by Kate Gragg
“Pity,” Lydia said. “That’s a learcock. Would have been a pretty impressive catch. I don’t think anyone’s seen one on this island since I was a–”
She caught herself.
“Since you were a cinder girl in Cheapside?” I finished for her. “Scrounging for your bread? Falling to sleep to stories I’d tell you about how we’d both make it out of there someday?”
“There it is again.”
“Again? I didn’t say a word about this to you all last night. It’s not like I even could, since you were so busy dancing with every stuffed shirt asshole on this island,” I shouted. She thumped me in the chest.
“The bird, Joe. It’s over there.”
She pointed to a branch hanging from a sort of purple willow tree, about a hundred yards away. The bird was barely visible behind the curtain of tiny leaves, preening and pretending it didn’t know we were watching it.
“They don’t fly far at a time,” Lydia said. “If we’re quiet and steady, we can catch up to it.”
“Okay but wha–”
“Quiet,” she hissed. I glared at her but didn’t say anything more.
We padded silently through the woods, predators in pursuit. Every time the bird took flight again, we had to stop and figure out what direction it had gone in. It always landed somewhere in sight, and sometimes cooed at us, like it was urging us to follow it.
It was going well enough that I had time to worry about what I was going to do when we caught up to it. I didn’t have a net or anything like that, or even a stupid little rope like Clifton. I tried to sneak a glance at Lydia to see if she was carrying anything that looked useful in the pockets of her dress, but she caught me looking and glared at me so hard I risked a whispered “sorry.” But all that got me was another glare.
The bird had vanished again, but I could tell it wasn’t far by the tickle in my nose. I was looking up at the giant leaves overhead and thinking about taking a couple of them and devising some sort of leaf cage I could just clamp around the bird when it wasn’t looking, or maybe wrap around the bird like when you have to swaddle a cat so you can carry it out of the chimney it got itself stuck in without losing an eye. Had to do that to a lot of cats over the years, and one very confused possum.
We went up a low hill and when we came back down, some kind of rainbow light was shimmering through the trees, kind of like the bird’s feathers but much brighter. I looked at Lydia.
“I don’t like this,” she said. She didn’t bother to whisper.
I pulled out my sword and jumped as high as I could, cutting down a leaf in one surprisingly clean motion.
“What’s that for?”
“For the bird,” I said.
Lydia looked like she had follow-up questions, but instead she just gasped. The woods abruptly gave way to a dry ravine running alongside a steep cliff that was, I’d say, maybe two townhouses high. It was the first cliff I’d ever seen but it seemed pretty ordinary, except for all the colors.
The rainbows I’d seen were, it turned out, just ordinary sunlight. Sunlight reflected off the biggest hoard of gems I’d ever seen, and I was inside the royal vault for a couple minutes not too long ago. The belly of the ravine, which might normally have been littered with river stones, was paved with thousands upon thousands of gems in every color, the smallest of them bigger than a goose egg. Even the bigger rocks at the base of the cliff were encrusted with crystalline growths, like barnacles, and there were huge crystals jutting out of the ground at intervals, some of them taller than me. The centerpiece of this dazzling setting was what I could only describe as a crystal waterfall, giant diamonds arcing out from the top of the cliff like water frozen in space.
“Okay, so this is definitely one of those deadly traps people were talking about?” I said.
Lydia peered through one of the tall crystals and suddenly leaned back, making a face.
“I’d say so,” she said. “Take a look.”
The crystal she’d been looking at was a dark emerald color, hard to see through. I pressed my face up close, cupping my hand over my brow to block out the sunlight, and saw a pair of eyes staring right back at me.
“There’s a guy in there,” I shouted. The sound echoed off the cliff wall and made the crystals vibrate with a strangely tonal hum.
I’d seen a young man, about my age, his face frozen in terror. I looked around and realized all the other big crystals were the same. There had to be half a dozen men there at least.
“This isn’t right,” Lydia said, more to herself than me.
“No kidding!”
Lydia went around to each crystal, squinting to make out the faces.
“That’s Karsten Jandal,” she said, pointing at a topaz-yellow spire that leaned at a queasy angle over the edge of the ravine. “He competed last year. I think they all did.”
“And they died out here?”
Lydia ran her fingers through her thick black hair, mussing up the braid even more than it already was.
“I don’t think they’re dead,” she said. “Nobody’s ever supposed to die, normally.”
“Normally?” I said, the squeak I couldn’t keep out of my voice bouncing between the rocks.
“All the really dangerous stuff on the island got put up on my family’s walls centuries ago,” Lydia said. “Everything that’s left just slows you down. You might miss the clock and get eliminated, but everybody comes back by morning. Only…”
She looked me in the eye for the first time that day. I recognized the look on her face. Stricken, like the time she’d told me she’d been rented off to a workhouse for a week. I wondered what that had been a cover for. A tour of the countryside with mummy and papa? Pony-riding lessons? The back of my neck felt hot.
I let the moment hang, the vibration of the crystals fading to a barely audible chime, then reluctantly gave in.
“Only?”
“Only last year nobody came back,” Lydia sighed. “There was no winner, no disqualifieds, nothing. My father sent men out to search the woods, but they never even found anyone.”
“You want me to believe they didn’t check this place? We didn’t even have to walk that far to find it.”
“You can’t find places on this island if you’re looking for them. The whole island is magic. It watches you.”
“I guess I can see why, if there’s treasure like this just lying around.” I kicked one of the gems on the ground, sending it bouncing off poor Karsten with a satisfying plink.
“Don’t do that! We have no idea what made them… like that. Don’t touch anything.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s the gems,” I said, picking one up and weighing it with my hand. It was astonishingly heavier than it looked, more like a cannonball than a rock.
“Are you nuts? That’s–”
“A very tempting treasure, right, I get it.” I said. “Believe me, nobody knows better than me about the whole ‘don’t touch the ill-gotten gains lest ye be cursed’ bit. That’s happened to me twice already this week.”
“You’re right, we really do need to find time to catch up.”
“But!” I said, holding the gem up to my nose and giving it a hearty sniff. “These gems are not cursed. See?” I tossed it to Lydia. She caught it instinctively, making me strangely pleased to see she still had her old street rat reflexes.
“It’s just a rock,” I said. I crouched down and ran my hands through the piles of gems, scooping up a huge armful and letting it tumble through my fingers. “They’re all just rocks. If they were magic, I’d have sneezed myself to death now.”
“You have been sneezing a lot today,” Lydia said, looking at me clinically.
“Only when I got close to that bird,” I said. “The bird is magic, and I’m allergic to magic. But these things?” I clapped two gems together. “Not magic.”
“So, you think there was some non-magical process that trapped some of the smartest and fittest guys in the country inside giant crystals?” Lydia said.
I forgot what I was saying, distracted by the fact that all those non-magical rocks were suddenly levitating off the ground. An impossibly low rumble filled my ears, shaking everything.
“You mentioned something about a curse?” Lydia yelled above the din.
“Don’t worry,” I said, pinpointing the source of the sound. “It’s just water coming down off the cliff. Perfectly ordinary water!” That we were standing right in the path of, I realized.
No time to think, only time to run. I tackled Lydia and scooped her up off the ground, half carrying and half dragging her as fast as I could. The area around the ravine was a sort of low basin, and I worried the whole thing would fill with water in a flash.
“You have to stand on my shoulders!” I shouted. The water was splashing into the ravine now, adding the noise of all the gems scraping against each other to the deafening sound of the water itself.
“What?” Lydia said, but she was already bracing her legs against my chest and reaching up for the nearest tree branch. I pushed her up with all my strength and felt my feet slip on the loose stones.
I transferred all my momentum into sideways movement, just trying to get up on higher ground any way I could. I landed flat on my back, my legs splayed across a pile of tree roots, and I mostly made it too. Only my hand got wet.
Tink, tink, tink, tink.
I groaned and flung my good arm across my eyes, trying to block out the late afternoon sun.
“If a rock didn’t work, I don’t know why you’d think a stick would,” I said.
“Well I can keep trying this or we can switch to my plan,” Lydia snapped.
“I told you, I can’t have my hand cut off. I’m a thief.”
“You’re a chimney-sweep, Joe. All these years and all you’re doing is wishing you were a thief. And to think when I saw you in those clothes, I actually thought you’d made something of yourself.”
“Oh, are you upset that I lied? Do lies offend you, Pirate Queen?”
“I never said I was a pirate queen,” Lydia said, whacking my crystallized hand so hard it made all the bones in my arm jangle.
The water had turned out to work something like the cauldron of molten sugar water they had at the candy makers. The candy maker would dip wooden sticks into the water and pull out crystals of rock candy. This was like that, but the candy was gems and the sticks were whatever got in the water’s path, like rocks or aspiring knights or my non-dominant but still very much valued and appreciated hand.
Lydia sat down suddenly and rummaged through her sleeves, which I’d come to realize contained both an apothecary and a small armory. She pulled out an enormous knife and offered it to me.
“You can do it yourself if you want. But trust me, Joe, you don’t want to be out here after dark.”
“I don’t want to be out here at all,” I groused.
My hand being stuck to the ground had me lying at a weird angle, and I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.
Then I sneezed, which practically wrenched my stuck arm out of its socket. I heard an answering chirp.
“The learcock!” Lydia said. “Look, Joe, it’s practically on top of you.”
“Great. Let’s catch it and head back and I can be the only knight with a hook for a hand.”
The bird was browsing among the gems, pecking here and there like a chicken on the hunt for a worm. It seemed to find one it liked and settled down beside it, then flung open its beak and started to sing. Two lilting notes, high and clear, the most beautiful I’d ever heard.
“Did you know they sang?” I whispered to Lydia. She shook her head.
“I’d never even seen one before today. They’ve been extinct on this island for years.”
Then the damndest thing happened. The gem started to sing back.
The gem resonated with every tone, vibrating more and more until it was hopping like a wind-up toy. When it all seemed to reach a fever pitch, the stone cracked and out hopped out a very surprised-looking mouse. The learcock ate it with one crunch of its beak and then turned to us, making sure we were watching it preen its magical feathers.
Lydia and I looked at each other and had the same thought.
“Here chickie chickie!”
“Who’s a good bird? Over here yeah?”
“I’ve got…” Lydia rooted through her sleeves. “Crackers! You like crackers, pretty birdie? Birdie want a cracker?”
“You’ve had food this whole time?” I said.
“I was saving it for later, to help you with the blood loss.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Well it’s not important now, is it? Can you reach that thing?”
I stretched my right arm as far as I could, feeling the joints in my left arm pop. But right as I was about to grasp one glittering wing, I remembered something.
“Hey Lyd? If an old lady in the forest once told me to be polite or I wouldn’t get anywhere, should I believe her?”
“What?”
I cleared my throat and put on my most dulcet, Fritz-like tone of voice.
“Say there, bird. Er, learcock. You’re a very fine specimen, aren’t you? Nice sharp beak.”
Lydia was looking at me like I was crazy, so I turned my face toward the bird and pasted on a smile.
“Would you mind awfully coming over to me, and maybe singing one of those lovely songs of yours?”
The bird turned its head to one side, then the other. It gave a cautious hop in my direction.
“That’s a nice bird. Over to my left, if it’s not too much trouble. I really do appreciate it.”
The bird took a shortcut across my chest, digging its sharp claws into my shirt and bashing me in the face with its enormous tailfeathers while I willed every cell in my body not to sneeze.
“We would appreciate it if you would, uh, see about his hand?” Lydia said, catching on.
The learcock clawed its way down my arm and gave the crystal encasing my hand an exploratory peck.
“That’s a good bird,” I said. “I’ll owe you one for this.”
“Don’t say that!” Lydia gasped. The bird ruffled its feathers and glared at her, then looked back at me as if to say, “may I continue?”
“Don’t worry about her,” I reassured the bird. I would have felt ridiculous, if I didn’t usually feel that way all the time anyway.
The bird flapped its wings, settled into position, and sang its song. I felt the crystal start to shake and heat up, a frenetic vibration that had me gritting my teeth not to scream. Just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore, the entire thing burst into a shower of crystal shards. My hand was free.
“Thank you!” I cried, scooping the bird up in a hug. It waited politely for me to stop sneezing into my handkerchief, then gave me a sharp peck on the ear.
I put the bird down and it hopped a few steps away, then looked back at us and tilted its head, clearly telling us to follow it.
“Well you did say you owed it a favor,” Lydia said. “Literally the first thing they tell us in school is not to make open-ended promises, especially with magical entities, but sure, let’s follow this bird and probably get eaten or turned into a bird or turned into a bird and then eaten–”
“Not all of us went to school,” I said, “or did you forget your hardscrabble upbringing already?”
The bird came to a stop in front of a massive boulder of a gem at the base of the crystal waterfall.
“Is this what you want?” I asked the bird. It nuzzled its head against the stone and let out a small keening cry. I pressed my face against the slab and tried to make out the form of whatever was inside.
“It’s a giant bird,” Lydia gasped.
The bird chirped in affirmation.
“You want us to get it out?” I said. “But we already tried to break the rock on my hand all day and got nowhere.”
I swear the bird rolled its eyes at me. Maybe only magical birds can do t
hat, but it definitely happened. It threw back its head and sang its crystal-breaking song again. I put my hand on the boulder but only felt the faintest rumble.
“I don’t think it’s working,” I said stupidly. The bird pecked me on one foot and resumed singing, locking eyes with me as it did. Now I got it.
“It wants us to sing too.”
“What, so we can free that giant bird that hasn’t eaten in who knows how long?” Lydia said.
“Come on.”
“You made the promise. You sing.”
So, I did. I’ve never been much of a singer, and the bird seemed offended by my first attempt, but I did my best to match its tone. The louder I got the more I felt the crystal vibrate, but it wasn’t enough.
“I don’t think I can do it alone, Lydia,” I said.
Lydia sighed and started singing too, her voice a surprisingly fine soprano. I guess country estate money can pay for quality music lessons.
As our voices blended together, the learcock flitted around us, pecking at the crystal in between notes. The vibration was audible now, an ear-splitting whine that echoed off the cliff walls. I felt the first crack before I saw it, and barely had enough time to turn Lydia’s face away before the whole thing shattered.
When we turned around, a magnificent charcoal-gray bird loomed over us, shaking crystal fragments out of its feathers. It didn’t have that luminous quality the little bird did, but they were clearly – forgive me for this – birds of a feather.
“I think it’s a learhen,” Lydia said in awe.
“I think it’s its mom,” I corrected. The little bird chattered excitedly, hopping and pecking and submitting to a vigorous preening by the larger bird. I was still slightly afraid we’d be eaten, but it’s always nice to see family reunited.
The massive bird bent its neck and brought its eyes level with mine, sniffing me all over and ruffling my hair with its razor-sharp obsidian beak. The little bird hopped up on its back and kept chattering away, dropping in a few notes of the crystal-breaking song as if it were filling the larger one in on the day it had had.
The hen stretched its wings and paced around the basin, pecking at the giant crystals where last year’s unfortunates were still imprisoned. Now that I knew what it felt like to have that stuff stuck to you, I really felt sorry for those fellows.