Her lips parted.
She had words to tell me. I rose to them like surfacing toward light. Maybe she could help me pick apart the señora’s words like tangles of thread, until we knew why they had brought the sound of swans’ wings. If you can get a blue-eyed boy, then you will save yourself.
But saving myself meant my sister losing, and me losing her.
The door opened, cutting off my mother’s effort at words.
My second cousins, some younger than my mother and others older than my grandmother, stood in the hall. Footsteps downstairs echoed theirs.
They had all come. The del Cisne women who had survived the swans. The ones who had not been turned into swans themselves.
The ones whose sisters had.
“Es hora de irse,” the older ones said.
“It’s time,” the younger ones repeated.
“No,” my mother said, without any cut of fear in her voice.
But they took hold of her like she was no bigger than a child. Their hands—some weathered and wrinkled, some younger and smelling of the perfume on their wrists—drew her toward the stairs like they were a front of wind.
“They’re my daughters.” Mamá looked back at me.
“And you have to let them alone,” Mercedes said.
I followed them down the stairs, pulling at Mercedes’s and Luisa’s sleeves like I was a little girl trying to get their attention. They ignored me the same as they would a moth.
Downstairs, more of them were shooing my father out of his study.
“You can’t keep us from our own children,” he protested, more offended than afraid.
“You love them too much,” Sofía said. “You’ll never let the swans look at them.”
“You have to let the swans see them without you watching,” Julieta said.
“If you don’t let them,” Beatriz warned, “they’ll take them both.”
The truth of their words drifted down over all of us, the stories of how, when mothers and fathers interfered—trying to scare off the swans, or whispering advice to one daughter or another—the swans sometimes took both daughters out of spite.
Del Cisne women refused to lose more daughters than they had to. They would drive mothers and fathers out of their own houses if that was what it took.
Roja grabbed at our cousins’ and second cousins’ shoulders, the ones shoving Papá toward the door.
I couldn’t hear her words. All I could make out was the ripping-cloth sound of fear and grief in her voice.
She was calling after Papá.
She was calling after the father she thought she’d never see again.
Our father, a del Cisne son, who had carried the swans’ wrath in his blood, cursed to lose a sister and then a daughter.
“Let us say good-bye,” I shouted at our cousins.
At least her, I almost added, but stopped myself. I heard it how my sister might hear it.
I didn’t want Roja thinking the swans would take her any more than she already did.
Isabel snapped her head toward the sound of my voice. “Haven’t you both done enough?”
My feet stopped on the floorboards.
The first flash of her eyes was anger; Roja and I were the wicked girls who swallowed rose petals and thought we were above the swans’ reign.
But behind that anger, I caught her fear. She worried over what we had done, holding off the swans until now, months after Roja’s fifteenth birthday. And now I felt the swans’ coming wrath, loud as a bird’s cackle. The truth rattled through me, how we had tried to outsmart them, how they would break our hearts into pieces.
Our mother and father looked back, but their words got lost in the rush of leaves and stones under their feet, and the voices of the women the swans hadn’t taken.
I grabbed Roja. I held her. Half because I thought she might rush outside and hit at our cousins to get Papá back. Half because I thought if I held on to her tight enough, the swans could never take her. I would hold her in her own body, her brown skin and red-black hair, and she would not lose it.
ROJA
Blanca held me back from clawing my own primas’ eyes out. She held on to me like I was a cat she would lose if her grasp fell. And there, with her keeping me still, with our bodies holding the same broken heart, I understood everything I’d tried to forget.
My sister and I had been born fair and dark, her looking like a girl in a fairy tale who would grow up sweet, a princess, and me like one who would grow into a cruel witch. I had seen the pictures in storybooks. I knew what I was, with my bloodstained hair. Girls like me were marked for the swans. How could they ever take a girl like Blanca?
Blanca had tried to save me. She had tried to make us the same, so the swans could never choose. And her belief that she could was as sweet and young as the certainty she once had that fireflies were fairies. It made me feel like I was the older sister instead of her.
She had been so sure that if we loved each other, if I didn’t let a cygnet sow jealousy in me, if we did not let fear of the swans wedge its way between us, their power would wither.
But she had been wrong. Soon I would become one of those awful, pale birds, and I would never be my father’s daughter again. I would never again get to show him a polished stone I found by the pond, or a leaf with a few perfect jewels of rain, or the thin ribbon of a green snake. We would never again go outside to see the early December constellations, the almost-winter smell coming on clean and sharp.
The next time he saw me, he wouldn’t recognize me under my coat of feathers.
I let my body slacken, so Blanca would think I’d given up fighting.
She let me go, and I slipped toward the pond so quietly she probably thought I’d gone inside.
Maybe Blanca wouldn’t let me get my fingernails into my cousins.
But I could make sure the swans saw me, that they knew what they had taken from me.
“Hey,” I called out as I neared the edge of the pond.
I stood at the waterline. Those white birds stared at me with their ink-smooth eyes, and the only thought I had was that they had no right. We were our own girls. We weren’t offerings for them to choose from.
“Hey,” I yelled again, louder now.
They slowly turned their heads, lifting their slender necks, considering me.
I threw everything I could touch. Pinecones that broke the water and startled them back. Smooth stones that cut through the air when I hurled them; the swans flitted away from the rings in the water. Branches they had to dodge unless they wanted the wood to ruffle their down. Handfuls of wet leaves that floated on the pond or stuck to them; they fluttered their wings to shake them off. I warmed with the satisfaction of seeing dirt dull their perfect white feathers.
I got to them. They rose off the water, like swaths of snow retreating back into the clouds.
Then they swept down again.
They filled the air around me.
Their feathers sliced at my skin. Their dark gray bills nipped at my neck and wrists. Their wings struck my hair. The force of them knocked me to my hands and knees.
My body trembled too much for me to stand, so I crawled. The rocky soil tore at my knees and palms.
The swans beat their wings down on me, keeping me on the forest floor.
That was where I saw him, the yearling bear, between flashes of white. But he wasn’t rooting for hazelnuts I’d left for him in the watergrass.
He was clicking his jaw, showing his teeth.
The whole time I’d been bringing him blueberries or pumpkin seeds, I had forgotten he was bigger than I was.
I edged away from the swans and away from him.
The more I watched him, the more I caught the look of a nahual, all those stories Blanca and I had gasped or giggled over but that I could not laugh at now. That moon on his chest. The aggression that didn’t match his youth. That stare, the way he came toward me, how the flickering of my pulse seemed to draw him.
I didn’t car
e if he was young or soft-coated. In my mother’s stories, the most harmless-looking nahuales—doves, rabbits, deer—were the ones to fear most.
The swans would weaken me, and then leave me to him. He would draw my soul from my body and spill it out over the forest like glitter from a cascarón.
The bear kept a straight line through the trees. I crawled, dodging the papery bark of yellow and white birches.
The swans followed. Their feathers, soft when still, became the thinnest knives as they sliced through the air. Thread-thin cuts stung my skin.
The yearling bear came after me. He crossed the underbrush and the bright yellow of fallen birch leaves. He wove through the beating of wings. Wild thorn-apple spines combed his fur, and feathers ruffled his coat.
I knew better than to run. My father had told Blanca and me that when the coyotes came down from the hills, the only thing to do was stay away from them. If you saw one, turned, and ran, they switched from stalking you to hunting you at the sight of your back.
But my body acted before I could calm it with my father’s sense and logic. I scrambled away from the nahual bear, and now both he and the swans were coming for me.
His jaw let out those clicking sounds. The crescent of white on his chest flashed like a thumbnail moon. Low, gruff noises came from his throat.
The nahual’s fur brushed my skin, his coat smelling of wet bark and the must of dry leaves. I clenched my molars to stop my breath from wavering. I felt his nose through my shirt as he took my back collar in his teeth.
He seemed so much bigger now, feral in a way I’d seen in cats. The first time I fed him sunflower seeds, I thought of him as no more frightening than one of Blanca’s stuffed animals.
I grabbed at the ruff of fur on the back of his neck. I made my hands sure enough to show him I wasn’t afraid of him. I felt it like a spark through my palms, how, for just a second, I was a girl who feared neither swans nor nahuales.
Good, my father would have said. Make sure he knows he can’t push you around.
My hand stopped on a hot, damp patch. The nahual let out a short groan from the back of his throat. My fingers came away shining and wet.
New blood dampened his fur, and old had dried and hardened, matting his coat.
In the next flash of white wings, I didn’t feel the yearling bear’s fur under my hands.
I felt skin.
YEARLING
I kept all the broken things that were mine. I didn’t want to leave them in the woods, not after the woods had given me somewhere to go.
When I lived in the ground, and the wind and rain weathered it, the deepest part of me got weathered, too. When I was in trees that caught fire blight, I took the blight with me when I left. I carried it in me so long that my own heart was turning and falling away like leaves.
And when I was a yearling bear, and a grown bear saw me as enough of a threat to leave warning gashes on my back, I made them mine.
They were what I felt first, those deep cuts in my back.
My back. Not a yearling bear’s. Mine.
I came back because she needed me, this girl who fed me when I was hungry and when I couldn’t get near other bears without them swiping their claws at me.
I had gone into the woods already broken, and now I had collected so many other ways of being broken, I could barely carry them.
But this girl hadn’t let me starve, so I couldn’t just leave her. The swans were going after her like they wanted to tear the flesh from her body. They threw their wings at her, hard enough to leave cuts on her.
So I came back. She had her own pull to her, a way that stirred the air around us, and I gave in to it.
The sight of the swans through my eyes—not the yearling bear’s, but mine—came brighter and more glaring than I’d braced for. Their wings looked so bleached, the color pierced into my forehead. That white was so stark against the trees’ shadows that I squinted against it. It stung worse than the sun through the branches.
I thought maybe my eyes couldn’t focus, that I was seeing more of them than there were.
But they were here, the truth of it beating down on us, this many white wings.
My vision didn’t clear. I kept blinking, like trying to shake off the fluffy, not-quite-defined look things have before you’re completely awake.
It didn’t work.
I shut my eyes tight, still trying to shield this girl from these awful birds even when my vision couldn’t pin them down, and then opened them.
Then I realized. The truth that this was not going away pressed its fingers into me.
My eyes didn’t see quite like they had when I’d gone into the woods. I hadn’t known when I’d been a bear, or the leafed skeleton of birch branches, or anything else in the weeks I’d been something other than myself. But now it came on strong. Not just the throbbing on my left side that Liam had given me. It was more than that. It was the feeling of my left eye having a filter on it, dimming and fuzzing everything. It clouded the swans and the boughs overhead, like seeing them underwater, like everything out of my left eye had distilled down into its rawest forms, into blurs of light and shadow. It made all those birds whiter, painfully white, and made the woods recede and darken like they were pulling back. Moving my head, letting my right eye catch as much as it could, was the only way I could make sense of all these terrifying white wings.
I would’ve had a hard time coming up with a worse moment to have to relearn how to see.
The girl’s hands froze on me, my fur gone, my skin in its place. I couldn’t figure out if her wide-open eyes were about the swans, or about me.
The swans pulled back. They kept wary gazes on me as they flew off, like they didn’t trust a bear who’d turned into a boy.
The girl didn’t watch them.
She watched me.
She knew who I was. I was close enough to see the black centers of her eyes flashing in the deep brown, and that told me she knew everything.
The sound of the swans’ wings faded.
My eyes adjusted. They made sense of the light and the shadows, the brighter colors from the paler ones, until it was just the left side of my vision that stayed cloudy and dark.
The girl was still looking at me.
I had the vague memory that we’d been in school together once and then she hadn’t been there anymore, something about her parents teaching her and her sister at home. That was as far as we knew each other.
But there was some flicker of recognition in her face, enough that I knew she was going to say my name.
I was already a boy again, but if she said my name, then there’d be no getting away from how I’d once been Barclay Holt. Worse, she’d probably say it like a question. Barclay Holt? That was all I’d be to this girl, a name. Some guy who’d gone missing at the start of this fall. Sometimes, when I had been trees or rain, I’d caught this town’s whispers. I knew what I was to this place.
“Don’t,” I said the second I saw the girl’s lips part.
It was the first word I said. I landed on it hard.
She flinched, closing her mouth.
She could not say my real name. If she named me, I’d get pinned to everything I’d been trying to get away from. I’d lose the feeling of being a bear who had no name.
I remembered Grandma Tess’s story, the one that had been in me when the woods made me into a bear.
“Call me Yearling,” I said, because I had to give her something else.
BLANCA
I turned my back and Roja got away from me.
The swans had come, and the touch of their feathers was like a spell driving away all that I loved. First the cygnet. Then Mamá and Papá. Then Roja.
I found my sister out in the trees.
She wasn’t alone.
She was with a boy, one who wore the same kind of thin cuts on his arms as Roja had on her cheeks.
I grabbed a branch and wielded it at the boy. “Get away from her.”
His panic rustled the lea
ves around us. It wasn’t the guilt of someone who’d been caught. It was fear, clear and so animal that for a minute the way he moved seemed less like a boy and more like a startled raccoon.
He dropped his hands from Roja’s arms. It wasn’t until he widened the distance between them that I registered how he’d held her. It wasn’t him grabbing her or making her stay still. It had been the loose hold of guarding her, his body a shell around hers.
“Blanca,” Roja said, her voice out of breath but level enough that I could hear her talking me down.
I lowered the branch, but didn’t drop it.
Something about this boy made me turn back through things I knew but hadn’t thought of in weeks. A newsprint picture. School photos in old passed-around yearbooks. A boy I’d known from school before our father started teaching us at home.
A misplaced boy, now squinting up at the white sky of the morning.
I caught a flash of paler skin on his chest, an almost-moon shape. It echoed a shape I’d seen before, white fur set within brown.
Understanding rushed into me so fast, my forehead ached.
The yearling bear.
Barclay Holt? Roja’s bear was Barclay Holt?
I skimmed back over the way he’d tolerated Roja petting him, his patience like an old cat’s. How he flicked his ears in a way that seemed like he was trying to make conversation. How he’d eaten pepitas out of her hand. None of that matched up against what I knew of the Holts. Their brick houses, so big they cast shadows onto the road. Barclay’s mother, who looked at other wives in town like she was some proud queen and they might dirty the hem of her dress. Barclay’s father and uncle, embarrassed by how their own mother wore her flannel and hunting jacket to church.
A tiny white feather fell from Roja’s shoulder.
The color slid into me like the shock of a winter morning.
The swans.
They had come after her, and he’d shielded her from them. The fine cuts on them both were from the sharp edges of their wings.
I found his gaze, to tell him thank you.
But the color of it quieted me.
Blanca & Roja Page 4
