Here’s one: brother. Bly is my brother.
“Bly!” I yell, running into the cave. Running toward the blood and light we share.
But when I see him, I stop.
He’s sitting on Nightfall’s back, the cloisterwings balanced on his shoulders. Nightfall arches their neck, lets out a clamoring cry.
“I went looking for you,” he says. “I saw them — the Masters. We don’t have much time.” Nightfall lurches underneath him, almost flinging him off their back. “They want to fly,” says Bly, clinging to the beast-bird’s feathers.
I can see that.
Even if the whole sky was torn to pieces, this giant bird would fly, up and up and up, finding new skies, new stars to press their wings against.
Bly says, “You’ll have to jump.”
“What do you mean?” I laugh out the words.
Before Bly can answer, Nightfall glides forward as if they’re made of howling wind, lifting into the air and grinding their head against the high ceiling of the cave. Bly says, “Now!”
Nightfall’s wings spread out like seeping ink, clicking like warming bones. In their glistening eye I can see the soul I sang. The cloisterwings cry out.
Bly says, “Come on, Delphernia! Jump!”
My brother. Bly. My brother says jump.
So I do.
I leap, reaching out, limbs and flame and brightness and fear, jumping — flying — forward.
I land on Nightfall’s back, legs dangling, a searing pain in my right thumb. Mimm tugs at my jacket with her beak, and Trick circles my head.
Nightfall picks up speed, sweeping out of the cave’s mouth into the gentle light of evening.
Bly pulls me up, my thigh grating against the grit-crumbling edge of an armor-like feather. And then I’m seated on the back of a monster-bird.
The wind whips loosened curls across my eyes, and my mouth is full of salt and sky. The cloisterwings are soaring, soaring, as though they’ve never been trapped.
And I don’t care that I’m scratched and bleeding — I’m flying.
We are flying.
Together.
The wind blows hungrily. I can’t get away from it, no matter how high Nightfall lifts in the air. Mimm and Trick fly above us, giving Bly a headdress of feathers. Bare-risen stars wink like eyes.
We soar over hunched boulders, over the silver edge of a winding cliff, veering left toward the dead-gold garden.
We hover over it, looking through the slivers of space between moonlit branches.
The Childer-Queen sits on a throne that’s been cobbled out of wood and shattered glass. A harsh-cut hushingstone crown is balanced on her head. She is sobbing. Mr. Crowwith stands calmly at her side, his hand grasping Linna’s arm.
Linna.
She’s still wearing her dress of bells.
We wait as the Garden of All Silences fills with hundreds of Masters.
They stand in a circle around the Childer-Queen, Linna, and Mr. Crowwith. A barricade of unspoken threats.
My heart feels as hollow as a half-burned tree. Nightfall tilts in the air. I grip their feathers. Their flying depends on the fight in my heart, just as the first cloisterwings’ flying depended on the First Mother’s love. I remind myself that if my voice can make the souls of birds, it can do anything, and Nightfall steadies, teetering in the battered air.
The wind quiets down, wrapping me in its silken cold, and with my heart I tell Nightfall to lower to the ground.
Nightfall’s claws meet lungmossy stone. They spread their wings to crack at golden bushes, snapping trees that judder and fall. Even the tree with keys for leaves is thrown to the ground with a creak and crash. Masters scatter, covering their heads, unable to cry out without breaking the laws of Blightsend. They stare at us as though Nightfall has come to lead them to the door of death.
Mr. Crowwith’s face warps with confusion. Dread.
I stand up on Nightfall’s back.
I fill my lungs.
I find my voice.
And, in this silent and dead place, I speak. “Give Linna and the Childer-Queen to us and we will leave peacefully.”
As if in agreement, Nightfall screeches. The sky buckles. The Masters narrow their eyes, mouths opening without words. They are watching me. But Mr. Crowwith is watching them. He knows they will do what they’ve been told the sea requires.
He clears his throat, and they look back at him. He motions for them to approach the traitors. They seem to forget about me. About Nightfall. They form a ring around Linna and the Childer-Queen again.
I freeze.
Nightfall freezes, too.
I sit down, then slide off Nightfall’s high back.
“Delphernia — no —” whispers Bly, the cloisterwings flapping their wings frantically at his cheeks.
“I have to do something,” I say.
The Masters’ eyes pelt me, their faces torn into scowls, until they see the cloisterwings flying at my side. They touch fingers to lips and bow their heads, eyes wide and searching.
Then they turn from me, tightening around Linna, Mr. Crowwith, and the Childer-Queen, closer, closer, closer — silent as shadows.
I remember what the Childer-Queen asked of me in the Sea-Singer’s library. To be the girl, singing in the garden, who changes everything.
Sing. Don’t be silent.
Mimm and Trick spin at my throat.
I gloss my tongue with spit. I ignore the tremor in my bones, the thump in my chest. The sea raises its head to listen. I breathe. I breathe. I breathe.
And then I push a rising note out of my mouth.
The note thickens the air like mist.
I draw it out, letting it bloom and loop and quiver.
Mimm dives and twists. Trick caws.
No light-strands shimmer in the air above me, no golden birds spread glisten-spark wings, no souls erupt against deepening heaven.
I am not trapped. I am singing freely.
The Masters part, turning their heads to me as though I’m speaking a language they haven’t heard since they were small enough to fit in cribs. The ones holding on to Linna let go of her jingling sleeves. The others’ hands drop to their sides. They listen. They are listening to me.
I keep my eyes open. I want to see it when it begins. Want to see their faces change as their ears fill with something they’ve only ever heard once before — if they’ve heard it at all. A girl singing. A girl singing in the Garden of All Silences.
And not just any girl. The Sea-Singer’s daughter.
“You sound like her,” says an older Master, breaking the law with his tongue.
Some of the others nod, whispering among themselves.
The Childer-Queen smiles, her cheeks traced with tears.
I look out over the sea, wrenching my most hidden voice from my belly. Then the sky softens the edges of its clouds, sets to falling a dusted rain, and I stop singing. I stretch out my tongue. I swallow the sky.
Mr. Crowwith is staring at me as though I’m a ghost — the long-buried come to kiss his cheek. His attention scatters, and Linna sees. She jams her stone heel into the toe of his silk-and-gold boot, her elbow into his stomach. He clutches at his gut, and she runs, pushing past distracted Masters. She runs to me. She takes my unhurting hand.
“Keep singing,” she says, as all the Masters turn oily eyes on us.
I lift my voice again.
Linna stands behind me, letting the music drift through her bones. At her back, light-strands form. She turns to draw the glowing notes from the air. By the time I let my song sink into silence, there’s a knot of lustrous gold resting in her palm.
She tosses it into the crowd of Masters. One of them catches it. The others gasp. They hover fingertips over the shining metal.
Mr. Crowwith tries to push through the crowd, but the Masters have formed a wall of elbows, leaning in to get a closer look at Linna’s shimmer.
The sea spreads its waves into silence. The Masters move slowly around us, holdin
g up their hands to show they mean no harm. Their whispers ripple like lapping waves. Their eyes are like darting fish.
Then a shriek rumbles the ground beneath our feet. “Wretched gold-lickers!” It’s Mr. Crowwith. “You give wings to traitors with wicked tongues. You ignore Histories on the whim of a pretty voice!”
The Masters turn toward him, opening a path in their midst.
He bolts through the narrow gap, grabs and yanks Linna’s wrist. He motions to the Childer-Queen’s cobbled-wood throne and a group of Masters takes hold of it. Her face is crumpled in fear. They start dragging it toward the cliffs. Mr. Crowwith pulls Linna away from me, struggling through the crowd of Masters. The Childer-Queen screams.
The wind takes a cue from chaos. It starts ripping at my ears again. Shouts and whispers. Hair stinging at my cheeks. Bly’s whistle. When I snap my head back, I see Nightfall lifting into the air. Mimm and Trick have flown to sit beside Bly on the great bird’s stone back.
I have to get to Linna.
I have to get to Linna.
I run toward the cliffs, pressing past sleeves, biting and clawing to make my way through. I can see Linna’s shining hair, the Childer-Queen’s crooked stone crown.
“Wait!” I scream. “No! Wait!”
Then I can’t see Linna — or the Childer-Queen.
And the Masters have stopped walking forward.
I tear past them.
Mr. Crowwith is standing at the edge of the cliff beside the traitor’s throne he fashioned for the Childer-Queen. But the throne is empty. He is alone.
“Linna!” I stagger, skid.
And see her.
She’s falling through the air, a grain of gold, luminous against the unforgiving gray of the ocean. And the Childer-Queen is the sparkling wing of a flickermoth, thrown into whipped cloud.
Something scrapes at my shoulder.
I howl, turning my head to see an immense wing blocking out cloud — stone-dark and knife-sharp.
Bly grabs my hand. Mimm and Trick hit my chest, scrambling underneath my jacket. I’m swept onto Nightfall’s back.
Nightfall pushes on, into the bellow of the wind. I grip their salt-crusted feathers with bleeding hands, tears streaming down my cheeks.
We keep steady, flying down, down, down, and all I’m hoping is that we’ll be able to do it — to catch Linna and the Childer-Queen on Nightfall’s broad back.
But then I see the cloister.
The cloister, distant, its own island.
Burning, burning, burning.
A blister of flames against the sea’s surface.
The bridge of spike-sticking rocks between the cloister and Blightsend’s farthest border is peppered with tiny figures — loosed turnaway girls. They’re free. But the cloisterwings. All those cloisterwings —
Mother Nine would never think to let them out. They’re trapped in there. I know I’m too far away for it to be real, but I can smell charred feathers, can hear songs choked by smoke. I can even taste the metallic tang of melting shimmer. Mimm and Trick tremble against my chest, and I am filled with a harsh, piercing silence.
My heart loses all its fight.
And when my heart’s not fighting anymore — when it empties of storm and sound — Nightfall cannot live. Their golden soul slips out of their body. For a moment I can see the soul I sang — the monstrous soul that came from my bones — against the wide blackness of the sky. But then she soars off. Another gold-feathered bird lost forever. Nightfall’s wings — Uln’s wings — shatter like hammered glass beneath us.
And I am falling.
We are all falling.
All I hear is the sea, the sea — reaching up to take me.
My skin is covered in fine dust — in the remnants of Uln’s wings. Mimm and Trick burst out of my jacket and clobber my ears.
They’re coming for me — waves with sharp teeth of crystallized salt. My body whips through space, all ache. I close my eyes.
Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.
Mother Nine was right.
Here it is, swelling like a bruise —
And I feel —
Feathers.
Feathers. Not water. Not ice-shard waves. I feel the pinch of beaks. I’m not falling anymore. Not falling — but not rising, either. My heart skips, uneven, and I hang above the crashing sea, the sad songs of birds surrounding me like a garden unfurling.
When I open my eyes, I see the night sky. Mimm and Trick squawk over me. Theirs aren’t the feathers against my neck and behind my head. Brushing my wrists, my ankles, with their edges. Feathers underneath me.
It’s the cloisterwings.
Mother Nine set them free before she lit their home on fire.
And they came for me.
They’re lifting me up, slowly, slowly. Beaks pull at my hair and wings pump against the wildness of the wind. They’ve made a net of black feather and wing-shine beneath me. They are lifting me on their backs. But it feels as though I am held only by the sweet tones of their voices.
I watch Uln’s remains — gray as ash — shift like a thundercloud, landing on the surface of the sea like a fall of distant rain. I drift upward, upward, upward, through layers of mist. Chills ruffle under my skin.
There are other groups of cloisterwings on either side of me, lifting the others on their backs, too, some of them fluttering between us. Bly clasps my hand. Linna’s caught up, too, lying still on a bed of black feathers, her mouth open in shock. The Childer-Queen’s delicate silks are tugged through gathered cloud by the gripping claws and clicking beaks of the First Mother’s birds, wings beneath her and wings above her.
Wings beneath all of us, as though the wind has learned of singing.
The cloisterwings lower us into the Garden of All Silences, among broken branches and gold-crushed petals. They form a whirling wall to keep the Masters away from us, snapping beaks and flapping wings in a scratch-scattering flurry. Masters gather silently, the birds scrabbling at their cheeks if they come too close.
“They saved us,” says Bly. “You sang souls for them. You helped them escape the cloister long before Mother Nine opened the skydoor — and they saved us.”
Even though I’m lying on the ground, my bones still feel like they’re falling. My stomach is inside out. My ears are stuffed with silk. “Linna,” I choke. “Where’s Linna?”
“I’m here!” She collapses on top of me, laughing, then rolls over onto her back, the music of her dress shimmering. “We were flying!” she says, as though she can’t believe it.
I laugh, wincing as my ribs ache. Leave it to Linna to think of falling as flying. Tears stream silently down my cheeks. I sit up slowly, pressing my palms to the lungmossy ground. It’s solid, unmoving. I’m not falling anymore. I’m not falling.
Then the Childer-Queen is standing over us, her arms folded. Bly gets to his feet, dips his chin. Linna blinks up at the Childer-Queen’s face — irreverent as ever.
“Childer —” I say.
But when I look up, she’s holding out a hand. “We’ve never been properly introduced,” she says. She looks at me, then at Bly, then lets her eyes rest on Linna. “None of us has. My name is Fable — Fable Harpermall. Thank you for —”
Her words are cut off by Mr. Crowwith’s low voice. He’s elbowing his way through the crowd of Masters, scowling at their shocked faces. “Your cloister is burning!” he screams at them. “Your cloisterwings are loosed. And a girl — a turnaway girl — has sung in your garden. A child born in music has made shimmer.” His voice gets louder with every word. “Will you not stand up and be Masters? Will you not choose for yourselves a ruler to replace your treacherous Childer-Queen?”
The wind bays. The cloisterwings break the light around us with their wings. In glint-glimpses, I can see the Masters squinting at Mr. Crowwith’s reddened face, at the fire and billow of the cloister.
Bly squeezes my hand. The Childer-Queen sits down beside Linna, who gets to her knees and puts one arm aroun
d me.
One of the Masters speaks. “The Custodian is right,” he says. “And I can see only one who would rule me.”
Mr. Crowwith purses his mouth and straightens his shoulders, readying to hear his own name.
But the Master turns away from him.
He peers into the brokenness of the Garden of All Silences — the fallen trees and crooked branches, the split leaves and smashed buds. He dips his chin, closes his eyes, touches fingers to lips. And then he kneels — to the tree with keys for leaves. It’s lying on its side like a toppled giant, uprooted by Nightfall’s wings.
The moon is ablaze in the sky, and its light is banging off angles of gleaming gold, and there — through the frenzy of wings — I can see her. Standing tall, her skin a glowing brown, her hair a dark-crimped diadem. She’s wearing bracelets of golden cloisterwing souls.
One by one, the Masters turn their heads. They kneel.
“Is that —?” says Linna.
Mr. Crowwith’s face is blanched.
It’s the Sea-Singer.
The Sea-Singer steps tentatively toward us, as though she’s teaching her toes what it feels like to walk on lungmoss again.
She holds her hand up to the wall of cloisterwings, and they lower in one swift motion, rushing at her skin like a winged gust of wind. Mimm and Trick snuggle against my neck before alighting on her shoulders.
“You’re not caged anymore,” she says, as though she is talking not only to the birds but to herself.
The cloisterwings soar, one cloud of wings, flying up and flying out, over the sea and into the light of a thousand stars. The golden souls tipping the Sea-Singer’s fingers follow.
Mimm and Trick hang back, clinging to the worn silk of the Sea-Singer’s dress. They caw mournfully, blinking their eyes against her cheeks. Then they swoop after the others.
I watch them go.
The Sea-Singer crouches before us — before me and Bly and Linna and Fable — spreading her arms to take us all in.
Warmth. Skin against my skin. Hair smelling of dust and blood.
The Turnaway Girls Page 13