After all her talk, the next weeks in Grandmother’s silence were like being plunged into cold water without a chestful of air. She would not speak to me, and I was, for the first time, really and truly imprisoned. We squatted in our separate corners like prizefighters. I nursed my baby girl as best I knew how, her fierce little mouth tugging my breast, her fierce little cries tugging at my ears. She tired me, oh, how she tired me! I could only nap, like a sick cat, awake and asleep, awake and asleep—flagstones are no cradle, and they are no bed, and I had no horse milk to teach her the taste of them, and no steppe grass to teach her the feel of it. She would never know any of the things I knew.
And her black eyes were always open in the dark. Her skin was always pale and clammy, and she shivered so, she shivered so in the damp. She was thin and chilled, thin as a window, and I wept while she suckled, rocking back and forth against the slimy wall. She never cried at all. She just watched me with those hollow black eyes.
“Aerie,” I sniffled one night, into the shadows where Grandmother hunched. “I’m calling her Aerie.”
“That’s a hopeful name, for a girl who will probably never see daylight, let alone a high nest between snowy mountains.”
I stroked her soft cheek, which had no color at all, just a shallow grayness beneath the skin. She turned her mouth to my finger, and for the thousandth time, I began to cry. I was so weary of crying, by then. My milk and my tears spilled out of me every day and I thought every day that I must have no wetness left in me to give, but every day I wept again, and nursed again.
“I can’t, Grandmother, I can’t. You want me to put her down like a horse with a shattered knee and I can’t. Even if it would be better for her, I couldn’t, I couldn’t even keep myself from going to her the moment she cried—her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.”
“Oh, little one, I would never ask you that. How could you think I would? Not for nothing have you heard me rattle on like a tortoise shell blown from stone to stone. What we can give her is better than that, and certainly better than what we will manage for ourselves. Knife, let me have her; trust that the tale I told was to a point. You want to call her Aerie? Well enough. We’ll see what we can do about getting her one.”
She had to pry Aerie from me like a jewel from its setting, and she smiled, sad and small, at her great-grandchild’s slight weight in her arms, touching her for the first time since she took the child from my body. Grandmother laid the baby out on what rags we could gather, to protect her from the cold floor. Aerie began, then, finally, to cry, sucking great icy breaths and sobbing to the rafters.
The old woman began to prepare herself—for what I could not think—shutting her eyes like veiled doors, and instructed me to do the same.
I saw no point. All I had was the power to kill a few deer and ride a horse, bind up a rotted limb and set a bone. If we weren’t going to kill my child, I had no help to offer. She told me what I am. Grass and leaves. My tiny girl continued to wail; it disturbed the worms and roaches and spiders that crawled happily over our cell. I ached to reach for her, to wrap her again and hold her to my breast, no matter how dry a
nd exhausted that breast might be.
Grandmother let her fingers fall over Aerie’s solemn face. “I’m… I’m not sure this is going to work, you know.” She cleared her throat. “I have never done it, and the Wolf never told me if it was allowed. A hole is nothing but space, but a filled hole is a Star. I am full, and she is empty. That should be enough.”
I had never heard my grandmother doubt a single thing under the red sun. If she had said that one rabbit should be enough to feed the world, I would have nodded and set about stripping its fur.
Grandmother bent her head to the floor as if in prayer, and slowly thumped her skull against it, over and over, harder and harder. I tried to catch her and pull her up but she shoved me aside and kept at it, slamming her face into the stones. A dark, wet mark spread beneath her, and the sound of her bone hitting rock grew thick and ugly before, finally, she stopped and raised up her face again.
It was bloody, yes, but among the black streaks of blood were streaks of silver, streaks of light, like gray growing in a young woman’s hair. It covered her cheeks and ran trickling over her eyes, dripping from her chin. She touched her finger to the soggy mess that had been her forehead, and seeing the light on her fingers, bent her brow to my daughter’s mouth.
Aerie did not seem to understand at first, but the silver and the black dribbled into her mouth, and she had never needed much prodding to suckle. She fastened her mouth to Grandmother and patted her tiny hands against the old woman’s hair with a hungry baby’s glee. The light went into her, and the blood, all together, and in the dark, my daughter glowed.
Grandmother pulled away, and wiped Aerie’s mouth like any other child’s. She put her hands on her poor, pale body and clamped her eyes shut, breathing hard and harsh, grinding her fingers against my child’s flesh as though she were shaping her like clay.
Slowly, Aerie changed. Her feet warped with moon-colored light and seemed to melt, her arms flattened like sheets of paper without ink. Feathers grew like silken hair on her body, first the curling down and then the strong gray feathers of flight, tipped black at the edges, the color of silver thread spinning on a crystal wheel. Her mouth, silent, as if in wonder herself, bent into a graceful beak, which snapped in a kind of awe at the empty air.
Only her eyes were the same, the watchful gaze colored like stones at the bottom of a lake.
She hopped up, my girl, now a pretty gosling, and nuzzled my palm with her soft head. She was still so small. I bent and kissed her feathers, feeling my heart wither like a dead hawthorn within.
We carried Aerie to the barred window and, balancing on a pile of bones to reach it, squeezed her little body through the gaps.
“There are hundreds of flocks of geese in this country, Knife. One will care for her until she is grown. It is for the best. We will not manage nearly so well. Go, little bird.”
Aerie looked at me for a long moment, her black eyes glittering in the frosted wind. Then she turned and hopped from the half-buried window into the deep grass. It was dark and the stars were burning their holes in the black. I watched her go, out of one darkness and into another.
Three days after we watched Aerie stumble away over the fields, the great iron doors which separated the damp dungeon from the court glistening in candlelight were flung open with such force that they cracked the stone foundations. Grandmother and I were seized by rough hands that bruised and tore at us as we were carried up and up the spiral staircases on which I had been borne downward into hell—so long ago it seemed another woman. Our eyes could not adjust, everything was washed in white and yellow.
And so, when we came before the King, we could not look directly at him at first, so bright was the sun glinting off his golden crown and jeweled jacket. This, of course, was what he wanted. Later I would learn that he rarely wore the regalia for audiences. A tall man announced the King, a tall man whose hair was twisted, knotted, falling slate-gray to his hips. He wore a wide, bolted iron collar that brushed the fabric of his blue and brown robes.
“You have been brought for judgment before His Royal Highness, King of the Eight Kingdoms and Steward of the Eastlands, Autokrator of the Unified Tribes, Lord of the Thousand Caves, the Sacred Vessel who owns all above and below earth. This is your Arbiter.”
By then I could see in the glare the coldness of the King’s eyes, like ice beneath ice. The herald had a cruel mouth, and he turned it on me, pursing his thick lips as he surveyed my emaciated form. Grandmother was stiff as a bristling hound beside me; she recognized him as her would-be master—Omir, the court Wizard who stood ever at the King’s ear. Before I ever came down the stone stair, he had tried, and failed, to bend her into the shape he wished, as though a woman were a stubborn plank of ash wood.
“You have”—and his voice, his voice was like oil sliding on silk, sinuous and sickening—“You have committed treason, my clever, clever girls. Not a minor feat when locked in a room underground, but you’ve managed it. You have engineered the loss of the King’s rightful property. What’s more, the property in question was not a prize won in war, but born right here within His Highness’s borders—within his very walls!—and clearly his legal chattel.”
The Wizard rubbed his long fingers as if they hid some secret ache. Grandmother looked at him levelly, her voice empty of fear as a hollow egg.
“Why do you not come near to me, Omir Doulios, and tell me how my great-granddaughter is the property of this wallowing pig?”