THAT NIGHT
T he ending needed to be altered.
The girl spent the whole of the afternoon crossing out lines with her
raven feather quill, then adding new, better words to read to the boy in the dark. A tale of a serpent who befriended a songbird. A tale where they lived happily ever after, for in the girl’s version, the snake never devoured the bird.
Long after the moon found its highest perch in the night sky, the girl slipped from the loft in the battle fort near the shore. Crouched low, she used the tall snake grass as a shield until she found her way to the old stone tower. The top had caved in, and it wasn’t much of a tower anymore, but the walls were thick as two men standing side by side.
Along the foundation, iron bars covered a few openings. In her head, the girl counted six barred windows before she crouched at the final cell.
“Bloodsinger,” she whispered. Since the end of the battle, she’d practiced the breathy pitch to be loud enough the boy inside would hear, but the guards stomping along the borders would think it nothing more than the hiss of a forest creature.
Five breaths, ten, then red eyes like a stormy sunset appeared from the shadows.
He was a frightening boy. A few turns older than her, but he’d fought in the war. He’d raised a sword against her people’s warriors. A boy who still had dried blood on his skin.
Her heart squeezed with a strange dread she didn’t understand. This was the last night she might see the boy; she needed to make it count.
“Trials come with the sun,” the boy said, his voice dry as brittle straw. “Better leave, little princess.”
“But I have something for you, and I’ve got to finish the story.” From the pouch slung over her shoulder, the girl took out a small book, bound in tattered leather. Inked over the cover was a black silhouette of a bird and a coiled snake. “Want to hear the end?”
The boy didn’t blink for a long pause. Then, slowly, he sat on the damp earth and crossed his legs under his lanky body.
The girl read the final pages marked in her new, palatable ending. The songbird and serpent grew to be friends despite their differences. No lies, no cunning, no tricks. Each word drew her closer to the bars until her head rested against the cold iron and one hand drooped between the gaps, as though reaching for the boy inside.
“They played from sunup to sundown,” she read, squinting at her messy writing. “And lived happily ever after.”
A smile crossed her features when she closed the bindings and glanced at the boy.
He’d reclined back onto his palms now, legs out, bare ankles crossed. “Is that what we are, princess? A serpent and a songbird?”
Her smile widened. He understood the whole point. “I think so, and they were still friends. That’s why tomorrow at the trials you can, well, you can say we won’t fight no more. My folk will let you stay.”
No more blood. No more nightmares. The girl couldn’t stomach any more blood from hate and war.
When the boy kept quiet, she dug back into her pouch and took out the twine. On the end was a silver charm she’d used her last copper to buy. A silver charm of a swallow in flight.
“Here.” She held out the handmade necklace through the bars and let it fall. “I thought it could remind you of the story.”
All at once, the distance between them was a blessing. Any closer and the boy might see the flush of pink in her cheeks. He might see that her hope in the charm was less about recalling the tale and more about remembering her.
With slow movements, the boy took hold of the charm. His dirty thumb brushed over the wings. “Tomorrow, I’ll be sent away, or I’ll greet the gods, Songbird.”
Her stomach dipped, and something warm, like spilled tea, flooded her insides. Songbird. She liked the name.
“That’s what happens when you lose a war.” The boy’s lips twitched when he placed the twine around his neck. “There’s no stopping it.”
The race of her heart dimmed. She dropped her chin. Hopeful as she was, the girl wasn’t a fool. She knew the only thing saving the boy’s neck was that he was a boy. Should he be a man, he’d lose his head. He had fought against her people; he hated them.
Like the serpent from the story hated the birds in the trees for their freedom in the skies.
She didn’t care. A feeling, deep in her bones, drew her to the boy. She’d hoped he might be drawn to her too.
Hope failed. True, he was young, but he’d always be marked as an enemy. Banished and forbidden.
She blinked and reached once more into the fur-lined pouch. “I know this is important to your folk. Thought maybe you’d want to see it once more.”
The girl cupped the gold talisman, shaped like a thin disk, with care. It was weathered and aged and delicate. A faint hum of strange remnants of magic lived in the gritty edges. If her father ever learned she’d snatched the piece from the lockbox, he’d probably banish her to her room for a week.
The moonlight gleamed over the strange rune in the center of the coin. The boy in the shadows let out a gasp. She didn’t think he’d meant to do it.
For the first time since she’d started reading to him, the boy climbed up the stone wall and curled his hands around the bars. The red in his eyes deepened like blood. His smile was different. Wide enough she could see the slight point to his side tooth, almost like fangs of a wolf, only not as long.
This smile sent a shiver up her arms.
“Will you do something for me, Songbird?” “What?”
The boy nodded at the disk. “That was a gift from my father. Watch over it for me, will you? I’ll come back to get it one day, and you can tell me more stories. Promise?”
The girl ignored the wave of gooseflesh up her arms and whispered, “Promise.”
When the sound of heavy boots scraped over the dirt nearby, the girl gave one final look at the boy in the darkness. He held up the silver bird charm and grinned that wolfish grin once more before she sprinted into the grass.
The speed of her pulse ached as she hurried back to the longhouse. Her gaze was locked on the disk in her hands; she never saw the root bursting from the soil. The thick arch snagged the tip of her toe and sprawled the girl face down in the soil.
She coughed and scrambled back to her knees. When she looked down, her insides twisted up like knotted ropes.
“Oh, no.”
The disk she’d promised to protect mere moments before had fallen beneath her body. Now, the shimmer of gold lay in three jagged pieces in the soil. Tears blurred her vision as she gathered the pieces, sobbing promises to the night that she’d fix it, she’d repair what was broken.
Perhaps it was the despair that kept her from noticing the strange rune, once marked on the surface of the disk, now branded the smooth skin below the crook of her elbow.
In time, the more she learned of the viciousness of the sea fae who attacked her people, the more the girl looked back on that night like a shameful secret. She made up tales about the scar on her arm, a clumsy stumble down the cobbled steps in the gardens. She’d forget the boy’s promise to come for her.
The girl would start to think of him as everyone else—the enemy.
If only the girl had kept away from those cells that night, perhaps she would not have unraveled her entire world.
