The Republic of Birds

by Jessica Miller

  We fly over barren plains, gritty with ice and boulders until, through the distant haze, the outline of a city appears.

  Soon the outline takes form and I can pick out domes and turrets, buildings, sprawling streets. I have seen this city before, through the map. I know that it is Ptashkagrad. I know that one of these turrets holds Mira’s cage.

  The birds dip down, flying low to the ground, swooping through the streets of the city. They fly like dark, feathered arrows straight into the heart of the city. It must have been grand once. But now the buildings are stained with a century’s grime. Their windows are broken. Doors hang ajar. The cobblestones of the wide avenues are choked with weeds.

  As fast as we swooped down, we soar up again, so quickly it feels like I have left my stomach behind me.

  I am lifted higher and higher, out of the streets and into the clouds.

  Up here, the city tells a different story.

  Up here, the tiled roofs of the buildings are gleaming. They are dotted with nests woven from twigs and boughs. Some are small, flat and saucer-shaped. Others are tiered like cake stands. Some are the size of small houses. Almost all the nests contain furniture that must have once belonged to the people in the houses below: Persian carpets, and tapestries, heavy wooden dressers, even a pianola.

  Up in the mountains, at the Imperial Centre for Avian Observation, the sky was wide and—most of the time, at least—empty. Here it is filled with birds. And all around me, I hear birdsong, soft and melodious, swelling rich and warm.

  If it weren’t for my fears for Mira—and the mysterious swarm of birds that has taken me prisoner—I’d be enchanted by this city in the sky.

  I turn my head one way then the other, searching for a glimpse of Mira, as we head towards a cluster of tall buildings at what seems to be the city’s centre.

  The swarm shoots upwards. I see all the rooftops of the city below me. My breath catches as, between the turrets and domes, I see the glint of a golden cage.

  The birds fly lower, heading straight for the cage. My heart stops when I see that it is empty, apart from a thick layer of feathers on the floor. But, no—it’s not quite empty after all. I see a girl-sized lump beneath the feathers, and a tuft of pale hair.

  ‘Mira!’ I cry.

  The birds grip me tighter in their claws.

  ‘Mira!’

  She bolts upright, and feathers fall around her. She she scrambles to the bars of the cage, her hands reaching for me. I reach out to her but the birds swiftly pull me away, higher and higher into the sky.

  Mira is here.

  The birds surge forward. Other birds are swooping around us now. There are birds patrolling the skies, and sentries on the guttering of every other roof watching the streets below with their beady eyes.

  The largest flock seems to hover over a grand building, tall and white and decorated with rosettes and curlicues. The nest on top of it is woven from shiny, silvery things—combs and brooches and candelabras and snuff-boxes—and it is surrounded by guard birds. A bright red banner with a yellow swirl at its centre flies over the nest. And smaller banners with the same swirl hang from the roofs all around it.

  A voice rings out from inside the nest. It’s not overly loud, but it is crisp and commanding.

  ‘Olga Oblomova,’ it says. ‘I’m glad you’ve come.’

  The birds lower me into the nest and I land with a tinkle among the silver. Then they lift effortlessly into the sky, leaving me standing between two large black birds.

  Before me, a bird perches on a silver throne. She has mottled grey-brown feathers and a sharp yellow beak. She is far smaller than the guard birds, but taller than me. Her eyes are bright and she has a stern regal air.

  Could she be Ptashka?

  I stand with my fists clenched and my lips pressed together, holding my fear tight under my skin.

  ‘Do you see, Grigorski?’ the bird who might be Ptashka asks grandly, and the slightly larger and blacker of the large black birds beside me nods its head.

  ‘Do you see, Magdanav?’ the bird speaks again.

  The slightly smaller and less black of the two birds nods its head, too.

  ‘This is the girl. This is the girl you were to bring me.’

  Grigorski speaks. ‘Yes, Your Illustriousness, Ptashka.’

  I suck in my breath. So it is Ptashka. I should feel lucky—Ptashka surely has the power to return Mira to me. But I am uneasy, too. What does she want with me?

  ‘When we saw the other one dancing,’ continues the bird Grigorski, ‘we assumed…’

  ‘The other one looks pretty. And her dancing is amusing to watch, I’ll admit. But I asked for the girl with talent.’

  I look around, confused. The girl with talent. Can that be me?

  Ptashka’s beak curves into something like a smile. ‘Won’t you take a seat, Olga?’

  ‘Umm…’ I don’t know what to say. There is nowhere to sit. But Ptashka waves her wings, and a small flock of birds appears from out of the sky. Their beaks are filled with twigs and stalks of grass. In moments, they have woven a comfortable-looking chair for me.

  I sit.

  Ptashka’s eyes flick over me, taking in my ragged dress, the muddied mink fur at my collar, the thick patterns of scrapes and bruises that cover my arms and legs, the dirt that has settled under my fingernails and in my knuckles. ‘You’ve had a long journey,’ she says. ‘I expect you’d like some refreshments.’

  This is not the welcome I expected to receive in the Republic.

  ‘Refreshments?’ I say. ‘Yes please. That’s very kind of you, Your…’ How had the black bird called Grigorski addressed her? ‘Your Illustriousness.’

  Ptashka waves a wing and a grey bird with a long thin neck glides down from the clouds with a silver platter in its talons and perches on the arm of my chair. With one outstretched claw it proffers the platter. On it are three seed biscuits—more seed than biscuit—and a glass filled with a steaming amber liquid that smells sweet like honey.

  I realise that I haven’t thought about what would happen once I arrived here. I had thought a lot about the crossing: how I could get through the Borderlands, how I would traverse the High Stikhlos. But after that? Did I think I would snatch Mira out from under the pointy beaks of the enemy birds? I certainly never imagined an armchair and biscuits. But where is Mira?

  Ptashka looks at the biscuits and the honey-smelling drink. ‘I hope this approximates your human food well enough,’ she says.

  ‘It looks wonderful,’ I tell her. ‘Most appetising.’ I’m not even lying. Even though it doesn’t look quite as delicious as the inexpertly cooked trout I’ve been eating for the last four days.

  ‘And yet, you’re not eating,’ she says.

  I have no appetite. I only want to find Mira and take her home.

  ‘Please, Ptashka. You have my sister,’ I say. ‘Mira.’

  Ptashka nods. ‘And?’ she says.

  ‘And I want to take her home,’ I say, shocked by my own boldness.

  Ptashka stretches her wings, and puts her face close to mine. ‘It was you I wanted,’ she says.

  Me? Surely Ptashka is mistaken.

  ‘After all,’ says Ptashka, ‘what would the Republic want with a precocious ten-year-old ballerina?’

  ‘But what would the Republic want with an unprecocious nearly thirteen-year-old girl instead?’ I reply.

  Ptashka looks suddenly crafty. ‘Ah, but you’re not a girl. Not just a girl. You’re a yaga. We have been watching you.’

  I remember sitting up in bed in the Imperial Centre with Great Names in Tsarish Cartography open across my lap. I remember the flutter of wings in the dark outside the window.

  ‘While your family did their best to ignore the signs that you were out of the ordinary, I was paying attention. Where they feared an uncanny kind of otherness, I saw potential.’

  A hot flush of pride rises up from somewhere deep inside me. It warms my blood and colours my cheeks. ‘Really?’ I say, and the
word comes out all soft and shy.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says Ptashka. ‘I suspect you have deep, powerful magic inside you—who knows what feats you’re capable of? But there’s just one feat that I have in mind…’

  Shadows fall across the nest. I think, at first, they are clouds passing overhead. But when I look up, I see the sky is suddenly thick with birds.

  ‘There’s something I want you to do for me, Olga,’ says Ptashka. ‘Something I want you to bring me.’

  She leans even closer to me, angling her sharp beak. I sit on my hands to keep from anxiously twisting them together in my lap.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course,’ she continues, ‘I will reward you. Bring me what I ask, and I’ll give you your sister.’

  A shiver of excitement runs through me. I had hardly dared hope I would bring Mira back with me and now it is all but done. I can’t think of anything I wouldn’t bring Ptashka in exchange for my sister.

  ‘I’ll bring it to you, whatever it is,’ I say. ‘Just tell me what you want.’

  Ptashka lazily stretches out her wings, folds them away again, and finally says, ‘I want the firebird’s egg.’

  I gasp. That’s impossible. She must know I can’t bring her the firebird’s egg. But Ptashka looks me straight in the eye and I understand that she means precisely what she says.

  A sharp wind flaps the flag above her nest, and I see that the yellow flourish has two flame-like wings and a long straight beak.

  A firebird.

  Even if I could find the firebird’s egg, what would happen if I brought it to Ptashka? With a firebird on her side, would she start another war? And then I’m aware of a creeping voice at the back of my head: with the firebird on their side, would my Father and the Tsarina do any different? I shake my head. It doesn’t matter either way. I’ll never be able to find the egg.

  ‘I…can’t bring you the egg,’ I say. ‘It’s hidden in the Unmappable Blank.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Ptashka, ‘but I believe you can. It has been reported to me that you have an ability with maps.’

  ‘But there is no map of the Unmappable Blank. And if you’ve been watching me,’ I correct her, ‘you’ll know that my magical ability is quite limited. In fact, if I push myself too far, I might lose my magical ability altogether.’

  ‘And yet, you’re determined. You will go to the Unmappable Blank. After all, it’s the only way to save your sister.’

  My shoulders slump. My spine sags. I have never felt so hopeless. What Ptashka is asking is impossible. I can’t save Mira.

  But even making it as far as Ptashkagrad seemed impossible when I started out. I pull my spine up straight. It seems impossible, too, that I could ever find the firebird’s egg in the Unmappable Blank, let alone bring it back to Ptashka. There is no map of the Blank, so no way for me to get there, even if I were as powerful a yaga as Baba Basha.

  But when I think of Mira, I know it is an impossible thing that I have to do.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I say.

  Ptashka flicks her wing again. The birds disperse, all but one. It streaks down through the cloud and lands at the edge of the nest. I have never seen such a beautiful bird: its feathers are bright as jewels, deep blue down streaked with paintbox greens and reds. Its beak is elegant and long, its legs slender. It spreads its wings with a flourish.

  ‘Petrovska will take you to the edge of the Blank,’ says Ptashka.

  ‘If you don’t return in two days, I’ll assume the Blank has swallowed you up, like the explorers that went before you.’

  ‘And what will happen to Mira then?’ I ask.

  ‘She will no longer be of any use to me,’ she says in a chilly tone. ‘And her dancing will only amuse my army of birds for so long.’

  Petrovska dips her long neck and I understand that I am to climb on. I hoist myself onto her back. My hands sink into the waxy softness of her feathers. She tenses her legs, ready to spring up and into flight, and I turn to Ptashka. ‘And when I come back with the egg,’ I say, ‘you’ll give Mira back?’

  She looks at me with her small, hard eyes. ‘When you give me the egg,’ she says, ‘that is precisely what I’ll do.’

  Petrovska lifts into the air and I am carried by her weightless energy. It is nothing like being snatched by a swarm of birds and dragged through the sky. Petrovska flies in a straight, clean line. The wind is fresh on my cheeks, and as we rise higher and higher the air glitters with crystals of frost. I sink my legs into the warmth of Petrovska’s feathers and spread my arms wide, letting the sky fall through my fingers, as we fly towards the Unmappable Blank.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Into the Unmappable Blank

  PTASHKAGRAD GROWS SMALLER and smaller behind us as we fly over the plains of the Republic. The bare frozen earth gives way to swathes of feathery frosted grass, then to expanses of deep, crisp milky-blue snow dotted with fir trees. Petrovska flies on with no sign of tiring and I am left to my own thoughts. Which are mostly about the egg.

  What horrors could be unleashed if I give the egg to Ptashka? I know I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t know where to begin looking for it, and even if I do find it, how will I find my way out of the Blank and back to the Republic? But what if I do find the egg and I do make it back? This is the egg that started the War in the Skies. Am I going to drop it straight into the hands—well, the claws—of our enemy?

  But if I don’t, what will happen to Mira? How long can she go on dancing in that cage?

  Tears prickle in my eyes. I need to find the egg. I need to try, at least.

  We fly on in frozen silence. The ground below grows thicker and thicker with ice and snow. There are no trees, not even small, stunted ones. There is no grass. There is just…white nothingness.

  But at last, a tree appears in the whiteness, it is so thick with frost and icicles that it looks like one of the chandeliers in the ballroom of the Stone Palace. Petrovska lands on one of its icy boughs, and I climb down from her back and tumble to the ground, sending snow puffing up around me like flour.

  Petrovska barely takes a breath before she flies off the branch and away, leaving me alone in the vast white Blank.

  I start to walk. With each step, I sink to my knee in snow. I have to drag my numbed feet one after the other up out of it to keep going. The white of the ground is the same as the white of the sky. I look back over my shoulder. I can see Petrovska, speck-like, in the distance. But then snow starts to fall and she disappears. I huddle close into my mink-lined coat. It doesn’t keep me completely warm, but it does, at least, stop me from freezing. I could kiss Anastasia right now—if I ever see her again, I think, I will.

  The snow falls harder and harder, coming down in thick curtains. I move forwards. Or maybe backwards. There are no markers for me to judge my progress against.

  I can feel the cold creeping into my limbs and taking hold of my thoughts. I need to find the egg. But everything in the Blank is the same. The egg could be anywhere.

  But Ptashka thinks I can find it. My ‘ability with maps’—those were her exact words. Perhaps my map holds a clue. I take off my gloves and with freezing fingers, I open Varvara’s bag and take out the map.

  I press my hand to the Blank and hope to feel something, anything, but it is just the same as it was in the classroom at Bleak Steppe: nothing. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I taste nothing. How can I? My medium is maps, and the Blank has never been mapped.

  I fold the map roughly and stuff it back into the bag. My fingers are numb and clumsy. As I push the map into the memory bag, my fingers brush against something strangely warm. It’s the feather Fedor gave me. But it isn’t dull and brown anymore. It’s a copper colour and, even in the icy Blank, it radiates a faint warm glow. It is beautiful, but I don’t have time to admire it. I put it back in the bag, and as I pull the drawstring closed I fumble. Before I can stop them, Varvara’s memories are leaking out, covering the snow with a dark shimmering liquid, like an oil spill.

&nbs
p; As I try to scoop the memories back into the bag, they turn vaporous and rise into the cold air, knitting themselves together, lifting up around me until they have formed the shape of a palace. It’s the Stone Palace—made completely out of Varvara’s recollections of it.

  Looking around at the cold white expanse stretching out around me, I make a quick decision. I walk into palace. I feel immediately relieved—it is chilly, but the chill is manageable compared to the bone-cracking cold of the Blank outside.

  I move through the entrance hall, past shadowy guards and make for the staircase.

  I am heading for the palace’s highest turret. Up there I’ll get a better view of the Blank. Maybe I’ll see something that will lead me to the egg. But I am soon lost. Sometimes doors open out onto nothing, or corridors loop around on themselves bringing me back to the place I began. The windows look out onto the garden in different seasons, depending on how Varvara has remembered them. A clock reads four o’clock in one room, and a quarter to nine in the next. I start to worry about getting lost in the confused corridors of Varvara’s memory—I only have two days in the Blank. I can’t afford to waste time.

  I turn into a shadowy hallway, lined with dark oil paintings. I am halfway down when a door opens and three women step out into the hallway. I recognise them from another of Varvara’s memories. The three yagas of the Imperial Coven. The first is Basha, still ageless yet also somehow younger looking than she was at Bleak Steppe. The second is the crumbling old yaga with a thin trickle of spiders behind her. The last is the red-haired yaga, Anzhelika.

  They walk down the hallway deep in conversation. And I follow them.

  ‘I definitely had it at tea-time,’ says the old yaga. Anzhelika sighs. ‘Devora,’ she says, ‘if the Tsarina finds your nose in her afternoon tea pastries again, she is going to be most displeased.’

  ‘Hush.’ Basha holds up her hand. The other two stop and listen. I listen, too.

  ‘...if the egg hatches,’ says a voice.

  I stop and turn, but I can’t find where the voice is coming from.

  ‘But you know the Tsarina wants the firebird for herself,’ comes another, deeper voice. ‘She says Golovnin found it on her orders. She believes it is hers.’