Chapter 23

177

Chapter 23

The world had ended, and it was Andala's fault.

Seven dawns should have come and gone by now; seven bright, warm days filled with midsummer sunlight. But instead it was dark. Unnaturally, unendingly dark. Ever since the solstice ball, night had held the kingdom in its unflinching grip. And the sun was nowhere to be seen.

For seven days, Andala had not felt the usual urge to transform. There was no spear of ice, no stabbing in her chest. She was just … herself, no trace of the nightingale at all. And she could not deny the feeling of relief it had given her.

It was tempered by shame, of course. Shame that she should be so selfish as to celebrate the end of the world because it made her feel better. And beneath the shame was the guilt, because, after all, everything was her fault; everything that had happened since the skylark had arrived.

Oriane.

The thought of her sent a different sort of spike through Andala's chest. Images from the ball were burned into her mind, flashing before her like a set of cards in the hand of a trickster. Oriane all in gold. Oriane's eyes, dark wells of grief smeared with shimmering paint.

Oriane in a cage. 178

That guilt bit at Andala with small, sharp teeth as she made her way deeper into the woods. It left tiny wounds that bled and closed and opened again. She shivered, drawing her winter cloak tighter about herself. The temperature had been dropping steadily. Andala was always dressed warmly thanks to the ever-present chill that pervaded her blood, but even she'd had to dig warmer clothes out of her storage chest.

She stopped, hung her lantern on a tree branch. She needed to push away the image of Oriane behind those gilded bars. It was the hour that would have been sunset, had the world been turning as it usually did, and she needed to know whether she could transform if she really, truly tried.

She drew in a breath and let it out. Focusing. Concentrating on the place where it usually started. But there was no agonising chill in her chest. The spark of metamorphosis was dormant, her heart beating warm when it should now be turning to ice.

Andala opened her eyes. It was useless. She had never been able to control her transformations. Why should she be able to start now? And even if she could, what good would it do? She had thought at first that if she sang it would somehow snap the sky out of its spell. But things didn't work like that. In truth, this had been a last resort, a final attempt to right all the wrongs she had set into motion.

As long as Oriane kept the sun from rising, there would be no need to call the night. But a world of perpetual night was a world nobody wanted to live in – a world in which no one would live at all, if it went on long enough.

But what would she prefer, really? To live the rest of her long, long life the way she had been living?

What if the rest of that life were short, but entirely free?

‘No.' 179

Something skittered away in the undergrowth at the sound of her voice. Andala had not meant to speak aloud, but something in her had rebelled against the intrusive thought. Because if she let this happen, let the world die simply because it would be easier for her to do so, then she was not the only one who would die with it.

Her stomach lurched unpleasantly, as it always did when she thought of Amie.

The palace soon came into view, lit up from within like a festive tree. That seemed to be their only recourse: light everything up as if it were day, to forget the fact that the day had not dawned.

Andala took the servants' entrance, hoping not to run into anyone on her way to find Kitt. She had no such luck. Ildrie bustled by, two dusty bottles of wine in her hands. She lurched to a stop when she spotted Andala.

‘Still going out for your night-time strolls, then, Andala? Even when it's night all the time? Suppose that means you can stroll whenever you like!' Ildrie laughed, and Andala marvelled inwardly at the girl's penchant for positivity, even when the sun had literally stopped shining. ‘I've just been fetching more wine,' Ildrie continued. ‘They can't get enough of it upstairs. And half the guests are still here from the ball as well – too scared to go home in the dark or some such, as if they've never seen night-time before. Fools, the lot.'

‘Don't let them hear you say that,' Andala murmured. ‘Anyway, I've got to go—'

‘What you doing now, anyway?' Ildrie said, tilting her head and regarding Andala as if something had just occurred to her. ‘There's no lady up there for you to be lady's maid to anymore, is there?' 180

Andala swallowed the biting reply that wanted to spring to her lips. ‘No, there isn't,' she replied carefully. ‘But there are still things for me to do. You'd better get them their wine, Ildrie, you don't want them all getting sober.'

Before the girl could say anything more, Andala pushed past and made her way up the stairs to the palace proper.

She made a beeline for Kitt's rooms, keeping her head down to avoid any more conversation. There was hardly anybody in the halls, anyway. All the nobles were sticking together in various chambers, as if to find safety in numbers against the threat of the night.

At Kitt's door, she knocked quickly and then let herself in. The room was dimly lit. It was something of a relief after the blaze of torches in the halls. Kitt was at his workspace, as she'd thought he would be. He'd hardly left since it had happened. He was trying to work out some solution, some way to get around the fact that Oriane would not sing. Andala hadn't had the heart to tell him that she didn't think it likely he could invent or experiment his way out of this one.

‘How goes the work?' she said anyway, crossing to his paper-strewn desk.

Kitt glanced up at her, then sunk his head back into his hands, staring at some diagram in front of him. He looked like he hadn't slept in days; his clothes were rumpled, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows.

‘I don't know what I'm doing,' he muttered. ‘I don't even know how to begin to tackle this. Everything I've been researching has to do with how we survive the night, but to be honest, Andala …' He blew out a long breath. ‘We won't survive it. Not for long, anyway. The cold, the crop failure … Our only real chance is—'

‘Oriane.' 181

Kitt nodded. ‘Oriane.'

‘Is she … How is she today?' Andala had not been back inside the ballroom, where Oriane was still being kept. Kitt had been in and out, examining her at the king's request. Tomas seemed to hope he might discover some way to make her sing.

Kitt sighed. ‘She's all right, I think. It's hard to tell. She's much the same, just … just a bird, really. Every time I look at her … I see more of the skylark and less of Oriane.'

Andala swallowed hard. She could not let Kitt see how much that news disturbed her. ‘Is she … Is she eating? Drinking?' She paused. ‘Does she need to?' Andala herself had never had to do so as the nightingale. She spent such little time in that form that it had never been necessary.

‘I don't think so,' Kitt said, shaking his head slowly. ‘Much as she looks like a regular bird, that's not what she is. If you believe what those Order of the Sky folk say, she's a goddess. And I suppose goddesses don't need food or drink – not in their divine forms, anyway.'

Goddess. Andala had never liked that word. She changed the subject swiftly. ‘So what do we do? Is there anything we can do?'

‘That's what I need to work out. Tomas has had other physicians examining her, too, hoping to find some way to get her to sing, but they're all terrified to hurt her, of course. It's one thing for her to stop singing, another entirely for her to die. Skies know what kind of place we'd find ourselves in then—'

He stopped abruptly at the look on Andala's face.

‘I'm sorry,' he said quietly. ‘That was crude of me. I know you care for her. I care for her, too.'

Andala just stood there. She should have said something, should have denied it, but she didn't trust herself to speak. 182

‘I don't want them prodding and poking at her, trying to force her to sing, any more than you do,' Kitt went on, brushing his papers aside to clear a space on the desk. ‘We need a new way to approach this. It's not really about Oriane herself, is it? It's about the song. The skylark's song.'

Andala pulled a chair over to sit by him. ‘Yes, and?'

He dragged a hand through his hair, then pulled out a fresh sheet of parchment, dipped his quill rapidly in an inkpot. His movements were erratic, almost manic. It must have been longer since he'd slept than she thought.

‘What if we could recreate it?' he said. ‘There's power in the song itself – there must be. The sun doesn't rise when she transforms; it only rises when she sings. If we can somehow trick the sun into thinking she were singing …'

‘Then it may rise without her.' Andala tapped a finger on the desk, her mind working. ‘But how would we do something like that?'

Kitt thought for a moment, then grabbed an open book that had been discarded on his haphazard desk. He flicked through some pages and read a little, nodding to himself. Then he scribbled two words on the parchment and pushed it towards her. Andala squinted at what he'd written.

‘ Sturnus vulgaris ?' She looked at him dubiously. ‘Is that some kind of spell?'

Kitt huffed a laugh. ‘I don't think our answer lies in witchcraft, no. It's the name of a bird. A common starling. You've probably seen one before – little shiny black thing. They're everywhere around here, hence the name.'

‘And … its song sounds like Oriane's?'

‘No,' Kitt said triumphantly. When Andala raised an impatient brow, he continued. ‘It's a mimic.' 183

‘A mimic.' Andala stared at the words on the parchment again. ‘So you think it can imitate her song?'

‘Possibly.'

Andala sighed. Kitt was brilliant, he really was. She had never met someone so smart. But sometimes even a genius had to have bad ideas. She would have to break it to him gently.

‘That would be wonderful, Kitt,' she said, ‘if we found one of these birds that already knows her song. But that's a very slim possibility, and if it doesn't …'

Kitt groaned. ‘Then it would have to hear the song to replicate it anyway. Skies above, I'm dim.'

Andala nudged him with her shoulder. ‘You are. But you're allowed to be, every once in a while. Gives the rest of us a chance to catch up to you.'

They sat in silence for a time, both staring into space. The dying fire cracked and flickered. Andala was glad of the warmth it still threw out; the chill in the air was becoming more palpable by the hour.

Kitt eventually began to talk again, more to himself than Andala, musing over their options for recreating Oriane's song. He seemed convinced now that it was the key, that if only they could come close enough, the sun would be fooled into rising. Andala was not half so sure. Dark possibilities stretched out before her, all terrible, all too imaginable. The sun never rising again. A vast, unending night, wrapped around the kingdom like a shadowed hand. Oriane forever in a cage – and she, Andala, free of the nightingale's burden, but at what cost?

‘I've got to go,' she said, cutting Kitt off mid-sentence when she could stand her own thoughts no longer. She stood and made purposefully for the door— 184

‘Are you going to tell her?'

Andala spun. ‘Tell her what?' she snapped, too quickly, too sharply. All this talk of the skylark's magic song had her on edge; what else might Kitt have figured out as he studied the subject? Did he know about her, too?

Kitt merely blinked. ‘That we're working on it. A plan to fix this – to help her.' He shrugged helplessly. ‘She must be scared. It might be comforting for her to know.'

Andala's throat tightened, and she could not respond. Kitt was so kind, so good, that it had not even crossed his mind for them to say anything else to Oriane, for them to try to persuade her to sing, like everybody else was doing. It filled her with relief, that he cared for Oriane so much, and so easily.

‘Yes,' she said eventually, her grip on the doorknob turning her knuckles white. ‘Yes, I'll tell her we're going to help.'