Her body collapsed in a heap of feathers. An ancient wooden dial scraped her palm.
Kantu did not know how long she lay there, feeling how the earth shook with her heartbeat, announcing her presence to her friends in the catacombs like a giant who first politely bangs the big brass knocker before blowing the roof of a house down. Hours passed. Or minutes. It was hard to tell these days. No one came. After a long while, she rolled to a crouch, drew her immense raptor’s beak back over her head like a crown, and set it securely between her two horns that it would not fall forward at an awkward moment. Her human face emerged, everything a bit dusty. There was nothing she could do about the diamond on her brow. She wiped her prodigious nose. She stood and spat. Her tongue felt dry and rough as sandstone.
Throwing the feathers back from her body until they settled behind her shoulders like a blanket roll, she stretched, hearing all sorts of pops and crackles and creaks as her body protested this cavalier treatment. She sat down again suddenly. Her feet hurt.
“Ow,” she told bare toes and overgrown nails. “You never ached as talons.”
“Next time,” said Mikiel from behind her, “you’ll know to rest them once in a while. A solid month of rain, Kantu! We’ve all started to mold!”
Scrambling up and whipping around, Kantu could barely gasp before Mikiel was upon her with a rib-crushing embrace. She couldn’t see Mikiel’s face, but Mik’s tears cut ravines into the dust upon Kantu’s clavicles. Kantu laughed a little, shaking her friend, trying to get her to smile again. Something else thumped her.
Crizion had joined them, a second circle of arms. More crying and scolding:
“Kantu! You’re back! You look so tired! Don’t you know, even a god must rest?”
“I didn’t, actually. I should’ve. Thanks for telling me.”
They touched her face, her feathers, her new curly golden horns and the sharp maw tilting up between them, its empty mask open to the sky, the sparkle on her forehead that made the lightning, her bloody rags, the scar on her throat. Though their voices were brave, their fingers shook. They wept more than they smiled.
What—had they thought her gone for good? So transformed as to be unrecognizable? Forgetful? Did they not know they were her own, that she was theirs?
“It’s all right,” she tried to tell them, trying to believe it. “We’re all here now.”
Then Manuway was there. Kneeling there. Kneeling before her, head bent. And this Kantu could not bear. No one could. Not even a god.
“Oh, hell. Fjord and flame and demons of the farthest north. Manuway. Stand up. Stand up, p-please.” She tugged his sleeve, his shoulder, his obdurate chin. “I’m still me. I am! My blood oath on it. And you know—my blood’s not a thing I idly fling about. Only in dire emergencies. This is getting…getting dire. Up. Come. Come here, Manuway!”
When he did not stir, she lifted him with an exaggerated grunt and mashed her body to his. There was a deep thrumming in his skin that she heard like a song. And his large hands stroked Kantu’s rough black hair as if trying to braid the hour before dawn. Kantu drew back to look at him. Manuway met her eyes, as even Mikiel and Crizion had not yet done, and smiled.
As ever, Kantu’s tongue knotted itself into mush and monosyllables. No use coaxing speech of it—she knew that from long years of practice. So she kissed Manuway instead. A quick kiss that turned into a deeper kiss that might have turned into something else had not Crizion primly cleared her throat. Mikiel was bent double, whooping.
“All right, all right,” Kantu said mildly. “I’m done—for now!” she added, when Manuway opened his mouth to object. “Meantime, Mik, stop cackling. Crizion, love, do you have anything to eat?”
“I have prepared a feast, Kantu,” Crizion said, solemn but dimpling.
“Lead on, friends. I’m starving.”
The Bone Swans of Amandale
For the erstwhile Injustice League
Dora Rose reached her dying sister a few minutes before the Swan Hunters did. I watched it all from my snug perch in the old juniper, and I won’t say I didn’t enjoy the scene, what with the blood and the pathos and everything. If only I had a handful of nuts to nibble on, sugared and roasted, the kind they sell in paper packets on market day when the weather turns. They sure know how to do nuts in Amandale.
“Elinore!” Dora Rose’s voice was low and urgent, with none of the fluting snootiness I remembered. “Look at me. Elinore. How did they find you? We all agreed to hide—”
Ah, the good stuff. Drama. I lived for it. I scuttled down a branch to pay closer attention.
Dora Rose had draped the limp girl over her lap, stroking back her black, black hair. White feathers everywhere, trailing from Elinore’s shoulders, bloodied at the breast, muddied near the hem. Elinore must’ve been midway between a fleshing and a downing when that Swan Hunter’s arrow got her.
“Dora Rose.” Elinore’s wet red hand left a death smear on her sister’s face. “They smoked out the cygnets. Drove them to the lake. Nets—horrible nets. They caught Pope, Maleen, Conrad—even Dash. We tried to free them, but more hunters came, and I…”
Turned herself into a swan, I thought, and flew the hellfowl off. Smart Elinore.
She’d not see it that way, of course. Swan people fancied themselves a proud folk, elegant as lords in their haughty halls, mean as snakes in a tight corner. Me, I preferred survivors to heroes. Or heroines, however comely.
“I barely escaped,” Elinore finished.
From the looks of that gusher in her ribs, I’d guess “escaped” was a gross overstatement. But that’s swans for you. Can’t speak but they hyperbolize. Every girl’s a princess. Every boy’s a prince. Swan Folk take their own metaphors so seriously they hold themselves lofty from the vulgar throng. Dora Rose explained it once, when we were younger and she still deigned to chat with the likes of me: “It’s not that we think less of anyone, Maurice. It’s just that we think better of ourselves.”
“Dora Rose, you mustn’t linger. They’ll be tracking me…”
Elinore’s hand slipped from Dora Rose’s cheek. Her back arched. Her bare toes curled under, and her hands clawed the mossy ground. From her lips burst the most beautiful song—a cascade of notes like moonlight on a waterfall, like a wave breaking on boulders, like the first snow melt of spring. All swan girls are princesses, true, but if styling themselves as royalty ever got boring, they could always go in for the opera.
Elinore was a soprano. Her final, stretched notes pierced even me. Dora Rose used to tell me that I had such tin ears as could be melted down for a saucepan, which at least might then be flipped over and used for a drum, thus contributing in a trivial way to the musical arts.
So maybe I was a little tone-deaf. Didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy a swan song when I heard one.
As she crouched anxiously over Elinore’s final aria, Dora Rose seemed far remote from the incessantly clever, sporadically sweet, gloriously vain girl who used to be my friend. The silvery sheen of her skin was frosty with pallor. As the song faded, its endmost high note stuttering to a sigh that slackened the singer’s white lips, Dora Rose whispered, “Elinore?”