The Turnaway Girls

by Hayley Chewins

  My golden bird — its wings beating to the speed of my own heart.

  I have to see it. I have to see the bird. It’s a mark of guilt, but it’s a mark of something else, too. A mark of my voice. A reminder that girls who are broken in their bones can still make something living.

  I hate that Bly caged it. But I am grateful, if only in this moment, that he did. Because I can see it again. It hasn’t left me like the others.

  I run along the beach, barreling into the greedy cave. Caves are gluttons for darkness. Bly has not lit the lamps. There is only the sound of the sea — distant, waiting — and pattering footsteps: Bly’s gait, so alive in kept-away places.

  When I get past puddles and needle-rocks, I see glimmering wings beaming. The light dances with life, and I know it’s a bird — my bird, free of its gustless enclosure. Silently, silently, it’s calling to me.

  Figures yawn around me, crooking their fingers and swishing their tails. I ignore them. My bird. My bird. But when I am close — so close I can almost touch it — I flinch, pressing back.

  Because a groan racks the cave.

  It’s a searing cry — a scream like someone being born. Like someone dying.

  My bird flies away from me until it’s only a smudge. I can’t leave the light I made behind. I need to feel its warmth brushing my cheek. I force myself to step forward even though my whole body is trembling.

  Eyes and hands. Teeth and claws and hooked beaks.

  One step, two, three —

  A spark glitters. Bly has struck a slice of hushingstone. He peers at the cave’s wall as if it has a face. “There, there,” he says, my golden bird dancing at his shoulder. “The sky is preparing a place for you.” He moves to the side slightly, gesturing for the little light-winged thing to come closer.

  A giant eye has been carved into the wall of the cave. It clicks in its socket, shifting from left to right.

  And then looks straight at me.

  And blinks.

  Eyes and hands. Teeth and claws and hooked beaks —

  The creature — the beast — it can only be a beast — groans again, roaring like a tempest come to shatter the sky.

  I turn and I run.

  There was a groan in that cave. An eye that made it. The groan in the cave. The eye that made it.

  An eye can’t groan, Delphernia.

  Except that it did.

  I heard it.

  And that sound — that awful, gut-bloomed sound — is still brewing under my skin. It’s shuddering through me like the whole ocean is pulling its tides through my bones.

  I imagine the eyes Bly carved into the walls of my sleeping-room blinking and twitching.

  I picture all his cave-creatures flexing their joints into living. Eyes and hands. Teeth and claws and hooked beaks. I could feel their eyes settling on me. As though they had minds and not just eyes. As though they were alive.

  I lie back on my bed, hiding my sight from the walls.

  I need some comfort, some hope, so I imagine Mimm and Trick flying at me with force and flutter. I remember them whirling through Hiddenhall when I sang underground for Linna.

  And I remember.

  The First Mother made the first cloisterwings out of hushingstone.

  They came to life between her palms.

  What if —

  Bly’s trying to do the same thing.

  I hurry along the dust-clogged central passage of the Old Sorrows, hundreds of tiny windows letting in evening’s purple light. I’m leaving a footstep-trail that anyone could easily follow, streaks behind me as if my heels are brushes.

  But I have to find the Sea-Singer’s library.

  Bly was left to his own education there. Maybe stepping among the books will be like stepping inside his head.

  “Shhh,” I whisper to the thrill of flickermoths in my belly.

  But they won’t calm their wings, so I start telling them stories.

  “Bly says that the Old Sorrows is the same age as the New. After the Sea-Singer was taken by waves, half the palace — the Queen’s Wing — was given over to shame and silence. The stone she walked upon was forgotten — banished from memory. That’s why it’s called the Old Sorrows. It represents the part of Blightsend’s Histories that should never be returned to. The part with a singing queen.”

  The flickermoths flip, twisting up my windpipe. I cough.

  “The New Sorrows is the only place the Childer-Queen is allowed to live. When she marries, the one she loves will live there, too. She’s never to cross a toe into this place, or risk the sea mistaking her for the Sea-Singer, risen from the dead.”

  My words echo against stone.

  I’ve reached the end of the passage. Before me stands a door. I approach it slowly, as though it’s a new acquaintance. Its gold surface is dulled with grime.

  The flickermoths shiver in my stomach.

  I open the door and step inside.

  The Sea-Singer’s library is long and rectangular, a universe of cobwebs, as all other rooms in the Old Sorrows are.

  There are no shelves.

  Instead, the books are piled in low, haphazard stacks. The stacks are arranged in circles, dotted around the room. Each circle is about knee-high, piled with soft-tangled quilts, as though Bly spends nights here instead of in his bed. The walls of the library — all deepest gray — slope and dip with the shapes of wings and leaves.

  I walk around one of the stacked circles, running a finger over gilded covers. The spines glimmer with letters, and, if I listen closely enough, I can hear all the words singing against the pages, as though they’re begging for my attention. I kneel on the glimmer-stitched quilts.

  “Shhh,” I say to the books.

  But they won’t be quiet.

  I pick up a thin volume. It’s smooth as wings in my hands, its cover made out of tongue-fruit leaves. I crack it open, and flickermoths escape from its pages, swirling up to the ceiling. The words are written in octopus ink:

  The turnaway girl is an inevitable contradiction. She makes gold, but she is exiled from it. Perhaps this is because, on the day of her birth, she turned from shimmer as though it were not hers to keep. She knew what she was from the beginning.

  I drop the book in my lap. The title glints as I read it: An Argument for Turnaway Girls. I roll my eyes, placing it on top of the stack again.

  People will use any words they can find to convince themselves that their cruelties are useful. Mother Nine did. And I’m sure Bly has constructed a thousand reasons for keeping my golden bird behind glass — even if I don’t have hard enough bones to ask him what they are.

  I crawl on my hands and knees to follow lines of leaf-smooth spines, searching for a title that hints at turning stone into beasts.

  In the cloister, we read only what Mother Nine parceled out. Our books had pages torn out of them, words turned to ravenous clouds with indigo ink. It didn’t bother the othergirls — their eyes only skimmed the world anyway. But to me it always seemed another punishment — tethering my mind to the chopped stumps of her ideas.

  Pain seizes my hand.

  When I look down, I see that my thumb’s turned bloody. The bandage has unraveled, clinging to the sticky, half-healed flesh. I grit my teeth and sit back on my heels, winding it around again.

  “I won’t find anything here,” I whisper.

  “You might find the truth,” says a voice. “It is the Festival of Secrets, after all.”

  I look over my shoulder.

  It’s the Childer-Queen.

  She’s not supposed to be here. This is the Old Sorrows. I don’t think she’s supposed to be alone, either. Usually Mr. Crowwith follows her the way a shadow follows a flying bird.

  “You left a path in the dust,” she says.

  I can only swallow.

  She keeps on as if I’ve answered. As if I don’t have a knot in my throat. As if my thumb isn’t screaming with hot pain. The books are humming again.

  “You’re obviously looking for somethi
ng,” she states.

  “I was — yes. Something to read.” This isn’t exactly a lie.

  “You know that this was the Sea-Singer’s favorite room at Sorrowhall? That’s why we call it the Sea-Singer’s library, even though it was built long before she was born.”

  “It was?” I hope she will keep talking. The more she talks, the less I have to admit.

  “The Ninth King renamed it. They say he would’ve done anything for her. They say he was so in love that he made an invisible palace only she could see.”

  Hiddenhall. Where the Childer-Queen heard me singing.

  Don’t tell, Delphernia.

  The Childer-Queen steps closer. “The thing is,” she says, “you and the Sea-Singer — you have something in common.” I stand slowly, tucking my hands behind me. The Childer-Queen fidgets with a ring on her finger. Her arm is bruised from Mr. Crowwith’s gripping — I can see the marks through the fine silk of her sleeve. “Rebellion,” she says, looking straight at me.

  I move backward, forgetting the books are there, and trip over them, falling to the ground. The Childer-Queen tramples the toppled pile and stands over me. I could scramble away, sprint out of the library, but I cannot run from what she knows. And she knows everything. She knows how awful I have been — like the Mothers in the whisper-room.

  She crouches down to level her eyes with mine. She grabs my arm, pulls me toward her — and hugs me. Her tears wet my neck.

  I wait, my body limp, until she sets me free, straightens up again.

  She sniffs, wiping her eyes, and looks around the room. “I come here sometimes. To remember her.”

  I stand. “Girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea,” I say, expecting her to nod and send me on my way.

  But she doesn’t.

  She looks shocked.

  “You don’t believe that, do you? The sea?” She laughs mirthlessly. “My father killed her, Delphernia. With the Custodian’s help. They pushed her over the cliff. They pushed her into the sea.”

  I let the words sink, sink, to the bottom of my stomach. All my life, Mother Nine has told me that the sea itself snatched the Sea-Singer from her bed because she dared to lift a quivering song from her throat. And now the Childer-Queen is telling me that she was killed. By the man who built Hiddenhall for her, set cloisterwings to flying for her. The Ninth King — and Mr. Crowwith. Mr. Crowwith, who lurks and spies in his silence, who cannot even stand beside a bell without wanting to clutch at his ears. He hates music. He must have hated the Sea-Singer even more than Mother Nine does.

  “Delphernia,” the Childer-Queen says, “I want you to sing.”

  I open my mouth to object, but no sound comes out.

  “I want you to sing,” she repeats. “In the Garden of All Silences. On the Festival of Queens — tomorrow. I’ve mourned my mother every day of my life, but we need a new singer. Someone to finish what she started.” She takes my wrist.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I can’t sing.”

  “But you can. I know you can.” Her voice is a pleading threat. “I heard you singing through the wall of the cloister for my brother — I followed him that night. And I followed you to those underground tunnels beneath the Featherrut. I heard you.”

  The sea is calling me, stretching out icy hands to take me. Mr. Crowwith’s silence is rushing, rushing like a coming wave.

  Don’t tell, don’t tell, don’t tell.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I’m — I’m sorry.” I try to move away, but the Childer-Queen grabs my arm like Mr. Crowwith grabbed hers. I blench. We’ll have twin bruises now.

  “Delphernia, you have to listen to me. When the Sea-Singer sang in the Garden of All Silences, the Masters sang with her. The sound of her voice — it shook them out of their stupor. They were moved to tears. They lifted their voices with hers. And they saw what Blightsend really is — a prison.”

  “That’s not what I was taught.”

  “Me neither. But that’s how it happened. If you read the records —” She motions around the library as if to explain where she uncovered this truth. “The thing is, nobody believes it. Even the Masters who were there choose to remember the story the Ninth King told with his own tongue before he died. The story the Custodian perpetuated. That the Masters called for her death and the sea obeyed, stealing her from her bed that night.”

  “They’re liars,” I say. “They’re all liars.”

  “I need someone to sing in that garden,” insists the Childer-Queen. “To remind the Masters of the truth.”

  But there’s a question tickling my throat. “This was only twelve years ago. They don’t want change, do they? They like the story they have. They like the power they have.”

  The Childer-Queen looks at the ground. “They chose to believe the Ninth King’s words over their own memories — you’re right. But they were scared, Delphernia. They didn’t want to admit that the Sea-Singer’s song made them see.”

  “See what?”

  “That they were cruel-hearted. That they’d chosen not to see. Chosen not to think of how their music kept girls trapped.”

  “I’m a turnaway girl,” I say. “The sea will take me —”

  “It’s not the sea you have to be afraid of, Delphernia!”

  But waves are mounting in my ears, and I don’t know which is worse: knowing an endless span of salt and gray wants you dead — or knowing the Custodian does.

  “You’re the Queen — you take the risk.” I can’t believe I’m talking to the Childer-Queen like this. As though she’s one of the othergirls and she’s asking me for a bite of stewed eel. I didn’t even bow my head and touch my lips when I saw her.

  “I wish I could!” blares the Childer-Queen, but then her voice peters out. “I can’t sing. My mother didn’t give me the gift.”

  “She didn’t?”

  The Childer-Queen stares at the ground.

  I don’t know why I got it. This gift, this voice, this curse. I’m only a turnaway girl, and I shouldn’t even have questions, let alone a singing voice. I wish I could tear it from my throat and drop it at the Childer’s feet. But I can’t.

  I put a hand to her elbow, gently, and squeeze.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She lifts her fire-gaze. “Then help me.”

  “No,” I say. “I can’t.”

  “Delphernia.” The Childer-Queen’s eyes are narrowed. “You have the same kind of music as the Sea-Singer. I was only a baby when she died, but I remember her singing. I kept it in my bones —”

  I back away. “I am the one who kept music in my bones. In the cloister. And I was whipped speechless for it. You will never understand that.”

  I start to push past her, but another voice floods the library.

  “Childer.” The word’s a gash in the atmosphere, freezing my feet. “I know you’re here.”

  Mr. Crowwith.

  The Childer-Queen wipes her eyes again, tucks a curl behind her ear. She takes hold of my sleeve and pulls me toward him. I yank my arm back, but there’s no point in running. Mr. Crowwith has seen me. The Childer-Queen clears her throat, smoothing the spray of her dress.

  “Custodian,” she says, loudly to mask the teary thickness of her voice. “I know I am not supposed to be in the Old Sorrows, but I smelled sapsweet, and I found, I found — this girl, Delphernia Undersea. I caught her eating.”

  Mr. Crowwith’s face reddens.

  The Childer-Queen tilts her hand, and a sapsweet slips from under her sleeve into her palm, round and golden as a bell. “I found this on her tongue.”

  I slant my eyes at the Childer-Queen, trying to suss out her purpose. I forgot that eating is a sin on the Festival of Secrets. As far as Blightsend is concerned, girls may as well give up their mouths altogether.

  “So you followed her here,” says Mr. Crowwith.

  “I did.”

  “And what, as monarch of our great isle, will you decide as her fate?”

  “I — I’ve —” stutters the Ch
ilder-Queen. “I’ve decided not to punish her. The Festival of Secrets is a time of grace. But I have warned her and reminded her that the rules of our festivals run to the very heart of our values as Blightsenders.”

  Mr. Crowwith is silent for what feels like half a century. I lower my chin, looking at the Childer-Queen out the corner of my eye. Horror fills me as I imagine the punishment I could be in for. No whisper-room this time. Straight to the cliffs.

  “Very well,” he says eventually. Then snaps his eyes in my direction, being very careful not to meet my gaze. “Remember, Delphernia, on the Festival of Secrets, our lies are enough to keep our bellies full.”

  I nod. I play along. And I know, I know, I know that I cannot trust the Childer-Queen. Ever. She won’t protect me if I sing in the Garden of All Silences. Bly told me: her tongue has hooks. And even if the sea doesn’t drag singing girls into its waters, men armed with silence can do their part to ensure that they taste salt.

  The Childer-Queen stares at the round sapsweet in her hand. Her tears have dried on her cheeks. “Return to your quarters, Delphernia,” she says.

  “Yes, Childer,” I whisper.

  Mr. Crowwith stops me, taking my shirt in his fist. “The Childer might have forgotten that we do not call turnaway girls by their names, but I have not forgotten what you really are. Make sure your shimmer comes to my door tomorrow.”

  I try to shove him away with the heels of my palms, but he stands, stiff as stone, before pushing me into the shadow of the passageway.

  Right then, I decide. There are more frightening things than monsters made of stone and seas that wait for singing girls to sleep before grabbing at their ankles.

  There are monsters made of flesh.

  And the Custodian is one of them.

  It takes little to make me happy — Linna, one hooked shard of hushingstone, and two black-winged birds.

  We’re sitting in one of Hiddenhall’s underground rooms. Its walls are lined with stone-carved faces, arranged in crooked rows — eyes open, eyes closed, teeth bared, thin-lipped. The expressions change, but the face is the same.