Chapter 29

216

Chapter 29

Time .

To think Oriane had considered the concept so little, before. But even before had its grounding in time itself, and was therefore suddenly incomprehensible. What was before? When was it? All she knew anymore was now.

Now was the rush of the hours as they flew past, the drag of them as they held her in place. Now was the pain that had been sharp, and then grew dull, and finally disappeared, leaving an emptiness in its place that was somehow worse. Now was the slippage of her mind, her memories, escaping through the bars of her cage and leaving her a shadow of herself.

The king's words still echoed in her mind: ‘I wish you'd never brought me the skylark, girl …'

But was it solely Andala's fault, when Oriane herself had come looking for exactly what she'd found? No. She was to blame, too. She always had been.

In one rare, shining moment, a flash of hope had briefly lit up the void. What was it Tomas had said about the nightingale? But soon that, too, was extinguished. There was no nightingale. No one else like her. The world was dark, her father was dead, and Oriane was alone. 217

After a while, she stopped thinking of her father. Of Andala. Kitt, the king, the palace she'd begun to treat like home, the pile of ash and scorched wood that had been the home she should never have left. The hidden sun, and the hidden song inside her. It all began to bleed away.

The voices that murmured around her, the hands that reached for her, the discomfort that sometimes threatened to turn into pain – even those faded into a distant sphere from which she soon became quite separate. It was not her they were touching and testing and threatening. It was her ghost.

How long did she sit there, statue-still in her gilded prison? How many hours passed? How many days? It did not matter anymore. Her world had shrunk to the patch of darkness between these golden bars. For all she knew, there was not a soul beyond it. Soon she doubted that there was even a soul within it. She was empty, immaterial, invisible.

Oriane was so far gone that she barely noticed when someone came to steal her away.