Even in these summer country wilds, there is no winter, but I do not argue with him. He walks with me back to the iris palace, and we pass a pair of flower-boys jumping rope with a skein of thick grass. I smile at them, and the king looks away. “I like watching the children play,” I say, hoping this is less offensive a pastime than gazing over the wilds. “We don’t have any children in the palace.”
He whirls on me then, anger brimming in his eyes and his great moths’ wing orbs quivering at me as well. “Do not speak of that,” he hisses, gripping my wrist in his, hauling me into the roots of the iris where the stalks grow tight together. He presses me against one, my wings crumpling, aching.
“I—I am sorry,” I breathe.
“My damned wives can’t go to seed and you—I had hoped you were from outside, different, a wild lily, that you would give me seeds to plant. But you are useless as the others.”
He drops my arm and it burns where he touched me, and I feel his shame seeping into me. I tremble, on the verge of tears, and he takes my hand again, softer, gentler, though I stiffen just the same.
“I thought you knew. Everyone knows. Everyone talks.”
“No one talks to me.”
He doesn’t question this, and he lets me run back to my chamber.
The days are too long, and finally, I make up my mind. I will go to the wilds. My wings can bear me, I think, I hope. And the king—he will not approve if he catches me, but he visits me less often than before anyway. I am a disappointment.
I leave in the pearly gray before dawn, when the dew is still thick on the leaves and the flower-people haven’t woken to sip their morning nectar and stretch their wings on the unfurled petals of their plants. I discover that I can fly far afield before I tire, and, when I see the rose bower below, I slowly descend to it.
The flower-woman, the wingless one, is there, reclining under the bower, nibbling on a blossom of clover. She jolts upright with a start.
“Wait!” I call.
“You are one of them? The Winged Court?” She watches me, tense, questioning. I bear wings. But I am not the color of summer. I am not graceful.
“I live with them now. I came from the northlands.”
“The northlands!” She gapes. “But you live with them, now.” Accusation glazes thick in her voice.
“I did not have anywhere else to go,” I said, “when winter came to the northlands. There are no others like me—like us—there. I did not know there was anyone here in the wilds,” I add.
“We are all from the wilds.” She almost laughs. “They did not tell you that? They did not tell you how they tamed the flowers and brought them under their power? How they learned the secrets of the wings?”
“They tell me little enough.”
She softens then. “What is your name? I’m Tansy.”
“They call me Majya.”
“They do!” She shakes her head, her cropped hair brushing faintly pointed ears. “And what do you call yourself?”
I haven’t said it in months, the word that used to be my name. “Once, I was called Floret,” I say, and it sticks to my tongue and feels strange in my mouth. It’s not my name any longer. Perhaps it never was.
“That’s no better.” She grins. Her smile is impish and clever, revealing dimples set deep in each sun-brown cheek. “What should I call you, then?”
“I—I suppose I don’t know.”
She raises a pert brow but doesn’t press me. Instead, she tugs a rose petal free from its moorings above her and ties it into a band around her dark brown hair, watching me all the while. “Why did you leave the garden? No one leaves the garden.”
I am not sure why, but I tell her everything—the agony of the wings and the cold dismissal of the other wives; the king’s visits and his anger with me. That my swallow friend had left.
She shakes her head with each part of the story. After a long while, she speaks. “Come, I’ll show you where the clover are full of nectar and there are strawberries as big as your head.”
So I stay, until the evening shadows lengthen and I know I cannot return to the palace tonight, not with bats and owls patrolling the skies. The rose bower is comfortable, with moss beneath the curving thorned vines and a sweet scent floating between the blooms. Tansy hands me a ripe indigo berry. Tomorrow I will decide where to go. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will decide what I should be called.
© Copyright 2019 Rowenna Miller
Rowenna Miller - [BCS292 S01] - Nameless in the Winged Court (html) Page 2