“What’s that?”
Linna laughs at my gaping mouth. “First rule of hiding — camp out under your enemy’s nose.” She slips into the hole, her feet pattering down a ladder. A few steps and she’s gone.
I stare in, my toes at the edge.
It looks like a trap — a place I can’t crawl out of on my own. But Linna says my name, and I know I will follow her. Because no one’s ever said my name like that. As though it means something terrifying in an ancient language. As though it holds courage in it the way a fruit holds seeds.
“Throw the tongue-fruit down!” she calls.
I do. I hear her catch the cluster in her arms.
“It’ll close on its own soon,” she says. “It’s now or, um, not now.” A laugh bubbles up.
I climb down, my shaking fingers gripping gold, my right hand drumming with an almost musical pain.
“Watch out,” calls Linna in the kind of shout-whisper that only she can accomplish.
The statue scrapes on its track, clanking over the hole again, and darkness floods in.
I climb down, down, down.
A long way away, a song echoes. I feel like I’m in the shimmer-room again. I started behind stone and here I am — in a place without the sky.
Linna told me she lives in a cloister, but this — the walled-in damp. It’s as if I never left. I smell salt and pause, thinking for a moment that the sea has found this place — that it’s dripping its cold into the underground tunnel. When I listen closely, though, there’s no thrash or spray.
But there is music.
It’s a voice. And it’s singing a slow, sad song. A song that is a circle, like the cloisterwings’ singing. Coming back to the beginning. Over and over and over.
My feet touch the ground. I feel for Linna’s arm. “What is this place?” I whisper. “And who is that singing?”
“Singing?” Linna laughs. “That’s not singing. It’s just the way the wind moves down here — through all the cracks they didn’t close up when they built this place. We’re alone. I promise.”
“How do you know?” I whisper. I feel as though someone’s listening to us. Listening to me.
“Because these tunnels — they’re a secret the Ninth King never revealed.”
“Oh, but he told you about it?” My voice is slick with disbelieving.
“If you must know, my parents purchased the Ninth King’s journals at auction after his death. They were artifacts, never touched. Kept behind glass. No one ever read them, out of respect —”
“Wait. You read the Ninth King’s journals?”
“Every single one.”
The crying voice — what Linna calls the wind — fills my bones. “Weren’t you afraid you’d get caught?” I say.
“Of course I was,” says Linna, pulling me through the thicket of dark. “But that’s never stopped me.”
We run. We run.
The singing climbs to a crescendo, then stops.
“See?” says Linna. “It’s the wind — that’s all. No one ever comes down here.”
She leads me to a small room filled with crooked-lit hushingstone. We stand in the doorway, looking in. Potted tongue-fruit trees that have long since died line the walls, their dry, fruitless branches drooping. The pots are made of patterned gold, and the floors and walls and ceilings are stone, just like in the cloister.
“Wait out here,” says Linna. “I’ll introduce you after they’ve eaten. They can be a little cranky before they’ve had their dinner.”
They. But Linna said this was a cloister all her own.
Linna hops over hushingstone, rustling dead-bristle branches, the tongue-fruit tucked under one arm. “I’m here!” she calls. “I brought food!”
I hear a shuffling sound and then a squawk — the flapping of wings. Two shadowy shapes launch at Linna, landing on her free arm. She drops the tongue-fruit cluster onto the ground, then takes a fried seaflower out of her bulging pocket and holds her palm flat. The shadows perched on her arm peck at the salted petals.
Birds.
Not just birds, but —
“Cloisterwings!” I say, stepping inside, forgetting Linna said to wait.
The cloisterwings burst into flight. I fall to my knees. I hold out a hand, and one of them twists toward me, flaps its wings to land on my wrist. Linna moves to kneel beside me, tearing the tongue-fruit in half. The cloisterwings seem to prefer the seaflowers, though.
“Hey, save some for me,” she says, taking a bite of a crispy petal.
A pang of sadness strikes my heart. And jealousy. They’re mine, the cloisterwings. But these birds don’t even know me.
Linna points from bird to bird. “This is Mimm,” she says, “and Trick.”
“Are they girls or boys?”
“Both girls.”
“You named them?”
Linna nods.
“Mimm,” I say. “Trick.”
The cloisterwings stop eating and bend their necks to look at me.
“They know their names,” I say.
I never thought to give the cloisterwings names. I knew their eyes. Knew their feathers and cackles. The sounds of their beating hearts as I held them against my cheeks.
“Of course,” says Linna. “They’re the most intelligent birds ever to exist — at least that’s what the First Mother wrote. I’ll admit she’s likely to have been biased.”
“Because she made them,” I say, stroking Mimm’s back. “But how did these two end up here?” I pick up a seaflower petal and feed it to Trick. “Cloisterwings never leave the cloister.”
“The Sea-Singer asked for them,” says Linna. “That’s what the Ninth King’s journals said.”
She patters her fingers along the back of Mimm’s neck. She looks around the room, then back at me, her eyes wild with secrets. “This place,” she says. “The Ninth King called it Hiddenhall. He built it for the Sea-Singer. Because she didn’t want to marry him. So he made this secret palace for her, showed it to her one night when the whole city was asleep. And she loved it, loved that it was secret, that she could sing down here without anyone knowing, but there was one other thing she wanted — more than gold and pale silks — and that was a cloisterwing. She told him if he fetched one for her, she would marry him. So he got her two. He asked Mother Nine, and she let them out. But he had to keep them down here so that no one knew.”
“Who’s been feeding them?”
“I don’t know. But they seemed well-fed when I found them.” She nods at the trees. “Maybe they’ve been eating dry tongue-fruit leaves.”
“Strange. So you got this story from the journals?”
“It’s not a story. It’s the truth. He never thought anyone would be disrespectful enough to read his private writings.” A laugh claps out of her mouth. “Kings,” she says. “Honestly.”
I look at Mimm and Trick, their claws clicking on the ground, their feathers glossy as sap. Claws that touched the Sea-Singer’s skin. Feathers that knew the feel of her fingertips. These cloisterwings are the closest I have ever been to her — closer, even, than when I brushed my fingertips against her stone-etched curls. I scoot along the ground, edging nearer to them.
“I wonder if they remember the cloister,” I say, thinking of the closed-out sky, the damp stone, Mother Nine’s hammer-clang steps.
Linna looks at my bandaged hand. “I hope they don’t,” she says.
I bite my lip, but tears run down my cheeks in itchy streaks.
“Delphernia, I’m sorry. I don’t check my tongue before I use it —”
“No,” I say. “I was — remembering.”
Linna puts her arms around me. I can feel the starry brightness of her hair, wet against my neck.
“A secret for a secret?” I say.
She sits beside me, a smile flashes, and then her face is serious as sea. “A secret for a secret,” she says, wiping my tears away with her thumbs.
I look at the cloisterwings. “I sang to them,” I say. “When everyo
ne else was asleep.” Speaking the words aloud is like loosing a round of hushingstone from my throat.
Linna frowns, pulls back as if she wants to see my face more clearly. “Really?” she asks.
I swallow, heat rushing from the tips of my toes to the lobes of my ears. But still I open my mouth. “Do you want to hear?” I say.
She nods — one small dip of the chin.
My voice quivers at the base of my throat — a croaking whistle. Linna squeezes closer to me. Her glittering eyes remind me of the First Mother’s, and I have to look away. I look at the cloisterwings instead.
Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.
But the sea can’t get to me. I am hidden from the sky. All I have here is dark and wings and a girl who says my name like it’s a recipe for magic.
I close my eyes.
My voice leaps off my tongue and into the room — a squelchy, spit-shaped note, wavering like a seaflower in a guttering breeze. I let my song lope and roam, upward and downward, not knowing the next step until I get there. This is the only kind of singing I have ever done. It’s not as though anyone’s ever taught me how to sing songs that have a beginning, a middle, an end.
Mother Nine’s voice finds me, says I should have stayed in the hollow tree if I wanted to sing. But I can also hear the Sea-Singer. She’s saying, Don’t be silent. She’s saying, Sing. Her cloisterwings are here, after all, like messages from a locked-away past.
I keep singing. I open my eyes and pull strands of light from the air — each note with its own beating heart. I press the light between my palms. Little golden birds spin into being, brushing my ears with their wings. Linna watches them, eyes wide, mouth open. She holds a hand up, and they nuzzle at her palm.
“Mothers of All,” says Linna. “How do you do that?”
Mimm and Trick circle my head.
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
Then the little golden birds gather as one and fly out of the room, searching for the sky, just as they did in the cloister.
“Where are they going?” asks Linna.
“They did the same thing before — flying away. They can press through the tiniest gaps —”
Linna takes my left hand and squeezes. “Look,” she says, pointing at Mimm and Trick. “I’ve never seen them do that before. Flying like that — those slow circles. It’s like they’re dreaming with their wings.”
I swallow, looking up, nodding. “That’s exactly, exactly what it’s like,” I say.
“But the golden birds — they’re not shimmer,” says Linna. Her eyes are two quizzing moons.
“I can’t make shimmer.” Another secret, spat onto the ground.
“They haven’t asked you to make any? At Sorrowhall? The Prince?”
“The Prince doesn’t seem interested in shimmer.”
Linna folds her arms. “So he is as strange as people say.”
I shrug.
I’m about to tell her that she owes me another secret, since I’ve already told her two, when she throws a palm over my mouth and pulls me to standing, pushes me against the wall. The cloisterwings swoop at my neck, their beaks clicking.
And then I hear it.
Footsteps patter like the beginnings of a stuttering rain.
Linna drops her hand from my lips, and I mouth silent words: “Who’s there?”
But Linna only shakes her head. I struggle for air as though someone’s grabbed my throat, as though I can already feel the Childer-Queen’s fingers crunching the bones in my wrist. All my hurting places throb. My thumb, my ear, my cheek —
The footsteps come closer, closer, closer — we wait several sap-stretched minutes before they stop. I hear them again, but this time they’re getting softer and softer.
Then they’re gone.
And then there’s silence.
Silence that could strip the sea of salt.
I’m eating tongue-fruit under the steady watch of stone eyes, sitting on the floor in the room of faces.
The portraits seem to know that I have questions.
But the Sea-Singer’s stare reminds me that it takes a questioning girl to do difficult things. And I can still remember the feeling of singing for someone — for Linna, Linna, Linna. Seeing her eyes light up at the sight of golden birds.
My cheeks ache. I realize I’m smiling. Even the dust, drifting like the tiniest stars imaginable, looks beautiful to me.
Until I hear the ringing.
It’s so loud, it makes the portraits hum against the walls.
And then Bly appears, leaving wet footprints that tell me he’s been at the cave again.
“It’s the Bell of Secrets,” he says. “They ring it when rulers tell hidden truths.”
Hidden truths. Hiddenhall.
Another rumble sounds through stone.
“They ring it a few times in the New Sorrows, then carry it out to the Featherrut —”
But I don’t hear the rest of his words. My thumb smarts. I drop the bowl of tongue-fruit. It lands with a crack on the floor. Dust billows, coats my lips. I run out of the room.
“Wait,” calls Bly. “Running feet are never wise —”
But I cannot answer and I cannot wait. My eyes would show my guilt. Yesterday, there were footsteps in Hiddenhall, and now the Childer-Queen is going to speak a secret.
I know, I know, I know.
She heard me singing.
Everyone has gathered around the Featherrut to hear the Childer-Queen’s announcement.
Wives check their reflections in palmfuls of smoothed gold. Soapstresses follow, some of them holding the hands of small children. Masters laugh, opening their mouths wide enough to take the sun on their tongues. Turnaway girls waft at their sides. Even men who are not Masters have come, their hands calloused, their feet naked. They are the ones who turn shimmer into trays and trinkets, the ones who catch the eels that Mr. Crowwith sends through the skydoor. They are the ones with no musical talent. The ones followed by silence. The ones Blightsenders do not see. The invisibles. I see them. Maybe because my feet were also once cold. Maybe because I know what it is like to see and not be seen.
But I can’t think of them now — men and boys who know salt and dirt and metal far better than I. Because the sea is coming for me.
I push past waists and jutting hips, hard backs and soft bellies, to get a clearer view. An old Master spills his drink — tongue-fruit juice, red and sticky — on my shoulder. He says, “Excuse me, miss,” before he sees I’m a turnaway girl, his eyes falling on my pierced ear, his face contorting into a look of disgust. “Get out of the way,” he grunts. I push on until I can see into the Featherrut through a clash of elbows, staying hidden.
Hiddenhall.
Don’t tell.
Mr. Crowwith waits in the middle of the sunken feather shape, a large golden bell at his side. He clangs a hammer against its shining patterns, and the sound rings out again. It’s a beautiful sound, but Mr. Crowwith looks as though he’s biting down on a knife.
The Childer-Queen appears then, walking past the statue of Rullun Harpermall and stepping down the three stairs that lead into the Featherrut. Her gold shoes tread the ground so quietly that she seems to be floating. The First Mother would be proud. She makes her way toward Mr. Crowwith. The people of Blightsend sigh for her, reaching out to brush her sleeves, which are sewn with iridescent fish scales. Her dress is the color of sea foam. The veil over her face is stiff as a cage.
When she reaches his side, Mr. Crowwith rings the bell again, wincing.
“Today,” says the Childer-Queen, “is the Festival of Secrets. This evening, you will send confessions out to sea. But the morning is set aside for my hidden truth.”
The Festival of Secrets.
Sounds like a good day for a singing girl to die.
“The Festival of the Sea-Singer always gives me nightmares,” the Childer-Queen continues. “Last night, I crept out of bed without anyone knowing.” All the Masters cheer, lifting their hands a
nd clapping. The bells on their sleeves chime viciously. Wives and soapstresses whisper and nod their approval. Turnaway girls are silent. Everyone thinks the secret is over.
But the Childer-Queen keeps talking. “The night had cleared of clouds. I wanted to see the stars.”
Whoops and bell-sounds dwindle.
“As I was walking,” she says, “I heard a magnificent voice, singing. It seemed to rise from nowhere. From below the ground.”
Below the ground.
Hiddenhall.
And still I wait for the Childer-Queen to tell her secret. Still I wait for her to declare my death.
Mr. Crowwith rubs his jaw as though he has a toothache.
“And the strangest thing occurred to me,” continues the Childer-Queen. “The voice. It sounded. It sounded like the —”
But the Childer-Queen doesn’t get to finish her sentence. Because Mr. Crowwith takes her hand, squeezing her fingers hard enough for her to cry out. She tries to pull away, but he bends to whisper in her ear. He grabs her arm and shoves her away from the Bell of Secrets, up the steps and out of the Featherrut, through the parting crowd and back toward Sorrowhall. She struggles and struggles, but he pushes her on.
Masters clap uncertainly, their sleeves shimmering with bells. Wives fix their skirts, kissing one another’s cheeks, as if they’re sharing secrets of their own. They clip off on their wooden heels. Soapstresses shuffle. Turnaway girls are led away.
I’m cold inside, like I’ve swallowed a raw eel. But I’m alive, alive. The sea won’t take me today. I trip through the clamor. All I want is to get away from the Featherrut. Away from everything. Away from Blightsend.
But I know that’s as stupid as wishing a caged bird into flight.
No one leaves this place — not princes and not Childer-Queens. Not even birds with gloss-sweeping wings. Let alone a questioning girl with nothing but secrets and fear in her pockets.
I follow the coastal road, trying to ignore the careening sky, the smacking sea, until I see Bly on the far end of the beach. He slips into his cave — the one with the sculptures reaching out of its walls. The one with my bird inside it.
The Turnaway Girls Page 8