Chapter 38

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Chapter 38

For the first time since she had become the nightingale, transforming did not hurt.

There was no cold, debilitating ache, no icy spear to puncture her chest. This time, it happened like breathing. One moment she was herself and the next she was a bird, and there was no hatred in the in-between, or afterwards. Perhaps it was because the change was purposeful. Andala had willed it. For the first time, she'd wanted it.

Or perhaps it was because she knew it might be the last time. These wings were a death warrant, after all. She would not come out of this alive. Perhaps that was why they felt so light on her back. For once, a source of power, and not a yoke.

Time was hers to own, slowing down around her as she changed. Andala watched Terault as the woman before him disappeared and a living god took her place. She dropped to the ground. Time regained its pace. And with a stroke of her wings, she rose.

Andala did not sing; she found she did not need to. Usually it was unstoppable, like the transformation itself. The notes would flow from her unchecked. There was no sound in the world she hated more. This time she would not have to hear it – though in her new state of mind, she may not have minded the sound of it so much after all. But no matter. The night was already here. 282

Instead, she flew – slipping through the bars of the cell, weaving around the shouting people. Hands grasped at her, but she dodged them all, and flew straight for Terault.

At the last moment, she banked low. Terault's cruel knife dangled from his fingertips, loosely, uselessly. But something else had caught the light at his belt: something Andala spotted with her nightingale's eye, with the strange sense of clarity that had descended upon her when she'd realised what she needed to do.

A key.

It was risky, snatching it from him. She would not be able to guarantee who it ended up with. But better the floor of the dungeon where a prisoner might find it than here with him.

The key hung from a single ring. Andala snatched it as she passed and pulled . It tore free, and she let it go; it clattered to the floor. But Terault did not hear it, did not even seem to notice it was gone.

‘ Do not let her escape!'

It was time to go.

More hands were reaching for her now. She was finding it harder to avoid them as she swooped and dived around the dungeon. She caught a brief glimpse of Kitt, standing alone, his captors seeking her instead. He was staring at her in wonder. She would have liked to have told him differently than this, if she'd ever chosen to tell him at all. But that didn't matter now. All that mattered was the distraction she was creating so that he could go free. Kitt was the smartest man she knew. He would know what to do from here.

She rose once more, so high that her wingtips brushed the dank, dusty ceiling, and shot towards the passage that led back up to the palace. Leaving the cells behind, she drew Terault and his minions after her. 283

They would catch her eventually. Perhaps she would let herself be caught. That was the point of what she had done, after all: she'd offered up the heart of a god that Terault wanted. But for now, she must lead him away. Any time he spent chasing her was time the prisoners could use to escape.

It was easy so far. Andala soared to the exit, over the staircase and away. The sound of pounding feet and shouting voices followed her, but not close enough. Not close at all. What hope had they of catching her while she was a bird? While she was a god?

What hope indeed?

Perhaps she need not give herself up after all.

She glided out into the palace proper, where she hovered, trying to decide which direction to take.

I could go and find Oriane.

Kitt had said she was in the woods. Andala could fly to her. They both had their wings now. They could fly away from here, together.

But would she want to?

Andala had been flying up the passage that led to the servants' quarters, and the closest entrance to the grounds, but the question nearly stopped her mid-flight, as if an obstacle had sprung up before her out of nowhere.

Why would she want to?

Were the sounds of pursuit getting closer? She couldn't tell. But these corridors were much narrower than the dungeon below. Eventually the guards would be upon her. Eventually she would have nowhere to go.

She will not care that you're the nightingale. Not after what you've done .

Up and over a staircase. To the end of the passage. Up and over another, and into the kitchens. The closest door to the grounds was here. 284

And are you not the very thing she seeks to banish? The darkness she drives out of the world every day?

The door was closed. There was no way through. Andala fluttered before it, sure she could hear the distant thunder of feet approaching now. A chill was crystallising in her feathered chest. There was another way out, back the way she had come. Another staircase that led out of the servants' quarters. From there she could still find Oriane—

You are not worthy of her.

Andala's wings suddenly felt very heavy. She dipped, almost colliding with the wall above the kitchen hearth. The cold feeling in her chest was getting sharper. What was happening? With an effort, she kept flying. Out of the kitchens. Back into the passage. Towards the stairs that led up into the palace—

The door there was closed, too.

She was trapped.

Andala fluttered helplessly. The full weight of what she had done came crashing down. That was terror, that cold spike in her heart; the same feeling she'd had as a child, when her mother blew out the candle by her bed and plunged her into the black. The same feeling—

Andala realised it a second too late.

Her body was expanding, her feathers receding. No, she thought desperately, trying to call back some of that conviction she had felt down in the dungeons. No, please, no, I want to stay, I need to—

But it was no use. Just as she had never been able to transform at will before, she could not stop herself from changing back now.

In the space of a breath, she had lost her wings, and she was falling. Andala collapsed in a heap at the top of the staircase, a woman again, a mortal, her body scraping and bruising against the stone steps. The pain in her head had returned, worse than ever, and on her way 285 down something inside her seemed to have broken. She felt beaten, resigned, as if it could only ever have come to this, and she had been out of her mind to think otherwise.

The stone was cold beneath her. Every inch of her body ached. She was tired – tired down to her brick-heavy bones, bones that, a moment ago, had been hollow and light as air. Andala shut her eyes. Images of Oriane swam behind her closed lids: first the woman, then the bird, one running, one flying, both away from her.

Get up.

A crash echoed in a distant corridor. They were coming. They were almost here.

She couldn't get up. She was cold and hurting, and alone, more alone than she'd ever been.

But she wasn't alone, was she? Oriane was alive. Oriane was still here. Her counterpart. Her counterpoint.

Her heart swelled with a rush of feeling – fury, that they had broken that sweet, sunshine girl the way they had; sorrow, that she would not see Oriane's light again, in the sky or in her amber eyes.

Get up.

Andala wanted to see her again, just once more, before she gave herself up. She had to make sure Oriane was safe, and to tell her – to tell her—

Another crash. Pots falling in the kitchens. Feet storming through the halls. Close – far too close.

Get up.

With a colossal effort, Andala rose. Limbs quaking, vision blurring, she wrenched herself towards the door, hauled it open. She stumbled outside, the door slamming behind her.

There was no time to let her eyes adjust. Unseeing, she ran out into the night, relying on memory, on instinct, to guide her. She fell, 286 once, twice. She got back up. Her head was throbbing, the blackness spinning before her eyes. She forced herself to keep going, to focus. The woods. That was her destination. She could barely remember why—

Oriane .

‘Oriane,' Andala said aloud.

The sound of the name urged her forward. It echoed in her ears, soothing her pounding skull, drowning out the panicked thrumming of her heart. It sounded almost like a song inside her head. A familiar song, bright and intimate, sung solely for her.

Andala staggered. She was here; she had reached the woods sooner than she'd expected, but her body was slowing now, her breath coming in gasps. Her limbs felt heavy, dead weights threatening to pull her down. Were those shouts close behind her? Were those footsteps? Or were they her own half-sobs and heavy footfalls?

A branch snagged on her clothes. Another scraped across her face. She had made it to the woods. The trees pressed dense around her, crowding, suffocating, black. But she forged on. This was what the night had always been like for her, after all – full of snatching hands, and gnashing teeth, and shadows that sought to drag her into their depths.

‘Oriane,' she murmured again. The name chimed in the air like a guide, drawing her forward. She repeated it as she pressed on. Her murmurs grew louder, becoming a call: seeking, summoning, her voice twining with the phantom sound of the skylark that sang in her mind.

Andala would have kept running had a real sound not pierced her heart like an arrow, bringing her up short.

She listened in the darkness, trying desperately to make sense of what her body and her mind were telling her. And what they told her was this: 287

The song in her head wasn't in her head at all.

No – if she strained her ears, if she focused all her senses on what her bruised and hopeful heart was saying, Andala could hear it, ringing clear through the infinite night.

The lilting song of the skylark, once more calling the daylight home. 288