singing, too. Making a glow in night air. Feeling like a tree among trees.

  “There’s a tradition,” says Bly.

  Linna evaporates.

  “A tradition?”

  Bly places his stone-flute in an open case and stands. I can’t help but stare at the instrument. It’s carved out of hushingstone and etched with the wings of flying birds, its keys a line of curling waves. I think of Linna’s stone-flute. I should have picked it up. Should have taken it with me. But music doesn’t belong to me. Never has. Never will.

  Bly takes a tongue-fruit from the bowl. He tears it in half. The red juice drips on the floor, mixing with dust. He squeezes some into his palm, motions that he’d like to do the same for me.

  I hold out my hand — the one without the bandage. I do not want to think of blood, but the juice runs along creases, making a crooked M in my palm as though someone’s sliced the skin, and then I am standing on Teeth Row again, and Mother Nine is coming with her wooden clamp —

  “A licked palm is a token of surrender,” says Bly. His words draw me back into the room of faces. “I will keep no secrets from you as long as you don’t keep any from me.” He licks his own palm, nods at me to do the same.

  I can’t promise that. Even if he’s already heard me sing.

  But I lower my eyes and suck the juice off my skin. My palm tastes of salt.

  Bly hands me both halves of the tongue-fruit, then sits again and lifts his stone-flute carefully from its bed. He begins to play. I’ve always thought music is what it sounds like to ask the world a question. But Bly’s music sounds more like a telling — like he’s telling a story about all that he’s lost.

  The eyes of Blightsend’s kings and queens prickle my cheeks.

  I turn to glance at the Sea-Singer again. I whisper a prayer to her. A short prayer. One word: “Please.”

  A clatter. I turn to Bly. He’s let his stone-flute fall to the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, picking up the instrument.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “I told you I wouldn’t keep secrets,” he says. “Delphernia?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something I want to show you.”

  It’s impossible for me to think of the ocean as anything but alive. It shifts under rain like the back of a beast. The beach is rocky, laden with splinters of black hushingstone. Boulders that look like giants with bent necks line the shore.

  As we step onto the sloped fall of stone, something in me spirals and cracks. The sky wears its clouds like a frowning brow. The ocean spits. I grasp at air.

  I do not know how anyone ever gets used to the width of the sky.

  “It’s all right,” says Bly, locking his elbow with mine the way he did on the day we met. Yesterday — that was yesterday.

  I can’t move. All I want to do is stand very still, right here, holding on to Bly and not going anywhere — ever.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask.

  “It’s not too far,” he says, pointing.

  My eyes follow to where the strip of beach tapers to meet a steep cliff. Caves howl there like open mouths. It’ll be lightless and damp inside one of them, but at least I’ll have a roof over my head. I’ll be hidden from the sky. I’ll be hidden from the sea.

  “All right,” I say. “Slowly.”

  “Slowly,” Bly echoes.

  The caves are even more horrid up close, smelling of salt and rotten seaflowers. Bly slips his arm out from under mine and steps inside the largest one. In moments, he’s gone — swallowed.

  I follow him, relieved to be in shadow.

  A few times I skid on slick rock, glad to be wearing boots of stone and silk instead of slippers — even if they press against my blisters as if Mother Nine has instructed them to. I keep on, and then, just when I think I can’t forge forward any longer, Bly reaches back and takes my hand.

  He walks through dark the way birds fly through air.

  Up ahead, a beaming light flits and crimps. Bly strikes a slice of hushingstone against the cave’s wall and uses it to breathe the lamps — little gold chambers nailed into place and filled with flaming stone — into flickering. And that’s when I see the faces — hundreds of them. Stone sculptures have been carved out of the cave’s walls. Boys with wings for hands and clawed beasts with fishes’ scales. Birds, too — small ones, their wings spread out, stilled in graceful motion. I quiver as we walk, imagining mouths opening to swallow me, taloned hands reaching to scratch at skin. We’re getting closer to the glow in the distance, but I still can’t see what it is.

  “What’s that light?” I say. My heart trips ahead of me.

  Bly doesn’t answer for a long while. He says “You’ll see” only when I do see — when I’m right up close to the light and I know that it’s one of the golden birds I made in the cloister.

  Its wings beat against the curve of glass.

  Glass — so that there’s no gap to squeeze through.

  So that it can’t escape.

  It’s trapped inside a round enclosure that sits on twisted stone legs.

  My chest tightens. I wanted to hide from the sky, but suddenly the cave seems smaller and smaller. As small as a globe of glass that could keep even a light-winged bird from flying.

  Bly caught the bird after I sang it alive. Bly has proof of me breaking the law.

  The rush of the sea fills my ears. I can feel the beating of the little bird’s wings as though they’re beneath my skin. Rage flares in my throat. It’s my bird — mine. I don’t want a part of me caged. But it’s something else, too. It’s a mark of guilt.<
br />
  My death, wearing feathers.

  Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

  I want to run. But I cannot run. So I make my feet into liars. I promised I wouldn’t hide anything, but I hide myself. I let my eyes go still and blank. I have seen enough turnaway faces to know how to look as though I’m disappearing.

  Bly steps up to the glass enclosure and holds his palm against it. The bird shivers its panicked wings. I fold my tongue in my mouth. Fear forms a seam between my lips. The Prince seems to be waiting.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say, once I’m sure I can speak without breathlessness.

  My voice doesn’t sound like me at all. It sounds like the voice of a girl made of stone — as though I am one of Bly’s sculptures. Light dips, surges again, and the sculptures look as though they are moving — crawling straight out of the walls. I look away, focus on the bird. I step closer to the glass. The little thing tilts its head at me — as though it remembers. My eyes fill with tears.

  Bly sits down on a mound of rock. I notice that he has not brought his stone-flute with him. Relief seeps through my kneecaps. He won’t ask me to make shimmer — not here. Not yet.

  “You know,” says Bly, “everyone thinks that Blightman Harpermall founded this place as a haven for musicians. But that’s not true. At least it’s not the whole truth. Blightsend was started for gold. The royal family is rich because of the turnaway girls — and all because Blightman Harpermall needed to prove something to the home that would not have him.”

  I do not like the way he is speaking. As though I am not one of the turnaway girls. As if the Childer-Queen is not his sister. “We each have our place,” I say, stroking the glass with the tips of my fingers. “And it does not bother a turnaway girl to do her work.” I try not to cringe. I sound so much like Mother Nine.

  I flatten a hand against the glass. The golden bird’s wings are warm behind it. It struggles, bumping at the scratched surface. But it can’t get free. Bly stares at its frantic wings. I can’t decide whether he looks like he wants to nail it down or set it free.

  “There is not enough time in the world for birds,” he says. “The First Mother said that. I think she meant that no matter how much time we have, we will never truly understand them.”

  “But she made them,” I say, forgetting I’m supposed to be turnaway-like. “She must have understood them.”

  “She understood what it was to be caged.”

  I pull my hand away from the glass and turn to look at him.

  “You know the story, Delphernia.”

  “What story?”

  “Blightman Harpermall and Pahliah Paradi,” says Bly. When he sees the blank look on my face, he continues. “The First King and the First Mother. They ran away together. From a land where art was hated — where creativity was seen as evil. He was a musician. A flautist. She was a sculptor. They found this island after eight hundred days at sea. They ate tongue-fruit and filled their mouths with rain. Pahliah carved Blightman a flute out of hushingstone, since his first one had been destroyed when they fled their home. She asked him to play for her. That’s when she realized she could turn his music into gold — real gold — by letting it run through her bones, pulling it out of air and kneading it. As soon as Blightman saw this, he started building the cloister. He told her he was building a place for them to live. And when it was done, he locked her inside it. He left the island, traveled the outerworlds to find talented musicians — Masters. And girls for the First Mother to train. The first turnaway girls. He promised them all the gold they could possibly imagine. He brought them back with him and he set his ship on fire. And that’s how Blightsend began.”

  We didn’t learn about this in Histories. Mother Nine is stingy with her secrets, after all.

  “It’s time to go,” says Bly.

  There’s an edge to his voice — a rasp like metal against stone. This has been a test. He wanted to see if I would tell him the truth about the bird. And I have failed.

  “But we’ve only been here a little while,” I say.

  I don’t want to leave the bird. It is a part of me. And I want to know more about Blightsend. I want to know about everything.

  “But you’ll be late,” says Bly. “You’ll be late. Late, late.”

  The frustration is gone from his throat now. All I hear is tiredness, as though he wants to sleep for three hundred years instead of being in a cave with me. And my lies. And tales of Blightsend’s first hateful king.

  I turn my head. “Late for what?” I say.

  “To meet the Childer-Queen.” He looks at the ground and then back at me. “And so you’re forewarned — her eyes see all.”

  I hold a hand to the golden bird’s glass cage one last time. “That doesn’t bother me,” I say. “I don’t have anything to hide.” The bird presses its light to my palm. Heat runs through me.

  “Even the dead have secrets,” says Bly, blowing out the lamps as he walks.

  The Childer-Queen is seated on a throne at the edge of a cliff, the pale sea rushing behind her like a veil. Her back is straight. Her nails are sharp. A jagged little crown sits on her head. Her eyes are a bright golden brown, but I imagine her skin would be cold to the touch. She looks a little like the Sea-Singer, only sharper, as though her mother made her from glass.

  Sorrowhall looms at her side, and the Garden of All Silences is like a pool of molten gold behind us. The sky is clear as an eye.

  We’re all here, at the cliffs, to meet her. Me and the sixteen othergirls. And Bly, who stands beside me as if he’s trying to shield me from an approaching storm — a storm only he can see coming. His face is so close to mine that I can feel his jaw clenching and unclenching against my cheek.

  I watch the Childer-Queen.

  “Why’s she called the Childer-Queen?” I whisper, unable to tear my eyes from her angled face.

  “Well, she’s a child,” says Bly. “And she’s queen.” He shrugs. “Her fourteenth birthday has only just passed.”

  “And why’s she sitting so close to the cliff?” I’m shivering, thinking of it. The steep fall. The rocks below.

  “It’s a ritual Mr. Crowwith devised. The Ninth King used to do it, too. It’s supposed to show the monarch as blameless — so blameless, the sea wouldn’t even think of stealing them.”

  “But what about — even sleepers —?”

  “Must be watchful, yes.” Bly shifts away, and I meet his eyes. “That’s because no one’s ever blameless in their sleep. Sleep is when secrets stir.”

  I look down at my hands, struggle for a word to change the tide of conversation. “Mother Nine called her strong,” I suggest.

  Bly smirks. “She’s determined to continue our father’s legacy of laws — that’s the truth. To make sure all girls stay musicless. If I were you, I’d keep my distance and stay invisible.”

  My mouth is dry, as though it’s been stuffed with fallen leaves. He knows that it was me who sang. He does, he does, he does. But he isn’t telling. He must want something from me.

  I hope it’s something I can give.

  I hope it isn’t shimmer.

  “Are you close to her?” I ask, trying to stop my thoughts from growing a garden of despair in my chest.

  “We’ve been separated since I was born. I live in the Old Sorrows — the eastern wing of Sorrowhall — and she was raised in the western wing, the New Sorrows, under the guidance of Mr. Crowwith. I was passed from nurse to nurse, left to my own education in the Sea-Singer’s library, while the Childer was educated by the Custodian.” He sighs. “My tongue might be slippery, but the Childer-Queen and the Custodian — their tongues have hooks.”

  “Hooks?”

  Bly lowers his voice. “Mr. Crowwith was born without music. Everywhere he went, silence followed him like an enveloping shadow. He could never be a Master, so he used his silence to gain power — he started spying. And he found that if he listened close enough, everyone had a secret. Even the King’s closest advisers
. One by one, he turned the King against all of them. Until he was alone. The position of Custodian didn’t even exist until Mr. Crowwith came about. He invented it, though now he acts like the post has never not been a part of Blightsend’s Histories. And he is always speaking into the Childer-Queen’s ear.”

  “He turned her against you.”

  “He didn’t even give us a chance to be brother and sister. He’s raised her on his ideas, and I don’t think she knows any different. He taught her to hate me. And my mother. He taught everyone to hate my mother.”

  Bly doesn’t belong here, either. Like Linna. Like me.

  I stare at the Childer-Queen again. She’s beautiful — in the way of stone knives with gold-carved hilts. When she speaks, it’s difficult for me not to imagine her teeth as gleaming needles.

  “Turnaway girls,” she says, opening her arms, “welcome to the Festival of Kisses. It is customary for each released turnaway girl to kiss her monarch’s hand. It’s the grace of Lull Harpermall that has freed you, after all.”

  I turn back to Bly, but he’s vanished.

  The sea whistles, as if to remind me of its presence. The ground sinks and lifts under my feet. Without Bly to hold on to, I lean to the right, topple, crouch on the ground. My thumb throbs.

  Then I remember Bly’s words. If I can’t grasp his arm, I can hold on to them. I try to recall the ones he spoke in the cave. Blightsend was started for gold. The royal family is rich because of the turnaway girls. Without us, this great city would crumble and fall into the sea.

  “Without us,” I whisper. “Without us.” I repeat the phrase until my shins have stopped wobbling. Until I can stand again.

  I’m beginning to imagine Blightsend’s descent — the slow-cracking stone, the rushing waves, the statue of Rullun Harpermall sinking like an old relic to the ocean floor — when Mr. Crowwith appears, his silence louder than a slammed door. He stands before the Childer-Queen, obscuring her light.

  “Mr. Crowwith,” says the Childer-Queen, shifting on her throne. “Good afternoon. We were about to begin with the kisses.”

  He moves to her side.