Chapter 1

3

Chapter 1

Like her mother before her, and her mother's mother before that, Oriane was born with a duty.

She understood it little in her early years. The moment she let loose her first screaming breath, her mother sighed her last, so it fell to Oriane's father to guide her. How taxing those years must have been for him – raising a daughter alone and in grief, helping Oriane through the transformations that began on her very first day in the world.

His wife had prepared him for it, or tried to, at least. But Oriane could only imagine how it felt for her father to see his newborn daughter disappear ; to watch her form fall from her like water – baby-soft skin transmuting into feathers, brown and white wings sprouting from her back. His girl had gone, leaving naught but a bird in her place: a plain, unremarkable little bird with keen black eyes and an interminable call.

The call was the point of it, of course. Those trilling, insistent notes that shot forth the moment she transformed – they weren't just song. They were power. Power passed down through the women in Oriane's line, mother to daughter, skylark to skylark.

At the end of every night, Oriane would call for the dawn. Every day was hers to command. Hers to pull down from the heavens so 4 that darkness never reigned unchecked. From the minute she was born, she alone had drawn back the black curtain of night, revealing the sun that smiled beneath.

At first, she had little control: she would simply transform, and sing, and transform back. She could no more have stopped her song than she could have stopped the flow of her own breath. But as she grew, she learned. One morning after singing, Oriane stretched her wings and, for the first time, attempted to fly. Her father caught her when she fell, and every morning thereafter he followed her around with hands outstretched, keeping her safe until she could stay aloft.

She took to the skies more and more often after that. Though she could not choose when to become the lark, she developed some control over transforming back. It gave her freedom to fly, to roam, to explore.

‘Don't go too far,' her father warned, his brow creasing, making him look old. ‘Don't lose your way.'

‘I won't, Papa,' she promised. And for the longest time, she didn't. She loved him too much not to do as he asked.

It wasn't until her twenty-first year that Oriane felt the first true stirrings of restlessness.

She and her father lived a quiet life. Their home was a comfortable cottage tucked away on the outskirts of the kingdom, surrounded by acres of verdant woods. Together they tended fruit trees, planted neat rows of vegetables, raised a brood of chickens and a single lazy cow. Once a month, Arthur would untether Snowpea, their faithful old mule, and head out to collect extra supplies. But Oriane never 5 went with him. She never ventured further than her lark's wings took her each morning – just far enough to feel the air beneath her, to watch the woods wake below to the sound of her song. Then she'd fly back to her father, to her human self.

On one bright, bluebell day that hovered on the cusp of summer, she was walking back through the woods after a visit to the stream. It was slow going. She dragged a little cart behind her, loaded with two buckets full of water. They usually relied on the well behind their cottage, but a pulley had come loose yesterday. Her father was hard at work fixing it, and Oriane had offered to fetch water.

The afternoon was warm. Sunlight poured through the gaps in the canopy like rivulets of molten gold, but the shade cast by the great trees was blessedly cool. Wiping her forehead on the back of her sleeve, she stopped to catch her breath—

A laugh echoed through the woods.

The tone of it was musical, a sparkling, glass-chime sound. Every muscle in Oriane's body froze. She stared around the little clearing in which she'd come to rest. Steadying herself on the trunk of a tree, she listened, sure her ears had made a mistake.

All was silent – or as close to silent as such a place could be. The ever-present music of the woods still played: the rustling of leaves in the breeze, the chirp and chitter of forest creatures. Oriane relaxed, shaking her head at herself. The heat must have been getting to her.

She dried her palms on her dress, then steadied her grip on the handles of the cart. She hefted it upwards and began to pull—

The laughter sounded again. It was nearer this time, clear and unmistakeable, bright as a struck bell.

Oriane dropped the cart. The buckets wobbled and then tipped, the water she'd collected spilling over the side. 6

Her pulse jumped, fast, faster, as if her lark's heart had been planted in her human chest. Something inside her leapt to attention at that sound. Straining her ears, she heard something else filtering through the trees. The cracking of twigs underfoot. Other voices. The faint murmur of conversation.

People. There were people nearby.

The voices drew closer. She couldn't move. Had they heard the crash of the cart falling? Even if they hadn't, they were coming her way, and all she could do was wait.

She glanced wildly around the clearing. Should she hide? The path that led here was difficult to find if you didn't already know where it was. If only she could transform at will and flutter up into the trees like any other bird … Panic was setting in now, dousing her sun-warmed skin in a clammy sweat. What if they saw her? Her father had warned her how dangerous that would be, how vital it was that she stay hidden. If no one ever saw her, no one could ever discover what she was.

The conversation grew louder, and Oriane made up her mind. There was no use hiding. She would need to run.

Leaving the cart and fallen buckets where they lay, she lifted the hem of her skirt and fled towards home, her tread light and silent on the familiar forest floor. The voices grew fainter behind her, and soon she couldn't hear them at all.

Oriane slowed as the cottage came into view through the trees. What would she tell her father? He would only worry if he knew just how close she'd been to the strangers. Sinking to the ground against a sturdy tree trunk, she sat for a moment in thought. 7

Laughter. She and her father laughed together, of course, but Oriane had never heard another person's laughter. She had never even seen another person – not outside of pictures in books. She had heard hunters in the forest once or twice, but distantly, so far away that only one attuned to the refrain of these woods would have noticed them. For some reason, though, she had not ruminated long on the fact that the other people out there were real . That they didn't just exist between the pages of her books and papers. That they laughed and talked and dreamed, just like her.

Once, when she was younger, Oriane had asked her father why they lived so far from other people. ‘Did you and Mama live here all by yourselves too?'

He'd nodded. ‘We built this place together, board by board. We knew we'd be safe here.'

‘Safe from what?'

‘From people who might stop us living our lives in peace.'

Oriane had cocked her head. ‘But why would they want to do that? Because of what Mama was? What I am?'

‘No, my little lark,' Arthur said, squeezing one of her hands in his. ‘Because of what they are themselves.'

Oriane had somehow known better than to ask about leaving the cottage, but that had not stopped her wondering what lay beyond it. She'd pored over books about the lands that stretched out around them and the history of the island on which they lived. The more she read, the more questions she had for her father – and the more often she found he was unable to answer her.

‘I don't know what's beyond the sea,' he said one evening by the fire, hunched over his work. He was whittling a little wooden instrument. A flute , he'd called it. It would join the other instruments he had made over the years, the ones he hadn't sold on his occasional trips to 8 distant markets: the carefully strung mandolin; the tiny harp whose strings sighed delicately when strummed. Oriane's father could play any instrument he touched and make it sound like magic. She loved that about him.

‘Have you never wanted to go there?' she persisted, finger marking her place in the book on her lap. It was a history volume, full of maps. Some of them depicted the lands beyond Cielore – huge masses of green in the middle of the blue-painted seas. ‘We're an island , Papa, and all these books say there are more islands out there, much bigger than ours! Surely you must have wanted—'

‘No, I haven't,' he said. There was something in his tone that made Oriane stop short. He didn't look up from his work. ‘I've not concerned myself with what's past the water, Oriane, and neither should you.'

Coming from him – her quiet, gentle father, who never raised his voice, even when he must have wanted to – the curt words felt almost like a slap. Oriane lost the page she'd been marking.

‘Why shouldn't I?' she asked. There was the barest, softest hint of a challenge in her voice. She hardly recognised the sound of it.

Her father sighed, dusting wood shavings off his lap onto the floor. ‘It will do you no good, my girl.'

The little seed of defiance that had come close to blooming in Oriane's chest sank back into the earth. He spoke the words with authority, with a weight that said they must be true. Perhaps he was right. Why should she wonder at what lay beyond the waters, when she had everything she needed right here?

Now, Oriane rose from the ground, brushing leaves and dirt from her skirts, and approached the little fence that formed a barrier between their land and the woods. She unhitched the gate and let herself through. 9

She should tell her father what she'd heard. He'd be upset if she didn't. He would want to know.

But as Oriane reached the back door of the house, she already knew what she would do. The voices, the laughter, the people – the strange way it had all made her feel …

That would remain a secret between her and the woods.

Oriane tried her best to act normally over the following days. She sang in the mornings, though she transformed back almost immediately instead of flying around the woods. She sat quietly with her father in the evenings, tired after long, warm days full of work. But she was never quite able to put the thought of other people from her mind.

She did not understand what had changed. It was as if that peal of laughter had caused something in her very nature to shift. She moved around in a daze she couldn't shake off. Several times, she caught herself staring at nothing, and could not remember how long she had stood idle.

The call of her lark form was stronger than ever. She had always liked being a bird, but now she truly realised what it meant . Every metamorphosis was an invitation. Every flap of her wings, an offer. Her very form was freedom – freedom, she now knew, that she had never really tasted. That was why she had been making herself transform back so quickly each morning. She had strength of will enough for that, at least.

A peal of laughter. That was all it had taken. People had existed in the abstract until now; Oriane had known they were out there, but they had never felt real . Not like they did now. The idea of them had 10 taken over her every waking thought, and most of her dreaming ones too, like ivy swallowing a building whole.

Oriane loved her father, and she loved her life. She was healthy and strong. She had everything she could ever need.

But she could not help wondering: what if there were more ?