The Turnaway Girls

by Hayley Chewins

  I raise my eyebrows at him. “For someone who loves poetry, you have a habit of stating the obvious.” But my heart cracks. This bird has been made in the dark and he is teeming with it. He needs light to fill his eyes. I imagine the cloisterwings coming to life between the First Mother’s palms.

  “The souls, do they —?”

  Bly reads my thought. “The soul of a bird never dies. The First Mother wrote that when her first generation of cloisterwings passed away, she saw their souls leave their bodies and escape through the stone of the cloister. That’s when she wrote her only poem.”

  “Stone bears down in daylight,” I recite, “but when nightfall comes, I know that I am flying.”

  Bly smiles sadly at me. “I love that poem.”

  “But I don’t want stone to bear down on them.” My eyes are welling with tears. “They’ll be caged within him.”

  “But he’ll be flying, Delphernia. He’ll fly across the sea. He’ll leave Blightsend. Forever.”

  “Leave?” I brush my tears away.

  Bly takes my hand. “Delphernia,” he says, “I need to get away. To fly away on the wings of a bird I made. On Blightsend I only remember the things I can never change: My mother is dead. And my sister is not my sister, even if we share blood. On Blightsend, I am caged.”

  “I understand,” I say. I have been caged, too.

  “So you’ll help me?”

  I stare into Uln’s glossy eye. A fat tear slides out of it. I move to wipe it away, and he nudges my palm with the crest of his beak. He moans as if he’s slipping into sickness.

  “I’ll sing souls for Uln,” I say, keeping my hand against the bird’s beak. “But only if you help me save Linna.”

  “I can’t do it,” I say.

  I collapse on the damp ground inside the cave. Seaflowers grow around me, their petals like salt-sticky fingers. Mimm and Trick jig at my wrists in comfort. I’ve made about three hundred souls, and Bly has passed them into Uln’s great chest, beckoning him out of shadow little by little, but still the creature’s eyes are glazed. His wings won’t lift with the lightness of flying. And my throat is dry. My bones feel hollow.

  Bly paces in the lantern-lit cave. Soon my voice will grow gruff and fade. I’ll have to be silent until it comes back. I won’t be able to make the golden birds. And we won’t be able to save Linna. She’s going to die. She’s going to die.

  “What are we going to do?” I whisper.

  With every moment that passes, I am losing her. Losing the girl who gave me hoping. Even Mimm and Trick, snuggling against my neck, can’t make me forget.

  “Maybe we should rest a bit,” says Bly.

  It feels more painful to stop than to carry on. But there are only so many souls a girl can sing before she needs a glass of water. Bly tips rainwater he’s collected into a wooden cup.

  “Here,” he says. “This’ll soothe your throat.”

  Mimm and Trick follow us out to the mouth of the cave. We sit, watching the sea move under the sinking sun.

  Bly turns to face me. “I’ve been thinking,” he says.

  My mouth is full of rain. I swallow. “About?”

  “The writings.” He scoots closer to me. “See, the First Mother was able to sing souls for the first cloisterwings because she loved them. And I can tell you love Uln — I can tell you love all birds — but I don’t know if that’s enough.”

  I couldn’t make shimmer in the cloister, and now I can’t make souls for Uln. Mother Nine was right. I’m a wretched, bone-broken girl. I put down my cup. I hide my face in my hands.

  “Delphernia, it’s not you — it’s about purpose. The First Mother made the cloisterwings to be companions. Their purpose was to love her the way she loved them. Because she was lonely. But Uln’s purpose — it’s not love. It’s escape. It’s rebellion. It’s — fight.”

  “Fight,” I repeat, unsure.

  “Do you think — I don’t know if it’ll work — but do you think you could give your voice claws?”

  “Claws.”

  “You know, make it harder. Make it sound like it has teeth.”

  I cough and laugh at the same time. “Are you speaking in poems, Bly?”

  “I’m serious as sea.”

  He doesn’t sound serious as sea. He sounds like a man who laps at the sea and says it quenches his thirst. But I have no other plan.

  I drink the last of my water. “I suppose I could try,” I say. The cloisterwings chirp, fluffing their feathers on my shoulder. I stroke their backs with one hand.

  We walk into the cave again, and I watch the walls, all the creatures Bly has carved, while Mimm and Trick jab at seaflowers.

  “Teeth and claws,” I whisper, sitting against a carving of an enormous flickermoth. I close my eyes.

  And I try one last time.

  I open my mouth and I sing.

  Because there are some things that make me wish I had claws. Things that fill my heart with fight. They belong to me in the same way the color blue belongs to the sky.

  Mother Nine. Her switch. All the bruises she left on my skin. How she tore the nail from my thumb. The babies in their mossy cribs, their sobbing drawn through bone, and Linna, caught in Mr. Crowwith’s choke of silence. Sveglia Emm, trapped underground, singing the small escapes of captive birds. And most of all the Sea-Singer, who sang a halo of light in a place that would never grow. One woman, standing in a lifeless place, changing the turn of the tides.

  My voice grates out — no longer a flying thing. Tired and rough and tender. Because I’m not singing from the place in me that soars. I’m singing from the place in me that hides in the dark and plots at burning cloisters. The place in me that has a fighting heart, a heart that wants to scratch its way to freedom.

  I crawl so deeply into the sound that it takes me away from the cave, takes me back in time. I feel hands grabbing, hear voices rattling. I hear the Sea-Singer. She screamed when they took her children away.

  And, in the cave, I scream, too.

  My voice echoes: a bleeding, ragged thing.

  I only open my eyes because Bly’s cold hands are in my hands. I look up and see a rope of light, beaming brighter than any light-strand I’ve ever seen before. I take it in my hands. It’s thick and warm and heavy as stone. There’s a thrumming beneath its surface like anger, like will, like a pounding heart.

  I knead the light-strand. My ripped thumb bleeds into its burning, brightening its color into richer flame. Then it struggles out of my grip, expanding and expanding. Mimm and Trick bob around it.

  “What’s happening?” says Bly.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  The light stretches, shapes itself, forming the head of a bird-monster. Dazzling wings fan out above me. The cloisterwings dive into my lap.

  A beast hovers above us.

  A bird with claws and a sharp-hooked beak, feathers keen as knives.

  A bird with fire for blood and blood in her fire.

  A bird who’s ready to fight.

  We don’t have to tell Uln’s soul what to do.

  She glides toward him, all fire, flying low under the cave’s ceiling. She presses against his stone feathers, looks into his unglimmering eye. She slips into him the way a hand slips into water. Soul and stone merge in a swirl of gold and exploding sky. Uln’s eyes remain black — black as mine, black as Bly’s — but they’re shimmer-filled now. And his feathers are soft, brittle only at the edges.

  He’s alive.

  They are alive.

  “He’s not Uln anymore,” I say, turning to Bly, dizzy with what I’ve just seen. What I’ve just done. “Their name. It should be different. They’re — they’re Nightfall.”

  “Nightfall.”

  “From —”

  “From the First Mother’s poem.”

  We say the line in unison. “Stone bears down in daylight, but when nightfall comes, I know that I am flying.”

  Mimm chirrs. Trick flaps her wings.

  Nightfall cr
ies out, then surges forward. The tips of their feathers gouge the walls of the cave. They lift their head and look at me, and in their eyes I can see that they know what to do. Find Linna. Be unquiet. Take us away from Blightsend’s cliffs. From Mr. Crowwith.

  “Nightfall,” I say, stroking their smooth-stone beak. They push their head gently against my chest. Their feathers are bristling with life, but the tips are still unbreakable as stone.

  “Shhh,” says Bly. “Listen.”

  I prick my ears at the silence, gathering Mimm and Trick into my arms so that they don’t make a sound.

  A voice echoes through the cave. Not my voice. Not Bly’s voice. Not Nightfall’s, either. Not a bird or a girl or a boy. A woman. “Delphernia. Delphernia. Delphernia.”

  Trick tucks herself inside my jacket. Mimm lets out a whimper.

  It’s a voice like an ax. A voice that still makes me bite the insides of my cheeks. I know it better than I know my own scars. I could never forget it. I’m all welt and wound. My thumb tingles.

  It’s Mother Nine.

  “Delphernia!” calls Mother Nine.

  Bly’s face is panicked. He smooths Nightfall’s black-bright feathers, as though he’s already thinking of losing everything. “You have to go outside and talk to her,” he says. “We can’t have her discovering —”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I’ll go.”

  But my feet have grown into the ground like roots.

  I thought I was free of Mother Nine. The law says she’s not to leave the cloister — ever. She shouldn’t be here. But she is. Her voice is looping about the cave like a hungry spirit, making Nightfall cringe, making Bly sweat. The old scars on my hands darken and sting. Stay away, my body says. But Bly settles worried eyes on me.

  “All right,” I say, “I’m going. I’m going.”

  Mimm lifts into the air. I ease Trick out of my jacket and hand her to Bly.

  And then I turn toward the sea.

  Mother Nine stands among the stooped heads of boulder-giants. The sea is varnished with evening light. For the first time since I left the cloister, I feel as though its waters are not a threat. But Mother Nine makes me doubt. Her eyes are on me — reminding me that winter waves have a taste for girls with unruly throats.

  I plant my boots on the damp-black beach. I tuck my fingers away and look straight at her face, as if I’m some kind of Sea-Singer.

  “You need to listen to me.” She reaches out, but I move away.

  “You hate me,” I say, fight still smoldering in my belly from when I sang Uln a soul. “Why should I listen to someone who hates me?”

  Mother Nine knots her fingers. “You need to get out of here,” she says. “Sooner or later he’s going to find out that you can’t make shimmer. If the sea doesn’t take you itself, the Custodian will send you to the cliffs.”

  I let the silence draw her closer to me, and then I whisper: “Bly already knows. I’ve sung for him, too. Now you can leave me alone. Find someone else to torture.”

  But she doesn’t turn away.

  She fiddles with her sleeve, checks the sea at her back as though it’s bound to hunt her. I realize all at once that she’s the one afraid of waves. Afraid of the world outside the cloister. She taught me to fear it because she fears it herself.

  “Come back to the cloister with me,” she says. “I’ll get us away; that was always my —”

  “Always your plan?” My laugh is a handful of scattered hushingstone shards.

  I want to spit at her feet, spit out all the lies she ever told me. But I don’t. I bury them in the rush and stir of my heart, along with all my questions. I’ll turn them to truth with my blood and use them as weapons.

  She reaches for my hand again. I snatch it away.

  “All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be safe, Delphernia.”

  “You don’t hurt people you want to keep safe,” I say, the end of my nose a spark, the corners of my eyes two tiny fires.

  “Leave,” I whisper harshly. “I don’t need you anymore.” I clench my eyes closed.

  “Delphernia,” she says. “If you make this the last time I see you, I need you to know. She is — she was — she was your mother. I need you to know that she loved you.”

  Her words fill me with the sea’s gushing. Mother. My mother.

  When I open my eyes, she’s put distance between us, weaving among boulders, her silks around her like dirty smoke. She used to seem so big. She used to take up the whole cloister. The whole world. But now she looks small and ragged. Wrinkled and tired, like a dress washed too many times with rough-scrubbing hands.

  I run after her — which is exactly what she wants me to do.

  But — mother. My mother.

  The sea is singing. “Who was she?” I scream, running to keep the mud and feathers of her cloak in sight.

  She stops, turns toward me, steps backward, stumbling, her hands two birds. “You won’t believe me,” she says.

  “Tell me,” I demand, cheeks wet.

  She looks at me, meets my eye for a long time. Then she swallows. “The Sea-Singer,” she says. “Her name was Sveglia Emm. I loved her. Like a daughter. She was so gifted. And her voice — I couldn’t bear to tell her to be quiet. She was your mother, Delphernia. She gave you that name. Delphernia. It means dolphin — a swimming thing from storybooks.”

  “But —”

  I’m not even sure what I’m going to say. But I want her to stop. To slow down. Mother Nine loved the Sea-Singer. The Sea-Singer loved me. The Sea-Singer gave me my name.

  Sveglia Emm.

  Sveglia Emm.

  The singer trapped in Hiddenhall.

  The Sea-Singer is alive. And the Sea-Singer is my mother. My mother is alive, singing the souls of birds deep underground.

  But Mother Nine isn’t done. She paces back toward me, grips my arm. “There was a storm after she sang,” she cries. “That night. You and Bly were born in it. Twins. And then the sea took her — rose over the cliff and snaked its way through passages of stone to find her sleeping in her bed.” She glances out at the waves, quickly, like she doesn’t want to meet a stranger’s eyes. A stranger she’s dreamed of and feared her whole life.

  “That’s a lie,” I say. “The sea didn’t take her — Mr. Crowwith did.”

  Mother Nine ignores me. “After she died, Mr. Crowwith brought you to me. He told me what’d happened. Told me to raise you as a turnaway girl. And he told me to draw out all the new girls’ crying. But I couldn’t do it — not to you. I knew” — her voice breaks — “I knew she would have wanted me to love you. But I’m afraid I haven’t done a very good job of it.”

  Twins.

  Bly.

  Mother.

  Questions.

  Sveglia Emm.

  I’m afraid I haven’t done a very good job of it.

  No, Mother Nine. You haven’t.

  You haven’t. You haven’t. You haven’t.

  Mother Nine grimaces at the sea again. “I beg you, Delphernia, come back to the cloister, and I will make a plan for us to leave this place — like I’ve always wanted.”

  “Always wanted?” I say quietly, remembering the whisper-room, the circles she drew around me with her skirts, the missed suppers, my scar-angry palms, my thumbnail torn off and left on stone like an insect’s wing, the bruises, the bruises, the bruises.

  “You were cruel to me,” I say. “I don’t understand. If you knew my mother, if you loved her, if you were supposed to love me —”

  Mother Nine doesn’t utter a word. But she doesn’t need to. I know why she was cruel to me. She had loved the Sea-Singer. She’d been gentle with her. And the Sea-Singer had died. She knew that I would have a voice. She knew that I would use it. And she tried to beat it out of me. To keep me safe. Because she saw my mother in me. She saw my mother’s crying — my mother’s questions — in me.

  “You named me Undersea,” I say. “Delphernia Undersea. Because you knew I would go to the waves when you didn’t draw the cry
ing out of me.”

  Mother Nine dips her chin like the good turnaway girl she is.

  “I won’t go anywhere with you!” I scream, the loudness of my voice surprising even me. I unclasp my earring, pull the gold clear of the flesh, and throw it at her. It drops onto pebbled splits of stone. The sea will claim it.

  “I’m a singer now,” I tell her, raising my head. “I’m not a turnaway girl anymore. I’m not turning away from anything. And I don’t belong to you — I never did. We only belong to those who love us.”

  I imagine the Sea-Singer holding me in her arms, telling me to sing. I picture us beneath the ground. I picture putting my hand through the gash in that underground wall — squeezing her fingers.

  “I belong to her,” I say. “I’ve always belonged to her.” I start to walk away, back toward Bly’s cave.

  “Delphernia —”

  “Good evening, Mother Nine,” I say.

  “But, Delphernia —”

  “What?”

  She points.

  My eyes follow her yellow-nailed finger along the beach’s stone, toward the higher ground of the city.

  Under a dimming sky, Masters march in solemn lines, no stone-flutes sheathed at their hips. No jeering faces. They’re dressed in quiet-embroidered tunics and jackets, unbelled slippers on their feet. No headdresses. They are silent, even if their steps still make rhythms.

  My whole body is steeped in cold. My heart grows wings and bangs at my ribs. “They’re going to the Festival of Queens,” I say. “Linna. I have to go. I have to go now.” I tear my eyes from the Masters’ procession.

  But Mother Nine is gone.

  I squint — there she is. Running back toward the cloister. Her sanctuary. Her home.

  But it’s not my home anymore. The cloister in my heart has burned to cinders, and I’ll keep no more wings inside it. I turn back toward the mouth of Bly’s cave.

  I have a friend to rescue. And a brother to meet.

  There are words that knot themselves at your ankles, tie you down with their meanings, and then there are words that light little fires in your kneecaps.