Chapter 36

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Chapter 36

For a moment before she opened her eyes, Andala forgot where she was.

Surely this was her mother's cottage. She had just been there; she was there still. The murmurs around her, then, were her family. Her father, still alive; her mother, the troubles between them forgotten. The voice that called her name must be Girard's. She was glad, after everything, that he was here with her now.

But , some part of her reminded herself, if Girard is here, then so is —

‘Amie …'

‘What? Andala, what did you say? Can you hear me?'

No. Amie could not be here. Or Andala could not be here with her. She was no longer sure which. She was no longer sure where.

‘Andala?'

A throbbing in her skull, beating steady like a blacksmith's hammer. What was being forged inside her head?

‘Please just let me know if you can hear me.'

With a colossal effort, Andala opened her eyes.

‘Oh, thank the skies.'

She could not yet see him clearly, but she knew it was Kitt. The relief in his voice was palpable. Had he feared she might not wake? She almost wished she hadn't.

For a while, she thought the blow she'd received had damaged her 260 vision. She could not see her surroundings at all. For the first time in her life, she was grateful for the dark. She feared that light, however faint, might actually tear her aching head in two.

Gradually, though, indistinct shapes began to appear: a solid wall beside her; huddled silhouettes, a deeper black against the darkness. People murmured, crying, comforting one another. The sounds echoed dully through the dank space, making it hard to determine how close the people were. Where was Kitt?

She was lying flat on her back, the ground hard and cold and uncomfortable beneath her. An attempt to sit up proved fruitless. The moment she moved, a fresh wave of agony flooded through her, strong and sickly. She retched, but there was nothing in her stomach to bring up. When was the last time she had eaten?

A hand on her shoulder gently eased her back. ‘Hey, hey – slow down there. Don't try to move. It's all right.'

Andala tried to breathe deeply. Kitt was right next to her. He helped prop her half-upright against the stone wall.

‘Where are we?' she asked when the nauseating pain had receded enough to allow her to talk.

‘We're in the dungeons.'

‘The dungeons—?'

‘It's all right,' Kitt repeated. ‘They brought all of us down here together and split us up. I managed to get you and me into the same cell, away from most of the others.'

‘Are you hurt?'

‘I'm fine. Nothing as bad as what happened to you.' Andala could almost hear him cringe. ‘How's your head?'

She had the sudden, mad urge to laugh, but the thought of the stabbing pain it would cause helped her stifle it. ‘As days go,' she murmured instead, ‘I can't say I've had many that are worse.' 261

Kitt chuckled, then fell silent. ‘I'm sorry this happened, Andala.'

‘It's not your fault.' It's mine, she thought but did not say.

‘It is, though. In a way.'

Andala frowned. Even that slight gesture shot a spike through her temples. ‘What do you mean?'

A sigh. ‘If I hadn't replaced Oriane with the replica … We wouldn't be in this mess.'

‘Kitt,' she breathed. ‘Where is she?'

‘Safe,' he replied, dropping his voice to barely a whisper. ‘She's … hidden. Somewhere secure.'

Somebody huffed a brief laugh. A voice nearby said, ‘Don't hold back on my behalf. It doesn't really matter if I know the details of what you've done anymore, does it?'

Andala fought the urge to shoot upright. There was someone else in the cell. And she recognised the voice.

Was the king in there beside them, locked in his own dungeons like a criminal?

‘Don't worry.' Yes – it was Tomas, no doubt. She heard shuffling and scraping; he seemed to be moving closer to the corner where she and Kitt were. ‘I'm not angry with you, Kitt. Much as you might think what has happened is your fault, there's no question about where the blame lies.'

‘Tomas—' Kitt began hesitantly.

‘No,' the king interrupted. His tone dripped bitterness, anger, but not directed at Kitt. ‘You aren't the one whose own seneschal staged a coup in order to steal the most valuable thing in the world away from him. You aren't the one who imprisoned that valuable thing in the first place, and made the world pay the price for having done so.'

Andala wondered if Tomas knew there was a chance others would hear him. There were at least a handful of people down here, from 262 what Andala could tell by the chorus of muttering voices – none in the same cell as them, at least, but in others close by. The only walls were at the back of the cells; they were otherwise separated by bars and nothing else. Surely a king would not risk his subjects hearing him speak in such a way. But he did not seem to care. Or perhaps it was easier to give voice to such things in the dark.

‘How did you do it, incidentally?' Tomas went on. ‘The false lark.'

Kitt hesitated. ‘I built a frame, and incorporated mechanics to make it move before I—'

‘No, no, not the thing itself,' Tomas cut in. ‘You're the most brilliant man I know, Kitt. I'm not at all surprised that you managed to build such a wonder with your own hands. I am surprised that you managed to sneak it past everybody in that room.'

‘Oh.' Kitt sounded sheepish. ‘Well, I … To be honest, it isn't something I'm proud of. Talk was flying about what Terault wanted to do with Oriane, and I – well, I was desperate. So I mixed up a serum – one that causes severe confusion if you take so much as a single sniff, but wears off after a while and leaves no memory of what happened. And I plugged my own nose and went in there, wafting it about as I passed all the guards … They were all so disoriented that I had no trouble walking in with the decoy and walking out with Oriane tucked into my jacket.' There was a pause, then Kitt said again, ‘I'm not proud of it. I've never done anything like that before.'

Andala didn't know what to say. It was indeed unlike Kitt to have used his medical knowledge in such a way. He was the gentlest man she knew, and it had to have been difficult for him to put aside his principles to do this. It touched her to know how much Kitt cared about Oriane.

‘And the real skylark?' King Tomas asked. 263

‘I took her to the woods.'

‘Did she not try to fly away? Escape?'

‘No.' Andala could hear the concern in Kitt's voice. ‘No, she didn't do anything at all. That's why the mechanical bird was successful, I suppose. It was easy to imitate her movements when she hardly moved at all anymore.'

The king heaved a deep sigh. Regret emanated from him like heat from a flame. Andala could feel it, and it burned. ‘What have I done to her?' he asked quietly. ‘Am I to be the death of the skylark, and all the rest of us in turn?'

‘No,' Andala snapped before she could stop herself. ‘She's not going to die. She's just – she's stuck inside herself. She's … forgetting who she is, what she can do.'

‘How do you know?' Kitt asked.

Andala hesitated – but what good would it do for her to talk around it all now? Both Kitt and the king would learn the truth eventually anyway. ‘Remember when I said I was going to see somebody who knew about the skylark? Well, I did. She said it's dangerous for Oriane to be suppressing herself like this. She thinks that the longer Oriane withholds her song, the less chance there is that she'll be able to get it back – that each day that goes by will mean a bigger effort for her to sing again, if she chooses to do so.'

King Tomas huffed a laugh again. ‘Perhaps I should speak to this person, too. It sounds as if she's a damn sight more informed than I was when I first had the ill-fated idea to do all this.'

Andala stayed silent.

‘Why did you seek her out in the first place, Tomas?' Kitt murmured. ‘I know the reasons you told me and everybody else. But why really?' 264

Eventually Tomas spoke, and there was no laughter in his voice now as he dropped its volume even further. ‘I have not talked about this with anyone else. No one except Hana. And Terault.' The name sounded as if it would choke him.

‘Where is Hana?' Kitt asked.

‘She was in her rooms when all this happened. I assume she is still there, under guard. But I fear …'

He did not need to say more. Hana's health was delicate at the best of times. Andala feared for her safety, too.

After a strangled silence, the king continued. ‘It is because of Hana that I sought the skylark. And the nightingale, originally. From what I had been told, either one would have sufficed.'

Told by whom? Sufficed for what? Andala wanted to ask, but long-ingrained habit would not allow her to do so. Luckily, Kitt seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

‘Who told you?'

Another sound from Tomas, between a laugh and a growl. This one had nothing else in it but anger.

‘Terault, of course.'

Terault? Andala's head gave an unpleasant throb. What had he purported to know about Andala and Oriane?

‘I trusted him. Looking back now, I feel so … Naive. Immature. Stupid. But he's been my seneschal the whole time I've been king. He was my mother's before that. I looked to him for guidance about everything. He was like family to me.'

Kitt made a sympathetic sound. ‘What did he tell you?'

Andala heard the king shift his position. He was sitting closer to her than she had realised. ‘He told me that the birds' songs had healing powers. Not only did they have control over the skies – they could affect people as well.' 265

Not only change their form and call the sun and moon with their song, but raise structures from the earth itself … travel great distances in the blink of an eye, or heal human illness …

‘Is that why you needed to find them?' she asked. ‘Because Hana's ill?'

‘Hana isn't ill,' Tomas said, very quietly.

‘What do you mean?' Kitt sounded puzzled. ‘It's not a secret that she's unwell, Tomas. Everyone understands that's why …'

‘Why I became king, when she should have been queen. Don't deny it,' the king said, cutting Kitt off as he began to protest. ‘It's not a matter I need my feelings preserved about. I'm well aware that Hana would have been the better ruler. I'm well aware that everybody else knows it too. I'm not embarrassed by it. But everybody thinks the reason Hana isn't queen is because of her health, because she has some strange, incurable illness that would leave her too weak to carry out her duties.' Tomas paused for so long that Andala wondered whether he was still there. ‘I suppose she does have an illness. It helps, sometimes, to think about it that way. Illnesses usually have cures. I had hoped the song of a goddess would be hers.'

‘What is her affliction, my lord?' Andala asked, though she thought she might already know.

Another long pause. And when Tomas spoke again, there was a break in his voice – an awful, wrenching sound. ‘She's … sad. Just deeply, unchangingly sad. And I don't know how to help her.'

The murmurs and moans and cries around the dungeon continued, but the sounds had faded into the background to Andala. She had never heard the king talk like this, had never thought of him as a real person – one who cried, one who cared for his sister. And she felt sorry for him now, desperately so. She knew what it felt like to be 266 helpless, to see something terrible happening to somebody you cared about and only being able to stand by and watch.

‘It's like this … darkness has overtaken her,' Tomas continued. His voice was steadier now. It sounded as if he was relieved to be talking about this. ‘Like she's herself a fraction of the time, as if the sun has broken through the clouds … And then they gather again, and she just … sinks. She can't eat or sleep. She can't talk to me about it, or she won't. Most of the time she just sits. Stares. And the look on her face …' He paused, as if trying to find the words, or trying to run from them. ‘Sometimes it's like she doesn't want to be here anymore. Like if the world ended, she wouldn't even care.'

Andala heard the king shift again, and she could tell instinctively that he was curling in on himself. She had sat that way on her own floor before. She was never sure whether it was a way to keep the world out, or to keep something else in.

‘I tried everything,' King Tomas went on. ‘Healers. Alchemists. Hedge witches. I had them test her and treat her in every way they could think of. All failed. And all were sworn to absolute secrecy, of course. I didn't want anybody to know what was really wrong with Hana.' A pause, fraught, heavy. ‘I suppose I was ashamed. When it first started happening – when the darkness first started coming for her – I did not respond well. I thought it was the usual kind of sadness, the kind everybody feels now and then. I called her selfish, weak, immature. She was older than me, technically, and better prepared for the throne – better at everything than I was, really. But I started acting as if I was older, as if I knew better. You can imagine how little it helped.

‘So after I'd tried for months to make some impact on her, with no change, and Terault started talking to me about the skylark, and the nightingale … I knew I had to find them – one of them, at least. 267 If their healing powers had once been as great as he said, why should they not be able to heal an illness that can't be seen? A disease that has no name and no cure? When you found the skylark, Andala—'

She jumped slightly at being addressed, at realising Tomas knew her name. Pain ricocheted through her skull, but she fought it back, listening.

‘—I was overjoyed. I'd never been so happy. I was convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the answer. Hana wasn't so sure, but then, I never expected her to be. I kept hoping, though. Every day we watched Oriane sing, and every day I watched Hana. I kept expecting to see her change before my eyes – come back to life like some instantly blooming flower. But it never happened. The song never worked that way. It brought joy to everyone else, but never to the one person who really, truly needed it.

‘I had Oriane become her companion. I hoped being in the skylark's presence might help – that the more time Hana spent with her, the better chance she'd have at being healed. When that didn't help either, I wanted to give up. But Terault told me to keep trying. He said that the more people who began to worship Oriane – and that word, worship : I should have thought that odd far earlier, but I didn't – the more people who began to worship her, the stronger her song would become. The stronger its healing powers would be. That was the purpose of the solstice ball: to debut her song for the kingdom and begin her rise. The anticipation was so great that I was convinced it would happen that very night.'

Tomas's voice dropped lower, tight with shame.

‘But I had grown afraid, the longer Oriane had stayed here. Afraid of losing her, losing the one chance my sister had at happiness, and the one chance this kingdom had at being overseen by someone worthy. And so I trapped her here. I stopped her letters. I built a cage 268 around her, and when she escaped it, and flew home to see her family, the only thing I could think of was what it meant for mine.

‘And then I lost my head. It's part of the reason I always knew I would make a terrible king. Hana was never like that. She was always the calm one, the wise one. She could make good decisions under pressure. That's something I've never learned to do.

‘So when the skylark escaped, I sent soldiers after her. I think I knew what would happen. I knew that she wouldn't come back without a fight, and that the only person there to fight with her was her ageing father. I sent my men with strict instructions not to harm Oriane. But I provided no such instructions regarding her father.' He scoffed. ‘I don't know what I expected when I dragged her back here. Why was I surprised she did not sing when she was a shell of herself? How could I still think of what Hana and I had lost, when Oriane had lost just as much, and when the world stood to lose so much more? Well – the answer is that it was easy. I have not thought of anything but Hana and myself in years. And now, in trying to save her from one kind of darkness, I've doomed her to another.' He drew a final great, shuddering breath. ‘I've failed her for good this time.'

The quiet stretched on now the king's tale was done. The whispers and cries of the prisoners flooded in to fill the void. Andala lay there, trying to comprehend what she'd just heard. This man who sat here with them in this cell, who had just poured out his entire heart as if it were a goblet full of wine … He did not resemble the king she thought she'd known at all. He was a different person. A real person. One Andala could relate to more than she'd ever thought she would.

‘Tomas,' Kitt said eventually. He sounded very far away to Andala, though she knew he was still right there beside her. ‘I'm so sorry. I had no idea. I … I wish I could have done something to help.'

‘It's all right, my friend,' Tomas murmured back. Despair and 269 defeat and exhaustion wove through his usually rich voice, black threads in a bright tapestry. ‘Nobody had any idea. That was the way I wanted it. It was my responsibility. My problem to solve.'

‘My lord?' Andala offered tentatively.

‘Yes?' the king replied, sounding slightly surprised. Then he softened his tone, speaking as a person to a person rather than a king to his subject. ‘Yes, Andala?'

She swallowed. It was not proper of her to talk to the king the way she was about to. But then, he had not been speaking to them as their king. Not really.

‘Might I ask … what Hana's role was in all this? During all the tests and treatments? How did she feel about them?'

Tomas shifted again; perhaps he was turning to face Andala, as if he could see her in the dungeon's gloom. ‘Well, she … she never thought they would work, never had any real hope that she could be cured. I cannot see how she could have hoped, though. Her condition … It seems to render hope an unreachable thing.'

Andala understood that feeling. Hope had been a foreign thing to her once, too. But she also understood that it might not have been Hana's condition alone that caused her to feel such a way.

‘I wonder,' she said carefully, ‘whether Hana might have realised that her condition – the way she was … was not something in need of a cure?'

‘She wanted to be cured,' Tomas said at once. ‘She told me so, more than once. She wanted to stop feeling the way she was feeling, to go back to being her old self.'

‘I wonder, though,' said Andala again, ‘whether she realised eventually that that was not possible – that she would never go back to the way she was, and that instead of trying to do so, she should be … trying something else instead.' 270

‘Trying what?' The king sounded confused now, even a little impatient. Andala couldn't blame him. It had been a hard concept for her to come to grips with herself, until very recently. She wrestled with the words in her mind before she answered him.

‘Trying to find a way to … to live with the darkness, rather than banish it entirely,' she said eventually. ‘Trying to accept that it is part of her, and that it might always be, but that it isn't something that needs to be feared – just … understood. Managed. Dealt with carefully, as and when it comes.'

A brief silence. Then—

‘With all due respect, Andala, look at us now. Look outside. There are some forms of darkness that cannot be lived with. This mess that we're in – it occurred to me, after a few days of this skies-forsaken dark, that this must be what Hana feels like, all the time.' His voice threatened to break again at the last words. Andala felt a surge of sympathy at the sound.

‘All of us tend to feel safer in the light,' she answered. She hardly knew what she was saying; her head was still spinning, and the words seemed to be streaming from her unchecked, flowing from some hidden, unfamiliar place. ‘But darkness is the default, isn't it? The natural state. We're just lucky to have the light to keep it at bay. And when the light fails, I suppose … instead of banishing the dark, we're meant to learn how to live without the light for a while, and how to focus on when we might see it again someday.'

Silence returned. A more complete silence this time. The voices in the dungeon had died down; perhaps people were trying to get some sleep. Andala's face grew warm. Had anyone else heard the strange little speech she had just given to their king?

There was the sound of movement nearby. For a moment, Andala thought she had offended Tomas so badly with her unsolicited 271 thoughts that he had chosen to move away in disgust. But then she felt a body settle down right beside her. A hand touched her shoulder, gentle and brief as a bird on a branch.

‘Thank you,' came King Tomas's voice, quiet but close. ‘If we get out of all this, somehow – if we make it through … I think Hana would do well to speak to you, Andala. It sounds like you are somebody who knows darkness near as well as she.'

The moment was shattered by the sound of boots descending the dungeon stairs.

Terault's people had returned.