by Hanna Howard
I flushed at my own words, knowing I must sound like a terrible hypocrite. All of us knew quite well how prejudiced I was against even my own power. But for the first time in my life, fear of what someone else might think of me was not uppermost among my concerns. This child—banshee or not—needed someone to help her, just as I had needed someone when I was a little girl. Yarrow and Linden had come to my aid then, and I could come to her aid now.
“I think Siria’s right,” said Linden quietly.
Merrall rolled her eyes and looked at Yarrow. “We have enough hungry mouths without adding another. And what if she has been planted? What if Iyzabel sent her?”
Yarrow glanced back over his shoulder. “Iyzabel has never had anything to do with banshees,” he said quietly. “They have no magic apart from their Sight, so they aren’t useful as a weapon. I don’t think she’s a plant.” He sighed, then looked at me. “We can’t take any added risks. If she comes with us, she can’t leave. And it must be her choice. I won’t have you coercing her against her will.”
I nodded eagerly.
He scowled at me, and his voice became even quieter. “Hear me when I say she’ll have to stay, Siria. If she comes, she will hear things, learn things that we could not risk anyone else discovering. If we take her in, she must stay with us faithfully until we release her.”
“I’ll ask her.”
Elegy was still standing at the edge of the trees. Without her pearlescent glow, she looked even smaller than before. Her lip trembled as I approached, but when I smiled, she returned the gesture tentatively.
“It’s your choice,” I said, crouching in front of her again. “If you want to come with us, you’re welcome. But you can’t leave if you do, at least not for a while. And it might be dangerous, but—” I looked back over my shoulder at Yarrow, whose wiry eyebrows were raised over his spectacles; Linden, who quickly tried to hide his miserable expression; and Merrall, who looked as if she had just been force-fed entrails. I took a deep breath. “But we’ll take care of you and protect you. If you don’t want to be alone, you don’t have to be.”
She studied my face, her wide violet eyes taking in my freckles and unwashed, fire-bright hair as though they would give her clues as to my trustworthiness. I didn’t know if she had ever heard of a sunchild before, or if it would matter to her if she had. It was plain she had not, at least, heard that the queen of Terra-Volat was in the process of tearing her kingdom apart in search of a girl who matched my description.
It was also clear by her expression of mingled disbelief and hope that she had not often met with a person who didn’t disapprove of her.
“I’ll come with you,” she said in a small voice, and then flinched as if waiting for me to revoke the offer.
I stood up and offered her my hand. “Good,” I said. “Come on. You can walk with me.”
25
CHAPTER
At first Elegy was about as talkative as a rock, though Merrall’s frequent dark and forbidding looks couldn’t have been much encouragement to speak. She walked mostly beside me, either keeping her eyes downcast or sneaking furtive glances at the rest of us.
“How did she get through your defenses?” I heard Linden ask Yarrow not long after we set off again, his voice low and worried. Yarrow’s reply was too quiet for me to hear, but I could tell he was disturbed. Elegy might not be a threat, but if she could penetrate Yarrow’s enchantment, who else might? I saw more evidence of magic spreading out from Yarrow’s Runepiece as we walked on into the night, bracken occasionally glowing white or blue beneath my boots.
After another few days, however, we relaxed again—all except Linden and me, who politely avoided each other with an effort that, on my end, felt like having a splinter perpetually embedded in my chest—and Elegy began to seem more comfortable too. I learned she had come from a large colony of banshees near Myrial Lake, and that her mother was a harsh, unfeeling matriarch who thought success was only to be found in the number of deaths one accurately predicted and the subsequent swoons caused by the heralding of those deaths. I ached as I listened; Elegy’s mother sounded a lot like Milla, though perhaps more liberal in her criticism.
The fourteenth of fifteen children, Elegy had always preferred a sweeter kind of singing—less like a dirge than other banshees, she said—and from the very start had suffered her mother’s disapproval.
“I’d been wondering for a while if they might banish me,” she said. “So I guess it wasn’t much of a surprise.”
In return for her confidence, I told her that until recently I hadn’t known I had any powers at all, and admitted I was still reluctant to use them. She seemed to know very little about sunchildren, but still gave me a confused look when I’d said this.
“You don’t want your powers?”
“Well,” I said, looking over my shoulder to judge whether Yarrow was within eavesdropping distance. “I mean, it’s more complicated than that. My powers are really dangerous, you know? I’ve already hurt Linden, and who knows what else I might do before I figure out how to control myself. If I figure it out. It’s not exactly that I don’t want my powers, I guess . . . I’m just—I just . . .”
“You’re afraid of them.”
My shoulders slumped. I hated hearing it spoken. “I suppose.”
Elegy squinted up at me, and the judgment in her face both shamed and annoyed me. I knew how it must sound to someone who wanted her own powers so badly, but she really had no idea what it was like to be a danger to the people you loved.
“I didn’t think you were a coward,” she said, her words soft, not meant to be cruel. They stung anyway.
I chuckled bitterly. “Well. You obviously don’t know me very well. I’ve spent most of my life quaking in fear of things—literally quaking, half the time—and I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without being afraid of at least one thing.”
“Being afraid doesn’t make you a coward,” said Elegy, sounding surprised. “Everyone’s afraid of things. It’s how you react that makes you a coward.”
I snorted.
“I’m serious! You stood up for me to your friends, which was brave. But hiding from the things you’re afraid of . . . that’s what’s cowardly.”
I didn’t reply, but I could feel the flush in my cheeks.
Elegy patted my arm, and I was surprised to find her smiling. “I was wrong,” she murmured. “You’re not a coward. You’re just not being as brave as you could be.”
Sometime during the afternoon, Linden shot a pheasant, which was the first game we’d had in weeks that wasn’t rabbit or squirrel. The prospect of roasted pheasant that evening lifted everyone’s spirits, and by the time we stopped to make camp, we were the liveliest we’d been the whole course of the journey.
Linden was warmer toward me as we built up the fire, cleaned the bird, and stewed the root vegetables Elegy had found along the trail, all of us reminiscing about our favorite foods from home and dreaming of the things we would eat when the world was right again. I wished for the thousandth time I was able to tell Linden the truth, but every time I considered it, I saw the outcome as clear as reality: Linden’s hurt would turn to determination, and that look would come back into his eyes—the melting, burning look that stole the bones from my legs—and before I could stop him, he would follow through with the almost-kiss from the cave.
He would kiss me, and I would kiss him back, and by the time I came to my senses there would be nothing left of his face but charred, blackened bones. It was impossible. Not for anything would I risk Linden’s life.
When at last we sat down to eat, Elegy opened up a bottle she had inside her satchel and offered to share it with the rest of us. It turned out to be some kind of banshee draft that did nothing whatsoever to the tiny, fragile-looking Elegy, but made the rest of us slightly giddy. It was the first time I had ever heard Merrall laugh, and the sound was unexpectedly bright, like bells. Linden looked more relaxed than he had in days, and I found myself smiling
at him from across the fire. He tentatively smiled back.
And then, while we all whooped and urged him on, Yarrow turned his Runepiece into a fiddle. With his lit pipe clamped firmly between his back teeth, he wedged the instrument between his shoulder and jaw and raised a silver-gray bow to the strings.
Anyone who had never heard Yarrow play before, I thought as my blood rose and hummed to the first barely grazed note, had never properly heard the music of the instrument. The bow flew over the strings like a flame dancing on the wick of a candle—leaping up and skimming across, diving down and running back and forth, so fast it was barely visible. The strings sang with a voice that seemed to come from the world beyond the worlds, for it was wild and elegant at once; sometimes keening so high it was almost a screech, but never too severe; other times dragging low and resonant and so rich the sound echoed through my bones. If I hadn’t heard him play an ordinary fiddle so often before, I might have believed the Runepiece instrument was magical.
For a moment after he began, everyone went motionless, as still as the trees that surrounded us. Merrall’s mouth sagged open, and Elegy looked spellbound. But then Merrall laughed and jumped to her feet, offering her hand—to my complete amazement—to the banshee, who stared at her in just as much surprise. In another moment, Merrall had pulled Elegy up and was teaching her how to dance a jig.
Linden’s laugher rang out at this miraculous development, and he got up to come sit beside me. My heart started to bang off the walls of my chest—should I dance with him?—but before I could think what to do, he nudged my shoulder gently with his. I turned, wondering how I could possibly avoid touching his skin, but instead of offering me his hand, he smiled. “Sing with me?”
When we were young, and nights in front of Yarrow and Linden’s fire were a regular event, Yarrow had often played while Linden and I sang. If we didn’t already know the words to his songs—which was often—we made up our own. But it had been years since we’d had a night like this; the ritual had stopped when I went to Gildenbrook.
I nodded and Linden’s eyes glinted, making him look like a much younger version of himself. Something so sweet it was almost painful swept through my chest. The smells of wood smoke and pipe tobacco joined with the music to press the clear image of that old cabin into my mind: I could see the carved table and the woodstove, the brick fireplace, the hanging bunches of herbs and haunches of salted meats, the mud-encrusted spades, and gunnysacks filled with seeds. I could see Linden, boyish and confident, laughter in his eyes and dirt beneath his fingernails as he sat before the crackling fire. I could hear our voices, so familiar to one another then, and Yarrow’s violin weaving through them like golden thread.
And now we sang together again, breaking off periodically in fits of laughter when one or both of us got the words wrong. I was careful not to touch Linden, but my skin threw scattered light over all of us as the energy in my chest expanded, and I did not bother to pull it back in.
Yarrow twinkled down at us through the haze of pipe smoke, and began another song—sad and beautiful, but one I knew well, though I had not heard it in many years. Linden’s eyes were bright when I looked at him, and for the first time since the cave, they did not drop away.
We began quietly, but our voices strengthened as they mingled with the crescendo of the violin. Linden’s husky tenor rose and fell with the melody, echoing Yarrow’s strings, and I sang the harmony, blending my alto with Linden’s voice in each verse.
I first met Sweet Sadie in moonlight;
Though perhaps it was she that did glim.
The blue silk of her gown that flowed to the ground
With her ankles barefooted and thin.
Her green eyes alight as she moved through the night,
Oh Sweet Sadie of the Glen.
No shadow upon her could fall;
She appeared as though in matins.
Her pearly face glowed as if heaven were showed,
But dimly through the veil of her skin.
And to me I called the fairest of all:
Sweet Sadie of the Glen.
It was a folk song, old and familiar to me as Yarrow himself, but I faltered as the lyrics fell off my tongue. Well though I knew them, they suddenly blazed with new meaning. Linden caught my gaze, held it, and I saw with amazement that he had understood them all along.
Her hair was the color of fire,
And raged as a flame from within.
In her voice could be found a musical sound,
A softness that ruptures and rends.
If praise could be higher, I would not be a liar
For Sweet Sadie of the Glen.
I’ll soon be with her always
As the envy of all men.
For to be close to that beautiful ghost
I’ve drunken a dram of black poison.
As the world turns to haze I begin my days
With Sweet Sadie of the Glen.
We sang the last note together, and I heard our voices cease at precisely the same time. As the song trailed away and came to a trembling halt with the last stroke of Yarrow’s violin, I stared hard into the red embers of the fire. I didn’t need to ask. I knew now that the song was about—had always been about—a sunchild.
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Merrall said, her throaty voice constrained, “That was very beautiful.”
I continued to gaze into the fire, all my nerves tingling. My chest ached. Linden did not move; he remained sitting beside me, elbows on his knees while the air between us hung thick and tremulous—as real as the music had been—and my entire left side pulsed with awareness of him. The others began to get up around us, stretching and yawning and muttering about sleep, but Linden and I seemed carved out of stone.
When he touched my hand, I jumped, even though his fingertips were soft as breath. I turned to look at him, fighting to contain the rampant sun energy inside me, which had swelled as we sang. The expression in his eyes was inscrutable, a wild mix of hope and doubt and confusion and longing, and I knew I was doing a bad job of upholding what I had claimed in the cave. The mere fact I was glowing had to be a clue to my real feelings, even if by some chance he couldn’t see them written in my face. I ducked my head, trying to fight off the haze of banshee wine and music long enough to think what to do . . .
What would happen if I told him the truth? Was it possible there was some way to truly control this power, to keep myself from being a danger to him?
I drew a breath, opened my mouth, lifted my eyes to his—
And he dropped his gaze and turned away. Doubt seized me, but before I could react, he cleared his throat and stood up. “We need sleep,” he said gruffly, and walked off toward the others.
I felt as though I had been emptied of all but my bones, which now seemed to be made of some cold, clanging metal. Were it not for my conscious control of it, my light would have blinked out all at once; but I dimmed it slowly, drawing it in by degrees so I would not make Linden suspicious.
This was for the best, I told myself as I followed him toward the aqua orb and bundled shapes on the ground that were Merrall, Yarrow, and Elegy. Let Linden stay angry; it was far better than being maimed or dead.
The campfire had burned almost out, and the early spring night chill had its grip on the forest. As the emptiness inside me expanded, I was relieved to lie down beside Elegy and wrap myself in my blankets, squeezing my eyes shut against tears.
My dreams were unsettling. Elegy pinned me with an accusing violet eye and said, “Coward. You are a coward, sunchild.”
She turned into Linden, who leaned in to kiss me, but then drew back at the last second. He became a beautiful woman with silky black hair and green-painted lips, who smiled darkly before pressing her mouth to my cheek.
“Not a coward at all,” she said in a low, purring voice. “It takes courage to resist using your powers. No one understands that, do they?”
The spot she had kissed burned cold.
26
; CHAPTER
The next day was foggy and slate-colored, like my mood, and no one spoke much until we stopped for the midday meal. I sat down beside Merrall, as far away from Linden as I could get. The naiad had been silent all day, and she, too, was staring absently into space. But as I watched her in a vague, detached way, I realized her chin had begun, very slightly, to tremble.
“Merrall—are you all right?”
She actually jumped, as if she had completely forgotten I was there. I watched her warily and was alarmed to see tears glittering in her huge aqua eyes.
“Fine,” said Merrall in almost a bark. “I am fine. I was just going to go look for a stream. I can hear one . . . down the ridge.”
I hesitated, then said, “Do you mind if I come along?”
Merrall looked startled. “I—I suppose not. If you want to.”
We picked our way down a rocky slope toward the trickling sounds of a stream, and I wondered if the naiad’s health and mood were tied to the water in the same way mine seemed to be tied to the sun. Perhaps going so long without her usual amount of time underwater was taking a toll.
“Is it hard for you?” I asked as we neared the stream. The trees here seemed healthier than the ones farther up the incline, and large patches of soft green moss grew along the banks. “Traveling over land for so long?”
Merrall shrugged. “It is not terrible. There have been enough brooks and streams along the way. Do you want to swim, sunchild?”
“I—n-no thanks,” I stammered. The memory of our icy excursion through the Umbraz canals still haunted me. “You go ahead, though.”
Merrall gave a smile that did not reach her eyes and walked straight into the water.
The change was immediate. Where they touched the water, Merrall’s feet turned deep fuchsia, widening and flattening into a pair of fins even before the rest of her legs were submerged. Glittering scales sprang up on her ankles below the fluttering seaweed garments, spreading as her legs fused into one appendage and flicked with tremendous power, propelling her into the greenish water. As Merrall plunged beneath the surface, the reedy-brown strands of her hair turned brightest violet, shimmering in the gray air as her head reemerged. Every part of her had intensified, had become a more radiant version of itself, and her skin flushed dazzling blue.
