by Paula Guran
She hung the surrounding sky with firebirds, contrails of flame streaking the clouds.
Dawn came, but it was neither rebirth nor respite. Sweeney was still befeathered. He turned to the glow of the rising sun, and the tower that appeared there, as if painted on the sky.
Every wizard had a tower, even in twenty-first century New York. It was the expected, required thing, and magic had rules and bindings more powerful than aught else. It had to, made as it was out of words and will and belief. Certain things had to be true or the magic crumbled to dust and nothingness.
Sweeney cracked open his beak, and tore at the promise-crammed air.
A wizard’s tower is protected by many things, but the most puissant are the wizard’s own words of power. Even after they have cast their spells and done their work, the words of a wizard retain tracings of magic. Their echoes continue to cast and recast the spells, for as long as sound travels.
The words do not hang idle in the air. Power recognizes power, and old spells linger together like former lovers. Though the connections are no longer as bright as the crackle and spark of that first magic, they can never be entirely erased. They gather, each to each, and in their greetings, new magics are made.
Ronan had been a wizard for centuries now, perhaps millennia. A few very important years longer than Sweeney had been a bird.
He had fled Ireland in the coffin ships, with the rest of the decimated, starving population. His magic, the curse’s binding, had pulled Sweeney along in his wake.
In the years since his arrival, magic had wrapped itself around Ronan’s tower like fairy tale thorns, a threat, a protection, and a guarantee of solitude. A locus of power that sang, siren-like, to Sweeney, though he knew it was never what he sought.
Sweeney flew around the tower three times, then three, then three again, in the direction of unraveling. The curse, as it always had, remained.
“How many paintings do you have finished?” “Five.”
“How long will it take you to do, say, five or maybe seven more?” “Why?”
“Drowned Meadow will give you gallery space, but I think these new pieces are strong enough you’d be better served if you had enough finished work to fill the gallery, rather than being part of a group showing.”
“When would I need them finished by?”
Brian’s answer made her wince, and mourn, once again, the loss of the sketchbook, and the studies it contained. Still. “It’s a good space. I’ll get the pieces done.” “Excellent. I’ll email you the contracts.”
“Wait, that ’s what the naked bird guy looks like?” Emilia stood in front of the first painting in the series, the man transform ing into a bird. “No wonder you keep seeing him around the city. He’s hot.”
“He’s usually a bird.”
“Still, yum. And is that drawn to scale?”
Maeve snorted. “Fine. The next time I see him, if he’s being a person, I’ll give him your number.”
Emilia laughed, but she looked sideways at Maeve while she did. “So, are you seeing all of the things from your paintings?”
Emilia had moved to the newest painting in the series, a cockatrice among the tents at Bryant Park’s Fashion Week, models turned to statues under its gaze.
“Do you think I would be here with you, discussing the attractiveness of a werebird, after having consumed far too much Ethiopian food, if I had really encountered a bird that can turn people to stone just by looking at them?”
Maeve looked at Emilia again. “Or no. It’s not actually that you think that. You’re just doing the sanity check.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. But you know you don’t always take care of yourself before a show. And this one did start with you thinking that you saw a bird turn into a naked guy.”
“Which, I admit, sounds odd. But you don’t need to worry that I’ve started the New York Chapter of the Phoenix Watching Club.”
“That sounds very Harry Potter. You haven’t seen any wizards wandering around the city, have you? I mean, other than the guys who like to get out their wands on the subway.” Emilia twisted her face into an expression of repulsed boredom.
“And you wonder why I don’t like to leave the house.”
“No wizards?”
“No wizards.”
There were wizards in New York City, nearly everywhere. War mages, who changed history over games of speed chess. Chronomancers who stole seconds from the subway trains. And the city built on dreams was rife with onieromancers channeling desires between sleep and waking.
Even the wizard who had set the curse on Sweeney looked out over the speed and traffic of the city as he spoke his spells, shiftings and transformations, covering one thing in some other’s borrowed skin, whether they will or no.
But though Ronan was here, and had been, he was not the direction to which Sweeney looked to break his curse. Wizards did not, under any but the most extreme circumstances, undo their own magic. Magic, magic that is practiced and cast, is at odds with entropy. Not only does it reshape order out of chaos, but it wrenches the rules for order sideways. It rewrites the laws, so that a man might be shifted to a bird, and back again, no matter how physics wails.
To make such a thing happen, though it might seem the work of an incantation and an arcane gesture, is the marriage of effort and will. And will, once wielded in such fashion, is not lightly undone.
But just because the wizard would not lift his curse did not mean that the spell might never be broken.
It just meant it would require a magic stronger than wizardry to break it.
Maeve’s apartment was full of birds. Photographs papered the walls, layered over each other in collage, Escheresque spirals of wings that had never flown together fell in cascading recursive loops of impossible birds.
The statue from Brian was a carnival fantasy among articulated skeletons in shadowboxes, shivered bones set at precise angles of flight.
Her own bones ached as if wings mantled beneath the surface of her skin and longed to burst forth from her back.
The canvas before her was enormous, six feet in height and half again as wide, the largest she had ever painted. On it, a murmuration of starlings arced and turned across a storm-tossed sky.
Among the starlings were other birds. Bird of vengeance, storm-called, and storm-conjuring. The Erinyes.
The Kindly Ones.
More terrible than lightning, they harried the New York skyline.
Cramps spasmed Maeve’s hands around her brushes, and her eyes burned, but still she layered color onto the canvas.
It was a kind of madness, she thought, the way it felt to finish a painting. The muscle-memory knowledge of exactly where the brush strokes went, even though this was nothing she had painted before. The fizzing feeling at the top of her head that told her what she was painting was right, was true. The adrenaline that flooded her until she couldn’t sit, or sleep, or eat until it was finished.
Madness, surely. But a madness of wings, and of glory.
The skies of New York had grown stranger. Sweeney was used to the occasional airborne mystery. It wasn’t as if he had ever thought himself the only sometimes-bird on the wing.
But a flock of firebirds had taken up residence in Central Park, and an exaltation of larks had begun exalting in Mandarin in the bell tower of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He thought he had seen the phoenix, but perhaps it had only been a particularly gaudy sunset.
Magic all unasked for, and stuck about with feathers.
Though perhaps not magic unconjured.
Sweeney paged through a notebook, not lost on a train but slid from a messenger bag. He had wanted, he supposed, to see how she saw him.
Of course, he was in none of the sketches.
But its pages crawled with magic. It was rife in the shadows and shad ings and lines of the sketches. Sweeney didn’t know if it was wizardry or not, what he was looking at, but there was power in her drawings.
Perhaps enough
power to unmake a curse.
“You’re sure I can’t convince you to come to the opening?” Brian asked. “Because I think people are really going to want to talk to you about these paintings, and Maeve, do not say ‘my art speaks for itself.’”
“You have to admit, you pretty much asked me to.”
“Maeve.”
“They’ll sell better if I’m not there.”
“What would make you think that?”
Because if I’m there, I’ll spend the entire evening locked in the bathroom, occasionally vomiting from panic, she thought. “Because if I’m not there, you can spin me as mysterious. Or better yet, perfect. Tell them what they want to hear without the risk that I’ll show up with paint still in my hair.”
“I have never once seen you with paint in your hair. And even if I had, artists are supposed to be absent-minded and eccentric. It’s part of your charm.”
“You told me I wasn’t allowed to be absent-minded and eccentric anymore, remember? Not in this gallery. Not at these prices.”
“I suppose I did. Still, this is your night, Maeve. If you want to be here, even if there is paint in your hair, you should come.”
“I can assure you, Brian, I won’t want to.”
Sweeney could, if he concentrated enough, prevent the shift in form from man to bird from happening. Usually, he didn’t bother—the change came when it would, and after all of these years, he had made peace with his spontaneous wings.
But he wanted to see the paintings. To see, captured in pigment and brushstroke the birds that Maeve had made a space for in New York’s skies.
He wanted to see her, just once, in the guise and costume of a normal man.
More, he wanted to see if the magic that crackled across the pages of her notebook was in the paintings as well, to see if she could paint him free. A request that might allow him to once again be a normal man, instead of what he was: a creature cursed into loneliness and the wrong skin, whose only consolation was the further loneliness of flight.
Sweeney’s difficulty was that while he could, by force of will, hold himself in human form, it let the madness push further into his consciousness. The longer he fought the transformation, the more he struggled to be shaped like a man, they less he thought like one.
Sweeney slid on his jacket. He checked to make sure his buttons matched, his fly was up, and his shoes were from the same pair. He hailed a cab, and hoped for the best.
On the night of the opening, Maeve was not at the gallery. She had been there earlier in the day to double-check the way the paintings had been hung, to see to all the last minute details, and to tell Brian, one more time, that she was absolutely not coming to the opening.
“Fine. Then at least put on a nice dress at home and have some champagne with a friend so I don’t get depressed thinking about you.”
“If that’s what will make you happy, of course I will,” she lied, offering a big smile, and accepting Brian’s hug.
As the show opened, Maeve was wearing a T-shirt with holes in it, and eating soup dumplings. Which she toasted with a glass of the very fine champagne that Brian had sent over. Emilia had texted from the gallery that the “paintings are your best thing ever. So proud of you!” Comfort and celebration and a friend, even if far from what Brian imagined.
Strange to think that this show, which Brian thought could be big enough to change her career, began with seeing a bird turn into a naked man. Which was certainly the one story she could never tell when asked what inspired her work.
She hadn’t seen the bird for a while now. Or, thankfully, the naked man. Some parts of the strangeness of the city were better left unexplained.
Too many answers killed the magic, and Maeve wanted the magic. Its possibilities were what made up for the discomfort and worry of every day life.
The lights were too bright and there were too many people. Sweeney bit the insides of his cheeks and walked through the gallery as if its floor were shattering glass.
The paintings. He thought they were beautiful, probably, or that they would be if he could ever stand still long enough to really look at them, to see them as more than blurs as he circled the gallery. He felt too hot, his skin ill-fitting, his heart racing like a bird’s.
Sweeney clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms, and forced his breath in and out until it steadied.
There.
Almost comfortably human.
Sweeney walked the room slowly this time, giving himself space to step back and look at the canvases.
Feathers itched and crawled beneath his skin.
And there he was.
The still point at the center of the painting, and feathers were bursting from his skin there, too, but there, it didn’t look like madness, it looked like transcendence.
Sweeney heaved in a breath.
“It does have that effect on people.”
Sweeney glanced at the man standing next to him, the man who hadn’t seemed to realize it was Sweeney in the painting hanging before them.
“Are you familiar with Maeve’s work? Maeve Collins, the artist, I mean,” Brian said.
“Ah. A bit. Only recently. Is she here tonight?”
“Not yet, though I hope she’ll make an appearance later. But if you’re interested in the piece, I’d be happy to assist you with it.”
“If I buy it, can I meet her?”
“I can understand why you’d make the request, but that’s not the usual way art sales work.”
And now the man standing next to him did step back and look at Sweeney. “Wait. Wait. You’re the model for the painting. Oh, this is fantastic.”
Feathers. Feathers unfurling in his blood.
“But of course you’d know Maeve already then.”
“I don’t.” Sweeney braceleted his wrist, his left wrist, downed with white feathers, with his right hand. “But I think I need to.”
He unwrapped his fingers, and extended his feathered hand to the man in the gallery, beneath the painting that was and wasn’t him.
Brian looked down at the feathers. “I’ll call her.”
“Idon’t care how good the party is, Brian, I’m not coming.”
“Your model is here, and he would like to meet you.”
“How many vodka tonics have you had? That doesn’t even make sense. I didn’t use any models in this series.”
“Not even the guy with feathers coming out of his skin? Because he’s standing right in front of the painting, and it certainly looks like him, not to mention this thing where I’m watching him grow feathers on his arms, and what the fuck is going on here, Maeve?”
“What did you say?” The flesh on her arms rose up in goose bumps.
“You heard me. You need to get here.
“Now.”
Maeve took a cab, and went in through the service entrance, where she had loaded the paintings earlier that week.
“Brian, what is—you!”
“Yes,” Sweeney said, and in an explosion of feathers and collapsing clothes, turned into a bird.
Maeve sat with the bird while the celebration trickled out of the gallery. She had gathered up the clothes he had been wearing, and folded them into precise piles, stuffing his socks into the toes of the shoes, spinning the belt into a coil.
At one point, Brian had brought back a mostly empty bottle of vodka, filched from the bar. Maeve took a swig, and thought of taking another before deciding that some degree of sobriety was in order to counterbalance the oddity of the night.
The bird didn’t seem interested in drinking either.
Maeve dropped her head into her hands, and scraped her hair back into a knot. When she sat up again, Sweeney was pulling on his pants. “I am sorry about before. Stress makes me less capable of interacting with people.”
Maeve laughed under her breath. “I can relate.”
Brian walked back. “Oh, good. You’re, ah, dressed again. Have you two figured out what’s going on?”
“I am un
der a curse,” Sweeney said. “And I think Maeve can paint me free of it. There is some kind of power in her work, something that I would call magic. I’d like to commission a painting from her to see if this is possible.”
“That’s—” Maeve bit down hard on the next word.
“Mad? Impossible?” Sweeney met her eyes. “So am I.”
“I’m not magic,” Maeve said.
“That may be. After all this time and change, I am not a bird, though I sometimes have the shape of one. Magic reshapes truth.”
Maeve could see the bird in the lines of the man, in the way he held his weight, in the shape of the almost-wings the air made space for.
She could see the impossibility, too, of what was asked.
“Please,” said Sweeney. “Try.”
“I’ll need you,” Maeve said, “to pose for me.”
“This has got to be the weirdest contract I have ever negotiated.” “Brian. You negotiated with a guy who had been a bird for a significant part of the evening. Even if it had been straight up sign here boilerplate, it still would have been the weirdest contract you ever negotiated.”
“True.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t ask for a deadline.” Maeve picked up one of the white feathers from the floor, ran it through her fingers. “Some way of marking whether this will work or not, rather than just waiting to find out.”
“You say whether like you genuinely believe it’s a possibility, Maeve.
“And yes, this has been a night of strangeness, but magic is not what happens at the end. The way this ends is that you’re going to wind up painting a very nice picture for a guy who is, I don’t know how, sometimes a bird, and he is still going to be sometimes a bird after it is signed and framed, and once it is, we will never speak of this again because it is just too weird.
“You’re good, Maeve. But you’re not a magician. So stop worrying about whether there’s magic in your painting, because there isn’t.”
“You said people don’t buy paintings just because of what’s on the canvas, they buy the story they think the painting tells,” Maeve said.
Brian nodded.
“Sweeney bought a story where magic might be what happens at the end. He’s bought that hope.
