Chapter 26

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Chapter 26

When Andala had come to see her, it had been like waking from a heavy sleep.

First, the sense of someone beside her cage, drawing her up from the depths. Then a voice – the voice she had come to know the sound of these past months, soft and musical as a song.

‘I'm sorry I didn't come sooner.'

Andala's words floated around her on the black tide, an offering, a life raft.

‘I'm sorry I … I'm sorry.'

She knew that voice. She wanted to see the woman it belonged to. With a greater effort than she had thought herself capable of, Oriane had willed her head to turn. And there she was.

The sight of Andala lit some spark in her she'd long thought dead. It didn't catch; after a moment, it guttered under the weight of her lassitude, then went back out. But it had been there. That was important.

Oriane had listened as Andala told her she and Kitt planned to help. She almost wanted to transform so that she could speak to Andala herself, tell her it wouldn't work, it wasn't worth it. But she was not so sure she could transform anymore. She had thought about it, once or twice – the possibility of changing back, breaking apart 196 the thin gold bars of the cage around her. But then what? Be thrown in a dungeon until she transformed back and sang at last? No. She would not move from one cage to another. She would not put herself back in the body that had lost so much. Oriane would remain as she was. Soon even her name might disappear, along with all sense of who she was and what had been taken from her. She would be nothing but the skylark, a little bird with a forgotten song. And perhaps it would be better that way—

Crash.

The doors to the room flew open, light and people flooding in. Another voice replaced Andala's. The king's.

Oriane turned slowly as the newcomers approached, so that her back was to them. The light they carried hurt her eyes. And she was tired. So very tired. Perhaps she would sleep, and hope not to wake again.

She had almost sunk entirely back into the black when the king's voice reached her once more. Something about what he was saying snagged her attention, drawing her up one final time. She turned her head slightly. Was that Andala he was talking to?

‘Sometimes I wish you'd never brought me the skylark, girl.'

No, he could not be talking to Andala. But if he was, that meant—

‘If I'd kept searching for the nightingale instead,' the king went on, ‘we might never have got into this mess.'

Oriane watched Andala run from the room. Then she turned her back again and closed her eyes. The spark in her heart felt so distant now that it might never have been there at all.