The Girl With Borrowed Wings

by Rossetti, Rinsai

  From his reaction, I may as well have been shouting “Yes!” He burst into laughter and reached out for me. “Nenner, may I please pick you up and twirl you around?”

  “No.” I couldn’t trust him after that whole milk-and-honey episode.

  “Could I at least kiss your hand?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, all right, I’ll shake it then,” he said, doing so. “Nenner, you’re absolutely right. Tonight you show me somewhere from your past. Where were you born?”

  “Actually, I began before I was born . . .” I said. “My father first had the idea of a Frenenqer Paje in Spain.”

  “We should go there, then,” Sangris said, refusing to relinquish my hand. “We don’t want to miss any details.”

  “But I’m not sure where exactly he was. Somewhere along the Camino de Santiago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A bunch of pilgrim routes that go right across Spain, from east to west.”

  “You were a dream your father had while he was hiking through Spain?” Sangris said. “That’s romantic.”

  He obviously didn’t know my father. “I’d call it more of a plan than a dream,” I said. “My father doesn’t dream. Anyway, he said it was toward the end of his pilgrimage. That means it must be near Santiago. I was flipping through an album once when he pointed at a photo and said, ‘That’s where I decided to have a daughter.’ It was a place with sunflowers, and trees that looked as though they’d been painted by van Gogh.”

  “Can you get the photo?”

  “Long lost. We moved around too much to keep that sort of thing. But I can remember what it was like.”

  “Then we’ll find it,” Sangris said. “I’ll fly you there, and you’ll find it.”

  We grinned at each other, and the dim dust-gray sky burned outside my window. “Oh, all right then,” I said, too excited to not relent, “twirl me.”

  We spun around and around and I smothered my laughter so that my parents couldn’t hear. Sangris had a faint smell, like rain and wood. That place in Ae, maybe; it had stayed in his skin. Finally he stopped, but my feet stayed off the ground. “Let’s go like this,” he said, hardly panting, holding me easily against his chest in the style of a newlywed. “I don’t want to change form too much. It’s a pain to have to keep taking off these clothes. If you want me to be hideous, I can become a gargoyle or something, but at least let me stay humanoid. Unless you want to carry my pants for me.”

  I wrinkled up my nose. “Gargoyle it is then,” I said.

  Without putting me down, he shifted into the lithe gray winged form he had used when he’d first tossed himself out of my window. The shirt ripped at the back, but other than that the uniform stayed reasonably whole. And once again, he wasn’t hideous. Unusual-looking, yes, but I liked the sleekness of this form, the way his wings curved out of his back in one smooth line. There was beauty in his sharp demon-like face.

  But maybe I only thought that because he still looked like Sangris.

  At the last second, I glanced at the door, making sure it was closed. The house was hushed, sleeping. And then he threw us out of the window. My stomach plunged, then soared, and the restricting rubber-tight sky of the oasis tore around us, leaving a clean cold hole through which we escaped. I watched the desert pass by, the smooth shapes of dunes rolling beneath me like ships through a sea. Faster and faster. I closed my eyes in the wind.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Which We Search for Sunflowers

  Spain was a lot closer than Ae. From Sangris’s point of view, it was right next door. He soon allowed us to slow down. “We’re almost there,” he said gently, like someone waking an infant. I opened my eyes.

  Because of the time difference, the sky was lighter all around us. We were much lower than I had expected; the view wasn’t at all like looking out of an airplane window. He was skimming, barely above the trees, the wheat fields a sunset-yellow blur rushing below, then lone houses, old villages, the occasional city streaming past, far off. It reminded me of Italy, except less languid. My impression of Italy, even when I lived there, was always of an old but very beautiful squid. Spain felt rougher, bolder. My skin began to tingle in the cool exhilaration of the air. Most of the landscape was agricultural, and the crops shone saturated gold everywhere. But here and there was a flash of green. Lush trees, wide fields bloodied with poppies.

  “Are we near Santiago?” I asked, holding on to Sangris’s shoulders with an abrupt change in my pulse, alive and almost unnatural, like an inward stagger.

  “Yes. We’re just east of it, so the road of the camino must be nearby. But I haven’t found it yet.”

  “The camino isn’t a road,” I said. “It’s a path. In the cities, it’s not even a physical path. The way is marked with yellow arrows and seashells.”

  “You want me to search Spain for seashells?” he said, giving me a look that showed he had found the flaw in this plan.

  “No. Keep an eye out for albergues, small white buildings, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, where the pilgrims sleep. And if there’s a path connecting them together, we’ll know we’ve found it.”

  “We passed something like that. Hold on—” He swooped to the left and in a few minutes, below us, beautiful, was an old stone house, strung like a bead on the thread of a long, wavering dirt path that ran from east to west right through the rich rippling acres of gold. “We’re near Santiago, and this is the only building around for miles.”

  “That must be the camino,” I said, kicking my feet in the air.

  Sangris sped us low along the path. We flew between troubled lovely hills. They were raw, and ragged, on either side of us, frayed by the reckless wild plants. And there, underneath, untouched, were sudden secretive hollows where the countryside folded inward, absorbed into the privacy of its flowers. The land had an air of self-admiration about it then, and Sangris went as quietly as possible, as though not to disturb it.

  “Okay,” he said. “Keep a lookout for sunflowers and creepy trees.”

  “Van Gogh’s trees aren’t creepy,” I said, swatting at him.

  “Don’t hit the driver.”

  “Don’t antagonize the passenger.”

  “Are you always like this?” he said with a slight grin.

  “It usually gets me into trouble, so I hide my evil talents,” I said. “Actually, that’s how you could come in useful. I need practice to keep my tongue sharp. You could be my scratching post.”

  He looked down at me and twitched his arms dangerously. “If I were smart,” he said, “I would drop you right now, and fly away fast, while I still can.”

  “If you were smart? Good.” I laughed. “I have nothing to worry about.”

  My stomach swooped then, and I gasped. Sangris had plunged several feet, leaving me falling through the air above him, like a child momentarily separated from her swing.

  He caught me neatly.

  “Hey! That’s—”

  But I lost track of my outrage, because, actually, I’d enjoyed the fizzy feeling of falling.

  “Why do I have to be the scratching post, anyway?” he went on as if nothing had happened.

  “Well, I do it to Anju sometimes . . . but she’s so quiet, it’s no fun.”

  I hadn’t meant to bring up the oasis again, but there it was. It dampened my giddiness, just a little, and now I had time to worry about how awkward it could be to stay slung in Sangris’s arms, in silence, as we flew over a field of rushing red poppies and delicate skinny trees. There was a risk that we might run out of things to say.

  But Sangris seemed content to just keep going. He didn’t say a word. I looked up, saw the black hair wild in the breeze, and, convulsively, I began to talk again.

  “That’s Anju,” I said. “Even when I treat her like a secretary, she won’t complain. I keep waiting for her to snap and tell me to organize my own timetable, but she never does. I wonder what her breaking point is. I keep pushing her; I can’t help it. It’s like holding a bendy
twig. There’s always something in you that wants to bend it all the way around and see how far you can go before it breaks, isn’t there? But I don’t know why she can’t just tell me to shut up.”

  “I can do it. Shut up, Nenner,” Sangris said.

  “Right. See how easy it is? But she always just puts up with everything. She’d make a very good Frenenqer Paje. My father would have loved her.”

  “Uh. You don’t think your father loves you?”

  “Of course not. There’s a list of things he wants me to be, and ‘lovable’ is not on it. But that doesn’t matter. I’m glad my parents don’t love me. It would make me feel uncomfortable if they did. We don’t display affection in my house. It’s not done.”

  “That explains a lot,” he said, giving me a look. “But maybe they do love you and they just don’t show it. Have you thought of that?”

  “Yes,” I said, a bit indignant. I hadn’t expected him to question me. “I’m sure they think they love me, but their idea of love is forced and—and hypocritical. They’ve often told me that if I weren’t their daughter, they wouldn’t like me at all. What kind of love is that? Why should they only care about me because I happened to be born to them? If anyone else said, ‘I’m obliged to love you because you’re the daughter of so-and-so,’ people would see through it immediately and say, ‘Ah-hah! That’s not love at all!’ But when my parents say to me, ‘We’re obliged to love you because you’re our daughter,’ everybody thinks that’s just fine. Well, I don’t. My father invented his love just the way he invented me. And he doesn’t actually like a thing about me apart from what he made up.” I smiled. “You know what I suspect? I’m his failure.”

  I said all this easily. These were the facts of my life, and I was used to them.

  “And you’re okay with it?” Sangris said, winging onward.

  “Oh, yes. I told you. Because, if they don’t truly love me, then I don’t have to love them.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I’m not stupid. I’m not going to force myself to love them the way that they force themselves to love me.” I shook my head. “I did when I was little, but. . . .”

  He gave up. “Okay, forget your dad. What about your mom? What’s she like?”

  That stumped me. I had to think for a while. “I don’t know if Mom ever had a personality,” I said at last. “If she did, then it’s long gone.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No, really. I mean, she hardly exists. I’ve always suspected she was kind of hired for the occasion, but then after I was born, she became superfluous. And when someone’s been erased, they can’t be expected to be capable of love, right?” I said reasonably. “I guess it would be nice if Mom and I found comfort in each other, but it doesn’t work like that. My father pecks at her, and she avoids me. But it’s a good thing,” I added, realizing that I was making it sound sad.

  He looked down at me and frowned. “Have you ever loved anyone properly?”

  I knew then that I shouldn’t have suggested coming here. We could have gone anywhere at all. Why did even my escapes have to be planned around my father?

  “Only when I was a kid. How about you?” I said, feeling like I’d answered enough questions.

  I felt his fingers close around me as he swooped lower. “Nope,” he said.

  “What about your parents?”

  “Never met them. Whoever they were, they wandered off straight afterwards. They could have been anything—I was too small then to remember. Free people like me just sort of . . . pop up in normal species sometimes, though of course it’s rare. Or who knows, they may have both been Free people too . . . so it makes sense, they wouldn’t have lingered. When you can turn into hundreds of different animals, family ties are whatever you want them to be. Child-rearing or independence at birth—monogamy or polygamy—all the options are open.”

  He sounded the same way I did when I talked about my parents. Nonchalant, detached. I smiled up at him.

  “See anything?” he asked.

  We scanned the farms. Crops were twitching pink-gold everywhere. But no sunflowers. Nothing like the place in the photograph.

  Our search lasted hours. We discovered treasures. A field of wedding-white blossoms, but with a few firework-colored flowers seething underneath, like rebels. An abandoned pair of boots on top of a hill. Odd spots where cobwebs had been spun between the trees, so that thatches of silver gleamed in midair like suspended pockets of rain.

  I began to chatter about the silliest things I could think of. Sangris joined in at once.

  “There is an art,” I observed, “to artless chatter.”

  “People only call it artless because we make it look so easy.”

  “We? Sangris, you’re an amateur. Your remarks aren’t nearly irrelevant enough.”

  “How dare you!”

  “You insist on imbuing them with meaning.”

  “I assure you that I don’t know the meaning of the word.”

  “Of what word?”

  “Meaning.”

  I grinned. “You don’t know the meaning of meaning? My dear, you’re talking nonsense.”

  “See? I told you I’m good at it . . .” He stopped. Distracted lemon-yellow eyes flew to my face and he dropped the act. “Did you just call me your dear?”

  “Got you,” I said in triumph. “You see, you can’t sustain meaningless chatter the way I can. Sooner or later you start paying attention, and then you’re lost. That’s the problem with you, Sangris”—I shook my head wisely—“you pay too much attention to what I say. The day you learn to ignore me, you’ll be a better person.”

  He hissed and dropped me into the grass on the side of the path.

  “Next time it’ll be a pile of nettles.”

  I bounced up onto my feet. “I’m sick of being carried like a newlywed anyway. Let’s run.”

  “You’ve got running on the brain.”

  “Try to catch me,” I said.

  “No.”

  He was evidently still sore. I smirked at him. “Sure you don’t want to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though I smell like milk and honey?”

  “I could just buy a bar of soap and carry that around,” he said.

  “A bar of soap wouldn’t call you ‘my dear’ either.”

  It was like poking a bear on the nose. He hissed again and turned on me.

  I fled down the path, shrieking like a delighted little kid who has finally managed to trick someone into playing with her. I only got a few steps before he swept me up.

  “Cheater,” I said. “You flew.”

  “Call me your dear,” he demanded.

  “Nope.”

  “Just once.”

  “Nope, nope, nope,” I sang.

  “You’re acting like a five-year-old.”

  “You’re acting like the grumpy boy on the playground who pulls girls’ pigtails.”

  He flew me a little way off the path, staying low to the ground.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Trying to find a pile of nettles.”

  There weren’t any, so he got impatient and just dropped me on the spot.

  This time I lay there and refused to move.

  He commanded, “Get up.”

  “I can’t. I think you broke my arm.”

  “Liar.”

  “I have weak bones.” I peered up at the sky through a screen of the huge, dark undersides of flowers. “It hurts.”

  “Liar,” he said again, but I heard him land cautiously beside me, pushing leaves apart. I prowled through the stalks as he changed to human. Then I attacked, grabbing at his elbow, and tried to knock him over. But I was too light, or he was too heavy, so instead of dragging him down, it turned out that I pulled myself up. We ended up face-to-face in the chest-high field of flowers. He tried not to smile, twisting his head away so that I couldn’t see. “You’re such a pipsqueak.”

  “I’m normal-sized,” I panted. “It’s just that you�
�re too fat to budge.”

  “You don’t get to call me fat unless you call me your dear as well.”

  I thought about that. “My fat dear?” I said at last, laughing.

  “If that’s the best you can do, I accept,” he said. “At least until the day I find a bar of soap that can be programmed to talk.”

  I looked at him, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. There was the heady, sticky smell of upturned dirt, and a cold wind, and mixed underneath all that, the faint sleepy smell from the forests of Ae, which seemed steeped into Sangris’s skin. It took a while for us to realize that we were standing in a vast field of sunflowers, thousands of them, stretching up and over a hill ahead of us. The path of the camino was now hidden somewhere far to the left.

  “But no trees,” Sangris said. “This can’t be the place.”

  “Maybe my father went off the path. Let’s check. The sunflowers seem to just keep going and going.”

  We pushed through the huge, crackling dry stems, which towered around us like a garden designed for giants.

  I heard the trees before I saw them. At first I thought it was the sea. Millions of leaves all moving as one. We reached the top of the hill and saw, on the other side, a row of trees that had been planted on the edge of the sunflower field. They were each shaped like the flame on a candle, pointing up at the sky. The leaves rippled together in long curling waves like brushstrokes of paint. At their base was a little well of dirty green water, and a stone bench where my father had sat and posed for a picture years and years ago, thinking of the person his daughter must become.

  “Is this the place in the photograph?” Sangris said.

  “Yes.” I walked ahead and showed him the place where I had begun. We sat on the stone bench, looking back at the sweep of sunflowers that hid the camino.

  “It’s a good place to be invented,” he said.

  “Maybe. Except that my father imagined a daughter who—” I hesitated. I’d never told anyone this. My father had only said it to me once. I was nine years old, and we had just moved to Sardegna, an island in the Mediterranean. I was in trouble for getting into a fight at school, even though the other kid, a boy, had started it. He had kicked my shins and grabbed my bag, so I calmly kicked him back and a teacher saw. At home that night, my father looked at me and stated, in that voice of his that could change the universe: “My daughter is a girl who would never raise a hand in anger, not even to save herself from death. My daughter is meek, above all things. She would jump off a cliff if I told her to. That is who you should be. That is the point of you. It is the daughter I decided to have. A truly gentle, noble creature. If you cannot be her—if you ever fight against anybody again—then you are not Frenenqer Paje. You are nothing, you are nobody. Understood?”