Again the King laughed, low and friendly, as though he were reading his boy a story by firelight. “No, Leander. Thieves are not so bad, and killing wears all possible costumes. There is no death, no murder that is better than any other. If you can kill me, the manner hardly bears consideration. You want to kill your own father, and you think it will make your sleep easier for the next seventy years if you can say you did it honorably. But your honor is blackened by patricide, and no amount of high-sounding formalities will make it white again. Are you waiting for a confession, so that your soul will be clean? Very well. Everything she told you is true, and probably a great deal else besides. I have more blood on my hands than you could spill in a lifetime. I wear it proudly. It is my crown and my scepter. Would that you had such purpose, such drive. But you will learn, as we all do.” With this he folded back the rose-colored bedsheets with a genteel hand. Beneath them, he was fully clothed in a beaten leather corselet and breeches, brown from top to bottom, like a chestnut horse.
“Do you need a weapon? Did you really come so unprepared? A father’s work is never done. At least there is no shortage here.” He pulled a dagger from under the mattress—firelight leapt along the blade like a flashing salmon. Leander took it numbly, hardly seeing the hilt slide into his hand. Nothing, he thought, nothing since he had left the Palace that night so long ago, had happened the way it was supposed to.
He sat close to his father, so close he could smell his dry skin, like burned sand. “I’m… I’m sorry.”
Ismail of the Eight Kingdoms rolled his eyes and pulled his own dagger from his corselet, holding it to the Prince’s skin. “If you can’t manage one paltry death, how can you be King? This is how it’s done, my son.”
Before he could plunge the blade into Leander’s throat, Aerie, forgotten by the close-caught pair, threw her head back, black hair tumbling to the floor. She screamed again, louder than when she had first emerged, shattering every window and glass bauble, causing the birds to begin to fall from the sky. Crow, sparrow, finch—one by one they fell by the window, like many-colored rain. The cry was filled with rage that swelled like a flooded river as she watched this father-who-was-not-father coming, at last, near to killing the Prince. As his dagger touched the boy’s neck, her voice shattered its blade, and one of the shards penetrated deep into the King’s royal eye.
Leander hesitated only a second, and then plunged his knife into the King’s chest with all his strength, collapsing onto the hilt as it struck true and deep.
But the laughter of the King did not stop, even as blood bubbled from his mouth.
“Remember, my son,” he gasped as he perished, “with my death I instruct you. This is what it means to wield power. In the end, the blade is always in your own hands.”
Aerie stood in a shimmering white gown on the Castle balcony. She stared out into the highlands, and the mountains beyond.
“All I ever wanted was to leave this place,” Leander said, walking up behind her and placing a hand on her shoulder. “To be free. And he caught the last of us after all, locked me into this place forever. I have been set to zero, for all time.”
“But the nest survives, little brother,” she replied, her voice growing more musical every day. He held her close.
“At least you are here with me, Aerie. At least there is that.”
But she untangled herself from him, and looked sadly into his tired eyes.
“No.” She sighed. “I am leaving. I must go. There is a duty on me, just as on you. You have saved your father’s kingdom. I must tend to our mother’s.” Her gaze stole again to the far hills like a line of shadows hunting her. “When I flew, I knew what I was; I knew the wings were… borrowed, but it was far away. I do not know why I kept my mind in the bird’s body—it is not what the spell was meant to do. But the wind and the moon were all I loved, and then my mother. There was no reason behind it; I simply loved her. Now there is a glut of reasons, and the endpoint of them all is that there is a cave somewhere in those hills, and I am the only one left to enter it. You were born for power—they’ll call you the Maimed King, who lost his blessing fingers. There will be stories, and eventually legends. You cannot escape it, any more than I can escape the memory of the currents of air under my belly. Perhaps you can learn to use it differently; perhaps you can remain a Prince, though you are called King by all who have voices to utter it. Perhaps not. But I cannot stay to be your teacher. I have lost all that I was. I must find it again, with the poor, lost Stars. We must each find our ways to power, and how to hold it in our hands. Your nest cannot be mine.”
Leander struggled with tears he would not let fall on his sister’s slender shoulder. “But you will not go for a while, will you?” he said, choking. “I could not bear it. This is such a lonely place. Given time I could learn to hold power like a coal, and not be burned. But you must stay awhile yet, for me. We must be a family, for a while. Just a little while.”
Aerie turned to him and smiled dazzlingly, like a dozen noontime suns. “Of course I will stay with you, my only brother, my own.”
In the morning, she had disappeared as though she had never been, and the King stood alone in his great ivory hall.
Into the Dawn
THE DAWN HAD BEGUN TO DRESS HERSELF IN BLUE AND GOLD, ADORNING her hair with red jewels. She stretched out her hands to the two children, now almost asleep in the window of the tower. The girl cradled the boy in her lap, her hands stroking his hair, as she spoke the last words of her tale. A wind stirred in the Garden, and a whirl of white blossoms leapt into the air, swept along in the cool currents and eddies. Wild birds pinwheeled above their heads, singing with such passion they nea
rly died of the song.
The boy looked up at the girl, her face crowned in the new sun, which blazed around her like a corona of liquid gold. Her darkened eyes shone warmly, like polished river stones.
“That was a wonderful story!” he cried, embracing the girl in his excitement.
As she slipped down the ivy and crumbling stones, she smiled secretively up into his beaming face, which was washed by the sun’s tender hands.
“And I shall tell you another even more strange and wonderful tomorrow, if you will return to the Garden in the night, and to me…”
Laughing, the girl jumped onto the grass and ran from the tower. She disappeared into the trees, her hair streaming behind her like a promise.
In the Palace
“BUT FATHER!” DINARZAD CRIED, HER VOICE BREAKING LIKE A GREEN branch. Her violet eyes flashed indignantly, and there was a high flush in her fair cheeks. “He was with the demon! I saw them!”
“And I believe you, daughter.” The Sultan chuckled, shaking the beard that curled down to his chest like a fall of blackberry brambles. “You really mustn’t get so worked up about the children under your care. Children, especially young boys of your brother’s station, must be allowed some small indiscretions. It is good for my digestion to see them rebel a little. It keeps them from rebelling a lot.”
Dinarzad frowned, planting her hands on her hips in a fashion he imagined she had often seen on her own nursemaids. “Father. I hardly think this is a small thing. He might have brought that awful child’s curse upon all of us! I don’t understand why you have not banished her once and for all. Couldn’t you leave her to rot on some distant hillside?”
“I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me. So long as she does not enter the Palace, we do not risk her devilment! When you have lived as long as I, you will learn a little more about dealing diplomatically with demons. To banish her to the wilds would bring down the vengeance of whatever creatures gave her birth. Why should she concern us? She does not even approach the silver gates or the corners of the house. And the boy has promised not to see her again. At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity. Find another way, Dinarzad. That is all.”