I felt the tiny knives of pain in her body. And if this was what I felt, that pinch and heat, I shuddered at how deep it must have gone in her. I winced, and instead of my girl-shoulder flinching, my feathers flashed at the edges of my wings.
I flew a little in front of Roja, wanting to cut through the sky so her wounded body could fly on softer air. But the rasp of her breathing was so sharp I felt her fighting for it. My own lungs pinched for hers.
My swan’s call was unfamiliar to me. I didn’t know if she’d hear what I meant. We will survive this. I will find somewhere the swans can’t reach us.
The other swans flashed white through the air. I tried to cut faster through the sky, clearing the current for both of us. I felt how small my new heart was, running fast, and seeming so tight it was like a wet stone in my new body.
But the swans didn’t come after us. They flew toward the far horizon, into a corner of sky so silver it made the whole day look like morning.
For once, they left us alone.
As they flew away, I felt them drawing the breath out of me and Roja, like they were dragging our spirits from our bodies. The dread and fear of our whole lives drained out of us. I felt the worry of so many mothers and sisters stripped out of our swan-bodies.
We were two sisters who had both given ourselves up to be swans. We were a generation of del Cisne daughters who had abandoned our own bodies. We had given ourselves to what we feared.
That understanding was both bright and cold. It was a spark flaring, and water filling dry hands. Even in losing ourselves, we had stolen power away from los cisnes. There had to be something for us in that, even if it was only the sharp edges of our nightmares being worn smooth.
Instead, I felt a spreading heat, shared across my body and my sister’s. It bloomed and darkened, like the swans were hollowing us out. The sense of it both filled and emptied me, like they were reaching into us and taking the hearts out of our swan-bodies. I braced for it tearing out of me, a fist of deepest red ripped out of white feathers. A hot knife of fear flashed in me, worrying it would happen to my sister. They would take our hearts even as we flew, the centers of us becoming flashes of red against the silvered sky.
But our swan-bodies did not open. Red did not bloom on my chest and stain my feathers. There was only the dragging pain of los cisnes taking something from us we could not see, and the shudder of wondering what.
The white flock grew smaller.
Roja dipped lower, fighting her wounds, trying to stay up.
Her dark feathers flashed red, deep and vivid as her hair had been. I would have thought I’d imagined it if I hadn’t, in that same moment, felt the weight of my girl-heart coming back.
No. It was the only word in me as I judged the distance beneath us. No. I gauged the fall to the ground, and then the hard mirror of the flooded cranberry bog. No.
The swans were not only taking the curse from our family.
They were stealing even our swan-bodies from us.
They were letting us go, turning us back to girls, at the worst time.
No. The word echoed as I felt my wings becoming arms, as I saw the brown and red of my sister appearing where a black swan had been.
Panic made my feathers feel brittle as dry branches. I wanted our wings to stay wings, so we could keep flying, but I wanted my hands and fingers back so I could grab Roja out of the air. I wanted to halt her still, my broken little sister who could not survive this fall. I wanted to pin her in the sky like the moon, so the distance to the ground or the water wouldn’t kill her.
And the swans knew it. I saw nothing but the distant flecks of their backs, like blown snowflakes. But the chill of their wrath was so thick in the air it felt like frost. It was sharp as needles of ice. It had the gravity of hail and sleet, slowing our wings in the last moments Roja and I had them.
Under that cold, dragging weight, I understood.
We had violated the ways in which the swans had always taken del Cisne daughters. Our will had withered their reign like salt against snow. And for that, they would take my sister from me. It was an act of vengeance as graceful as the swans themselves.
We could have our bodies back. But only in the moment it would destroy us.
Even as I clawed at the air, I cursed every inch of their frost-white forms, their slender necks, the gracious spread of their wings.
I reached out toward Roja. But my arms did not span the distance my wings had.
So we fell.
ROJA
Each wound bit into me, each point so hot and deep I felt them meeting in the center of me. The air streaked through my wings, dragging on my feathers. I flew as far as I could, keeping up with the perfect swan my sister had become. I followed the crisp sound of her wings.
But then we had no wings. I heard nothing but the distant turning over of clouds, and the cranberry bog beneath us. I heard the bog below lapping at its own banks, the wet brush of vines.
The wind traced my bare skin. My down and plumes became my bloodstained hair. In the red-studded mirror of the water, our reflections rushed toward us, showing us the girls we were again.
The pain in my body made me remember everything that hurt about being Roja del Cisne. Driving my fists into the ground as a little girl, because there was so much rage in me I didn’t know where to put it. The flash of my sister’s hand across my face. The dragging ache that made the inside of me feel like a glass pear.
And that brought with it things that did not hurt. It brought the feeling of a boy’s hand on the space between my hips. That same boy’s mouth on mine.
It gave me back the brush of fingers as my sister braided my hair. The warmth of my mother’s sleeping remedio in my throat, the soft bite of passion flower and magnolia. My father setting a book’s weight in my hands, the chilled metal of his best pen when he let me use it.
We broke the water. The bog soaked my hair, weighing it down. It dragged me to the bottom, a layer of water covering me. My fingertips drifted over the sandy soil, the low, trailing vines stirring the water.
Pain blurred everything I saw. The berries made the bog look like a jewel box, and I was nothing but a bead lost off a necklace. I looked for my sister, but couldn’t find her through the vines.
The enchantment of the dark water, and the drifting green, and deep red of the berries filled me.
Maybe, in the end, los cisnes won. Maybe this fall would take me from my sister, the wounds deepening in my body. But the swans had to give us back our girl-bodies to do it, the hands and hair and teeth that made us Blanca and Roja.
YEARLING
The black swan Roja had become flew low. The tips of her dark feathers brushed the trees. The clouds silvered her wings. It was only when she started falling that I saw the white swan she was flying after.
As she fell, her wind-thrown wings became her arms. Her swan’s body became the shape I knew, her back and her hips. Her hair reappeared, fast as a brushstroke of deep red paint. The fingers of one hand reached toward the sky like some of her was still there.
The yellow sweep of Blanca’s hair showed up so fast it looked like the arc of a wing. The way she fell seemed less like falling and more like following Roja.
They fell from the sky over the cranberry bog. I knew it for sure when I got there. The force of them had stirred the surface.
Page was already there, wading in. Blanca had already come up out of the water and was looking for Roja. She raked her hands through the vines, trying to stand but stumbling to her knees every time.
I went in after Roja, this girl who was glass glitter and blue eggshells, hazel and birch wands, secrets she kept for me and from me. I didn’t think of how I was losing her. I didn’t want that to make my hands slower or less sure.
Everything under the water was so blurred and dim my eyes couldn’t hold on to it. Light and shadow broke through, the light piercing, my eyes straining to see the details of the darker places. I couldn’t tell the red of the cranberries from the red
of Roja’s hair. I couldn’t tell the fine, glinting silt of the bog from the brown of her skin.
It was my hands that found her first, the warmth of her under my palms clearer than anything I could see refracted through the water.
When I found her, when I took her in my arms, she felt as difficult to hold as water. Her fall had left her too broken to grab on to me. But I got her out.
She opened her mouth, sputtering water and tiny leaves. Red berries had come off their vines and stuck in her hair, the bog darkening it to redless black.
Page was holding Blanca up, so hard that I thought if Page let go, the flooded bog would dissolve her. Blanca looked like she wanted to scream into the sky, and I kept bracing for the sound, but it never came.
Roja’s eyes shut. The chill of the water left the brown of her skin paler.
A weak sound came from the back of her throat. Her wet eyelashes shivered like she was trying to look at me.
A cluster of red points stood out bright against her body.
Cranberries, I thought, wet and crushed on her skin, like the ones caught in her hair. But then they opened and spread.
BLANCA
There was a story I never told Roja. When we were small, I whispered tales of cursed dresses and enchanted trees in the minutes before she fell asleep. But I never gave her this one.
I heard it one day when my mother took Roja to the señoras. I couldn’t remember why. A fever, maybe, or a nightmare that visited as often as a stray cat.
The tall señora took Roja into the back room, my mother following after.
The short señora kept to the front of the store, filling the jars and folding the sheets and lighting so many candles the walls looked made of fire.
She must have felt sorry for me having to wait alone, or she worried that I might touch things. She gave me dried roselles to hold in the side of my cheek, and she told me a story she called “El Príncipe Oso.”
It was a story not so different from the one Tess Holt would tell us later. Sisters. A bear-prince. But in this story of el príncipe oso, the youngest sister used her will and her teeth on the whole world. She offered to marry the bear-prince in exchange for the life of her woodcutter father.
And when the bear-prince demanded she not look at him in daylight, fearing the enchantment that held him, she ignored him. She bound and gagged him to break the spell that made him a bear instead of a man. And when the spell stole him from her again, when it dragged him to a castle on a road she could not find, she demanded the help of the moon and the sun themselves.
That was the thing neither Roja nor the señoras understood. Sometimes what a story needed was not a girl who would do what the prince told her, who would content herself with meeting him only in the dark, who would not question why she must not open her eyes. Sometimes a story needed the girl who would find him among the crumbling stones where he hid, pretending all of it was a castle. It needed the girl who took the prince’s orders and crushed them between her back teeth, who bound his wrists if that was what it took to set him free.
Because in the end, it was Yearling who was lost. Page may have been the one following him around like she was his younger brother, but Page was the one drawing her own map to the world. It was Yearling who was breaking. I could never have held him together. And I didn’t want to. The señoras thought I was suited to the task, that I had soft hands and shy smiles enough for me to hold up a blue-eyed boy.
But he’d needed Roja. He’d needed a girl with teeth. He needed her like I needed Page, the boy who’d reminded me my hands were for doing things. They were not just for opening my palms to whatever the world wanted me to hold.
If I’d told Roja the story of el príncipe oso, speaking it into the dark between our beds, she might not have believed me. She might have thought I made it up myself. Even when I insisted it came from the short señora, the one who taught us to hold yellow rock salt in our pockets for good luck, she might not have believed it.
But at least I would’ve said it. I would’ve told my little sister that the biggest lie of all is the story you think you already know. Then it would’ve been up to her whether she heard.
I wished it now, as Page kept me from sinking into the cranberry bog. I wished it as Yearling pulled Roja out, his eyes on the air in front of him because he could not look at the wounded girl in his arms.
I wished it even as Page and I took her weight into our hands, worried that seeing her like this had broken Yearling down too much for him to hold her.
PAGE
I knew so little about Roja del Cisne. But I knew enough.
Blanca had been willing to give herself up to the swans, and Roja had enough love and spite in her to do it first.
Now Roja lay still on the ground in front of us. Her wet hair shielded her face. The wounds she’d taken as a swan spread and opened as she became a girl again.
I caught Blanca’s fear only in the way she held her lips together. Barclay’s breathing came hard and frayed.
I wasn’t letting either of them lose her if I didn’t have to.
There was a moment—growing up, understanding who I would become—when I realized that sometimes there is no putting things back. There is no making them what they were. I learned that while folding away dresses I had never worn and would never wear, in opening my hands and letting go of the Page I would never be, the life I would never have and did not want.
Maybe Roja del Cisne would never be whole in the way she had been this morning. Maybe there would always be part of her that wore the wounds of today. But maybe she could go on, still, as a Roja none of us had imagined.
I set my hands on her damp stomach, lightly enough not to hurt her, but with enough intent that I hoped she could feel my wish, how much I wanted to fill her in with anything I had to give. The trembling in Blanca’s hands reminded me of the faint line between her body and Roja’s, how anything that hurt her sister wounded her.
I was a boy Roja barely knew. My hands alone wouldn’t take her far.
Blanca was saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry over and over, the words wet and rattling and so soft I could barely hear them.
I took Blanca’s hands, slowly enough to quiet her, and I put them on Roja.
Blanca let me. I saw the shudder in her body, the shiver of feathers she’d grown and then lost. I felt it as though I were still a cygnet, that prickling beneath my skin.
I reached for Barclay’s hands.
He resisted, catching my gaze like he was searching for what in me had slipped out of place, why I was doing this.
I didn’t let his hands go. I set them on Roja’s skin.
This was the thing I knew, the thing I’d been trying to tell Barclay for so long: even if there is no retracing your path, no unbreaking what has been broken, the heart of you, the heart of everything, can still knit back together.
There were ways to carve away from your heart everything that did not truly belong, and still come back to life.
BLANCA
Our whole lives, Roja and I had felt the possibility of feathers under our skin. We waited, wondering if plumes were a breath from sprouting out of our backs.
Now, whatever feathers I had left in me, whatever the swans had not taken with them, I did not need. Whatever hard veins and down brushed beneath my skin belonged to them.
But I wasn’t giving them back.
As Roja’s water-chilled skin cooled my hands, I let her have them.
YEARLING
The harder it got to find the rhythm of her breathing, the more I wished that my blood was water or glass glitter, something I could pour out and give her. I knew what it felt like to get broken open, and now I wished I could do it myself, offer Roja anything left inside me.
I almost didn’t feel Page’s hands on the backs of mine. His palms stilled me until everything was quiet. The soft rush of the water in the cranberry bog. Roja’s heartbeat under my fingers, the breath I held so tight it stung the back of my throat.
Wi
th all those sounds gone, I understood.
Roja didn’t need anything I could break out of my own rib cage. She needed something I had asked her to forget.
She needed me to give her my name.
ROJA
I felt them do it, mending my broken skin with all they had in them. Feathers, light and soft like the ones that had covered Blanca’s back. The blushed blossoms of apple trees, the same mark Page had left on the woods. Birch leaves, from the tree Barclay Holt had been named for.
I was neither all the girl I had been, nor the swan I had become.
I was Roja again, but where I had been torn open, feathers appeared. Leaves grew over where I was bleeding. The tiny petals of blossoms closed the smallest spaces.
Where Blanca and Yearling and Page set their hands, where their palms covered my wounded places, they marked me. I became a girl who was part swan, part birch, part apple tree.
To keep me, they each gave me a little of themselves.
They claimed me as theirs, all three of them.
So I stayed.
BLANCA
I walked onto the Holt estate from the far side of the property, where it backed against the woods. No one stopped me. The sweep of my hair was a shield, a blond flash that let me go unnoticed where my sister would have been watched, remarked on. My hair slowed anyone from noticing that my skin was not the peach-pink of most fair-haired girls.
Anyone who noticed me probably thought I was one of Liam’s girlfriends. Especially when I found Liam behind his father’s house.
“I know what you’re looking for,” I said.
He turned, my voice the first thing to tell him I was there.
I stepped into the shadow of the house. “I don’t know how many copies he made or what he did with them. That’s your work, not mine.” The wind pulled at my skirt, and I thought maybe I could smell feathers on the air. “But I will bring him and whatever he still has to you. So you’ll have him, and you’ll know what he has.”
Blanca & Roja Page 24
