The Turnaway Girls

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The Turnaway Girls Page 11

by Hayley Chewins


  “A secret for a secret,” I croak out.

  And then I know, I know, I know.

  I know what I have to do.

  I run hard through Blightsend’s streets, the sun painting stone with a sheen of gold, the cloisterwings’ shadows flanking me. My heart is split down the center, but it pushes me onward, onward, against a threatening wail of wind.

  To the cave. Bly’s cave.

  The streets are narrow and empty, bright as needles, and I can’t rinse my thoughts of Linna’s face. Linna — handing herself over. Trading herself for me. And that voice behind the wall. Sveglia Emm. The name curls its script in my stomach like a prickly vine.

  The only thing I can do is beg for help. Tell Bly about Mr. Crowwith’s plan to rid the island of music. Bly’s an odd boy, but he is the Prince of Blightsend. That must mean something.

  I keep running, running along the beach of hushingstone pebbles, until I get to the screaming mouth in the side of the cliff.

  Linna’s pale eyes and the strange letters of Sveglia’s name push me forward like hurried hands. The cloisterwings fly close at my cheeks.

  I can’t see Bly. The lamps aren’t lit. But I push on until I get to a wall, to the back of the cave, resting my palms against it — then I remember the groan and I push away, stumbling.

  But there’s no movement. No light. The crashing sea beats against the beach, nearing and nearing, come to grab at my wrist.

  Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

  Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

  I’m listening for that sound of hurting. I’m waiting for a monster to burst from stone. I’m scanning the darkness, too, for one little nick of light. But my golden bird is gone. My heart thuds out a mourning, and I clutch at Mimm and Trick, bring them to my chest.

  I sit, my legs folded beneath me. A sob escapes my mouth — a small-squeezed sound.

  And I remember what it was to let my voice unfold in an unseen place, with only cloisterwings to listen.

  The dark wreathes around me, and I fill my mouth with it. And I am the girl in the hollow tree. The girl who makes birds lambent as stars. The girl who doesn’t yet know how hard it is to be free.

  My singing is a legion of glowing ribbons. I press each one between my palms until it becomes a beak, an eye, a feather. My tongue is like melted sap in my mouth. Golden birds dry my tears with their wings. The cloisterwings huddle against me, burrowing into my jacket. I’m home. This is the only home I’ll ever have: these birds, these songs. The air shimmers with speckles.

  And then I hear boots scraping the ground.

  I stand. “Bly?” I call.

  My gold-whorling birds flutter their light over a face — dark eyes, brown skin.

  And then he speaks. “I knew it,” says Bly. “I knew you were the one who made them.”

  The cave billows around me.

  I have broken Blightsend’s most hallowed law in front of its own prince. With no wall between us. No tulle of shadows. He’s seen me. I’ve seen him.

  Faces stare out from the walls. I don’t know why Bly spends time here — making eyes and hands, teeth and claws and hooked beaks. I don’t know why I thought I could ask him for help. The truth is, I can’t trust anyone.

  Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.

  Waves might not have taken the Sea-Singer, but Mr. Crowwith could still persuade the Masters to push me over a cliff.

  A singing turnaway girl.

  Mother Nine will be proven right. Mother Nine has always been right.

  I get to my feet. Bly takes my hand, but I pull out of his grip. I turn my back to him, hiding Mimm and Trick. The birds are still huddled inside my jacket, pinching my skin with their beaks.

  “Wait,” he says. “You made them. I knew you made them.” He looks up at the golden birds, his mouth forming words he won’t say out loud.

  He gives me a chink in time.

  And I take it.

  I whip around and open my jacket. Mimm and Trick burst out, panicked, flying at Bly with their sky-slicing wings. He jumps back, batting them away in a fury.

  I run toward the mouth of the cave, whistling for the cloisterwings to follow me. I trip, grazing one hand on a hulk of rock, soaking my knees in a puddle. I bite my tongue, and that stings, too. I am a pit of pins.

  I stagger to my feet. Golden birds fly over my head, swooping like shooting stars as I run out onto the beach.

  The tide is coming in.

  Water eddies, devouring peaks of rock. Waves lurch and bubble. The cold of the sea frizzles and snaps, splintering the wind, and Bly’s footsteps are pattering behind me. Mimm and Trick squawk nervously, a shield of black feathers at my back.

  There’s nowhere to go, nowhere. The entire beach is swirling with water.

  I wade into the thickening swell until I am wearing a necklace of foam. The cloisterwings caw above my head. The tide whips at my ankles, pulls me off my feet into the roiling of the sea. I think of the cloisterwings’ soaring and move my arms, but I cannot fly under water. The salt burns my eyes, and I am blind to feathers. I push up to taste the sky. A wave crashes over me. The world tips. I fight against the sea’s raging, but it won’t stop ripping at my clothes. For a moment, the water takes me in its hands — gently, gently — and I hang, suspended in the gray murk, opening my eyes, closing them, numb with cold. Little fish flicker around me.

  The Sea-Singer’s voice is in my head. Sing. Don’t be silent. Sing. Don’t be silent. But I can’t sing — not here. I am voiceless.

  The sea smooths my hair with its fingers. Finally, it seems to say.

  Remember that and you’ll keep your lungs from tasting salt. Mother Nine’s words boom in my chest.

  I have a singing throat. I have been swallowed by the sea. Girl meets prophecy.

  I close my eyes. I close my heart. I close up all the drawers in me, shut away all sound and echo. I sink, sink, pulled down by soaked silk boots and drenched sleeves and bones bursting with music.

  But then a rolling surge shoots up, pushing me toward air, lifting me the way the wind lifts a cloisterwing. I gasp at the surface, breathing in deep, hungry breaths, coughing up salt. The water makes a ladder of wave and wind and foam — and then it drops me, pummels me. My knee knocks against a rock, and I grab for it, but my fingers scrape fruitlessly —

  And then I’m yanked out of the tunneling froth onto the spine of a bent-necked boulder. It hurts, but it’s land, and I’m still, and I’m not sinking. My throat is raw, but my lungs are full of air, air, air, and not salt. Not salt. Not salt. Not salt.

  I am alive.

  I breathe as though breathing is all I ever want to do. I’m too tired to run, to fight, to fall again.

  I open my eyes.

  Bly stares down at me, a cloisterwing perched on each of his shoulders.

  Bly has lugged me — limp, salt-soaked, shivering — back into the cave, so deep into its dark that the waves can’t reach us. I’m huddled between two sculptures with outstretched hands, hugging his bell-silent cloak around me. Mimm and Trick chirp from a distance, preening their feathers with hard-curved beaks.

  I’m cold and damp and the sea’s still under my skin — the whole of it, all its sizzle and spray. Rushing, rushing, rushing. I am the whole ocean in one girl.

  But Bly’s soft voice is calling me. “Tell me how you did it,” he says. “If you tell me, I’ll keep your secret.”

  Don’t tell, Delphernia. Never tell.

  “Please,” says Bly.

  His eyes are kind.

  I can’t explain. Not about how I made the birds. It’s not the sort of thing you tell about, anyway — it’s the sort of thing you do. And, for once in my life, I don’t want to sing. I couldn’t. My throat pinches. But I want to save Linna. More than anything else, I want to save Linna. And to do that, I need Bly’s help. Singing’s the only way to get it.

  A secret for a secret.

  I still the sea in me and fill
my lungs with courage. I shiver-breathe, shiver-blink. Everything in me is a clatter of coins.

  I picture the Sea-Singer’s face — eyes steady in the cloister’s carving, in the looming portrait in the Old Sorrows, in the twisted passages of Hiddenhall. She’s everywhere. I picture her surrounded by the deathly glister of golden trees in the Garden of All Silences, singing out as though she were alone. That’s it — to sing, I need to pretend I am alone.

  I close my eyes, imagine that Blightsend is gone.

  I open my mouth.

  My voice comes out as a thin squeak, pressed against the roof of my mouth, as though it doesn’t want to be heard. I push at it, poke it, prod, but it won’t move. Won’t leave the sanctuary of my chest.

  Bly doesn’t seem to mind. He sits very still. He listens.

  At last, I get a note out — a note that could make something. Full and wing-full. I loop it about, up and down. I smooth its edges against my tongue until it’s whole and round — a glow-made globe. But when I open my eyes, there’s nothing there — no light-strands. Only Bly’s lick of hushingstone flame. Mimm and Trick look at me expectantly.

  “It’s not working,” I say.

  “Those who are scared cannot sing,” says Bly. “That’s from An Introduction to Voice, by —”

  “Bly,” I say, “I don’t need you to explain singing to me.”

  I have to grind my teeth to stop from hitting him in the face. I’ve only ever sung when scared — and he could never understand that. Neither could the Master who wrote An Introduction to Voice.

  Bly sits back. “You’re right,” he says. “I apologize.”

  He’s waiting for a miracle. But I am not a miracle-maker. I’m not a maker of anything. I am a worthless creature. A turnaway girl who cannot make shimmer. Mudworms do not envy me. I have riots in my heart each morning.

  I try again. Thank the Mothers, stubbornness is something I do not lack. Bly’s words filled me with raging, but he’s right. I need to calm my heart to be able to sing, just as I would do in the cloister when I’d settle into the hollow tree’s belly and forget Mother Nine existed, become a part of all the noises around me.

  I picture the cave rolling like a cloisterwing egg into the waves. I picture it plummeting right down to the sea’s bed. I picture me inside it. Right at the center of it, where a new chick would be.

  I’ve visited the sea now. We’ve become acquainted. I walked into it and it pushed me out. It doesn’t want to snake about my ankles, doesn’t want to snatch me while I’m sleeping. All it wants is to sit below my skin like a pulse, rush my greedy bones with salt. The Sea-Singer was thrown to the sea by the Custodian. The sea didn’t steal her away. And it won’t steal me.

  I uncoil from time’s ticking. And then I sing again. I burrow into the notes.

  I am closed inside sound’s own palm when Bly shakes me back to livingness.

  Light-strands glimmer above my head. I pull them down, press them between my palms. And then there are wings all around us, feathery ovals of lifting luster. They fill the air. They drift as though loosed on the wind. They swoop toward the mouth of the cave and disappear.

  I keep singing.

  Birds and more birds shudder into living, burnishing the cave with their gold, spinning toward freedom. I run tiny pieces of stone through my fingers, digging while Bly watches the golden birds dip and arc. They brush against his cheeks, tickling his ears, pecking at his hair. He leans forward and lets them perch on his fingers.

  Part of me is a banged hinge and part of me is an open window. The fearing’s there — of course it’s there — but there is something else. A knowing.

  Bly has seen the most hidden me.

  And he has smiled because of it.

  Silence.

  The cave expands like a yawn as the golden birds wing their way toward the sea.

  “Thank you,” says Bly. “Thank you, thank you.” He looks as if he’s seen the world’s last day and the end is lined with trees.

  The cave takes us in its arms. Mimm and Trick settle among sea-beaten scraps of rock.

  No one’s ever thanked me for singing — no one.

  “Delphernia,” says Bly, “I need your help.”

  I remember the groan, the eye, the monster. But now’s not the time for fearing.

  “And I need yours,” I say, meeting his eyes.

  “With what?” asks Bly, tilting his head like a bird.

  “A secret for a secret,” I whisper.

  He nods, standing. He dusts his knees and hands.

  And then he steps into the dreading dark.

  I follow Bly even deeper into the quiet of the cave. The dark settles around us like sheltering wings.Mimm and Trick flutter at my elbows.

  “The golden birds,” says Bly. “I caught one when you sang in the cloister —”

  “I knew that was you.”

  He strikes a stick of hushingstone and our eyes meet. “Of course it was,” he says.

  My breath curdles in my throat.

  “It doesn’t interest me to turn you in. It never did. I only needed the birds.”

  “Needed them?”

  “It happened by chance. I had almost given up hope, and then —” He runs his thumb along the inside of his cuff. “I’ve always loved to sit on the rocks and play my stone-flute. The rocks that lead from Blightsend to the cloister’s own island. I’ve always loved to play to the sea. I never believed the waves took her —”

  “The Sea-Singer.”

  He nods. “That night I went closer to the cloister. Closer than I’d ever been. I crossed the bridge of rocks. I played beside the wall. I saw the birds, your eye. And I knew I had to bring you to Sorrowhall.”

  “Even though I can’t —?”

  “I don’t care if you can’t make shimmer.”

  “You don’t? But —” All my life, Mother Nine has taught me that I am broken because I can’t make shimmer. Broken in a way that can never be mended.

  “I don’t,” says Bly.

  “Why do you need the birds?” I say. “What do you do with them?” I picture the giant eye carved into the cave’s wall. My skin crawls with flickermoth feet.

  Bly pauses as though he’s gathering all the strands of the story in his hands. “The birds you make,” he says, “they’re not really birds. They’re the essence of a bird before it’s born in flesh. The part of a bird that doesn’t die, ever, even if it’s shot down or starves.”

  I’m sprouting feathers, hearing those words. I’m feeling the wind bristling them. I can make the souls of birds. My own soul flits and glitters like water under the moon. Mimm and Trick nuzzle at my neck.

  “The First Mother was a sculptor,” says Bly. “She was surrounded by hushingstone, locked in the cloister, so she made companions out of it. Birds. Cloisterwings. They were only dead figures until she sang them souls.”

  “That’s not just a story?” I say.

  “It is a story,” says Bly. “But some stories are true.”

  Mimm alights on his outstretched hand, crows as though in approval. Trick nips at my ear.

  “The legend goes like this,” says Bly. “If a trapped girl sings with trapped birds — birds of feather or birds of stone — and if she loves them, and if the birds love her back, then she’ll sing them souls. Souls that can wriggle out of cages, through the tiniest slashes in stone, so that a small part of her — and the birds — can be free.”

  I think about the cloisterwings in the cloister, gliding in circles when I sang to them, huddling in their nests afterward, sighing in their sleep.

  “The First Mother sang souls for the first stone-birds, and they came alive,” says Bly. “With beating hearts and warmth under their wings and eggs to lay, living and dying like any other bird. And she kept singing souls for them, even when they were feather instead of stone. So that they could always be free, in some small way. So that she could be free, too.”

  All that time in the cloister, I was singing souls for trapped birds. And in Hidden
hall I sang souls for Mimm and Trick. Linna said they looked like they were dreaming with their wings, and they were. They were dreaming of flying against an unhampered sky. The golden bird I saw when Sveglia Emm was singing must have been a soul, too.

  But —

  “There are no trapped birds here in the cave,” I say, looking around. “Mimm and Trick have chosen to stay with me. They could fly away if they wanted to.”

  “You weren’t singing souls for Mimm and Trick,” says Bly.

  The eye in the stone. The groan.

  I swallow.

  “You’ve been singing,” says Bly, “for something I’ve made.”

  “Something —”

  “Someone.”

  My skin ripples with cold. I don’t know if I want to make a soul for a monster.

  Bly turns, shadows sweeping around him. “Come on,” he whispers. At first I think he’s talking to me, and I follow him, echoing his steps. But then he says, “Come out, come out,” and I know he’s talking to it.

  An eye darts in the cave’s wall. And then a claw appears, a great wing, a hooked, sharp beak. A monster. A bird. A bird-monster. Its wings are cramped, pinned by stone. It presses out of the wall slowly, crying as it does. It’s made out of Blightsend’s black, black rock. Hushingstone. Sculpted and sharp-edged, heavy and strong. Unbreakable. Full of fire. The First Mother made the cloisterwings, and Bly has made this.

  But it’s not only stone.

  It’s alive.

  “Delphernia,” says Bly, “meet Uln.”

  “Uln,” I say, stepping a little closer. “That’s a strange name.”

  “It’s the name of a poet.”

  “Oh. I suppose I should’ve guessed that.” I stretch out one finger, draw it back.

  “He won’t hurt you. He can hardly move. I’ve coaxed some of the golden birds — the souls — to drift inside him, but I think he needs more. He’s not as small as the First Mother’s cloisterwings.”

 

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