As I wept, darkness fell and the stars above me grew bright. The last of the light went, and dust blew up from the ground, catching in my throat. The shadows on the walls lengthened.
I turned and there they stood, bodies whole, hands and feet solid. Hair wildly mussed, tunics askew––it looked as though they had been standing in a great wind. They were white-eyed with shock.
“I don’t understand,” said Tem, looking at his hands.
“Starlight.” Mordan looked out the broken roof. “It’s a new moon.”
The new moon was a traditional time of magic and strangeness. Or it could’ve been the starlight. The Elde had worshiped the stars before humans came and brought the sun.
Tem stuck his hand into a shadow and out of the starlight, and a few transparent pinion feathers took its place. “All right.” He sounded remarkably calm. “Stay out of the shadows.” He looked at Mordan. “Let's put Father on the river while we still can.”
“Why? This is his fault.” Arin didn’t move, and the freckles stood out from his white face.
“You’ll help us,” said Tem quietly, “or I’ll thump you.”
Arin said no more about it, and the older boys picked Father up and carried him down to the murmuring Gael River to give him a proper Gralde goodbye.
With numb fingers we tied bunches of last autumn’s rushes into a pallet, and for lack of our family’s wild-roses, threaded it through with snow glories and larkspur while Liskara nickered in the night. We placed Father upon it with his sword on his breast, and set him afloat on the black water.
I wiped my nose and looked away before he drifted out of sight. My hand found Tem’s and he held me next to him.
At some point I realized Floy wasn’t there. I ran back up the steps and into the tower.
She stood against the wall, white-faced in the starlight. When she saw me, she slipped half into a shadow and I saw half of her disappear. I grappled for her hand and pulled her into the light.
“What happened to you?” I said.
She told me the whole story. I gaped at her, and the boys came in, keeping clear of the shadows. “All right,” Arin said shakily. “What are we going to do?”
“Stay out of the wind,” said Mordan. “Try not to die. Watch the country fall apart.”
“We’ve got instructions,” said Tem. He pointed to the signet ring glinting on the stone. “And that.”
“You could just put it on,” Arin said, “march down to Ellyned––”
“Not in a night. This is temporary––we have until morning.” He put his arm into a shadow, and it became a wing.
“You’re birds,” I said, staring at the feathers. “All of you. You’re all birds.”
Arin eyed me sullenly. “What about you? Always skiving off family occasions.”
“You locked me in the privy.”
“It is strange,” Mordan said, “that we should be birds. And Floy––she’s an actual bird.” He turned to Floy. “Are you dumb like a beast?”
“Dumb like a beast?” She shoved him away from her. “Straight out of hell this came.”
She hid her face in her hands, and I kept quiet; and Tem said to me: “We sent Floy to look for you when we found Father. As she was a real bird. Solid, I mean. The hall was burning, she told us.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe this,” he said to Mordan. “Outlaws and some bitch’s curse on the same day?”
“Could be more than a coincidence,” said Mordan.
Tem touched a bruise at the nape of my neck. “This is a wicked piece of work.”
“From a cupboard,” I said. “Nilsa did it.”
He pulled his hand away. “Nilsa?”
“Hardly matters now, does it?” I blinked back tears.
“How’d you get out?” said Mordan. “You’re wet.”
“The toilet.” Arin’s eyes bugged. Before he could say anything, I said viciously, “I didn’t have feathers, at least”
They all stared at me solemnly.
I backed away and cut the arch of my left foot. I looked down: the ring glinted.
“You’ll have to keep it. You’re the only one left.” Tem’s eyes didn’t move from the ring.
“Did you understand any of what Father said?” Mordan said.
“Don’t talk about Father.”
“Once we uproot the Marione,” said Mordan, “we’ve only got five years to find the ice asters.”
“While we’re searching for those, you’ll be sowing the Marione seeds,” said Tem, “so you have enough of a crop to weave tunics.”
“Stop it,” I said. “I’d kill us.”
“And you can’t speak about yourself to anyone,” said Mordan, “except us, I expect, once we’ve broken––”
“You believed him?” Tears wet my face. “Mordan, he was out of his mind.”
A silence followed, unbearably tense. “I’d rather be dead than have this disease,” said Arin. Leode started to cry again, and Mordan took hold of his wrist. Outside the wind picked up and slipped through the cracks, and Floy, still pinned to the wall, grew bold.
“Let her be,” she said. “See how small she is? She’d get no help at all.”
“We’ll won’t do the country any good as dust,” Mordan said.
Tem nodded. “If she’s willing––”
“She’s right, you know.” Arin didn’t look at them. “We’re done for, we’re through, whether or not she decides to do it.”
“Thank you, Arin. Your optimism is appreciated.” Mordan turned to everyone else: “Anything she does later––it can’t get much worse than this.”
“Yes it can,” said Arin. “Reyna with all our Marione?”
I looked at Arin and licked my lips. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it.” My heart lurched up and hammered in my throat.
“You won’t last a day,” Arin said to me. “You won’t be able to tell anyone your name, who you are, what’s your favorite color, whether or not you murdered someone––”
“I said I’ll do it.”
He wiped spit off his nose.
“You’ll go hungry, Reyna. You don’t know how horrible it is,” said Floy. My hand crept up to run over the back of my neck.
“Make sure you understand,” said Tem. “A broken spirit––it’s supposed to feel truly awful.”
This was beyond my comprehension. “Can’t you help me? Even a bit?”
“When it’s moonless. Twelve nights a year.” He sounded more miserable than I’d ever heard him.
“Let me try it, Tem,” I said. “Do. Let me just try.”
“And then there’re the ice asters,” said Arin, as though that put the cap on it.
“They’re real,” said Tem.
“How’re you so cocksure?”
“Because the Cam Belnech are, obviously enough.”
A wind caught in Tem’s hair and he turned toward the window. “It’s late,” he said. The first pale light shone through, coloring the floor green.
I backed against the wall and waited. Their fingertips caught the light and changed, lengthened into feathers that spread down their arms like sleeves.
Tem’s arms became long, wide, an egret’s wings. Mordan’s nose curved into the beak of a raven, Arin grew the slender neck of a swan, and the dove that used to be Leode waited for the others to be done.
I wondered what bird I might have been. The sparrow, the only solid one, sat on her windowsill and looked at me.
I picked up Father’s ring, put it in my chemise pocket. I walked out the door, turned, and called back into it, not sure they could understand me, “I’m uprooting our Marione. You come and watch.”