Chapter Forty-Six. Rory
Rory
It took Rory all spring and the better part of summer to figure it out, but, finally, he did.
It was simple, in the end. So very simple.
You wanted to build a construction or transition a Blodeuwedd?
All you really needed was knowledge of weave and words, hands to work, voice to speak, and the will to make it so, just as Porteous said.
It didn’t matter, Rory realized, that he was human or that Daye was a Blodeuwedd.
It didn’t matter what you were, as long as you had will, knowledge, hands, and voice.
Daye had will in spades. Her fingers were nimble and sure. Knowledge, he could teach her. Which left him with one obstacle to overcome. And once he narrowed it down? It became solvable. A question he already knew the answer to. A matter of research and experiments and fine-tuning and time.
Here was the problem: Daye didn’t have a voice because she was made of plants, and a plant could rustle in the wind, could knock and thump, but it could not form words or whisper or shout.
Here was the solution: Make her from something else. From something that could make sounds.
Exams came and went. He managed to wheedle an empty lab. He brought back bags full of flowers and vines from home every Monday, and learned where the nearby pet stores were.
He started with mice. In retrospect, it was an impractical choice—they had no vocal range, and their lives were too short, barely two dozen months.
But mice were cheap and plentiful. And he was used to their scurrying forms in the attic and to quietly disposing of their still, furry bodies from Mrs. Matthews’s traps before Daye could see them.
He didn’t think about the how of it until the small box was open on the metal table, the mouse peering out at the pile of flowers and borrowed knives.
That first time, he retched in the wastebasket for what seemed like hours.
Tears kept leaking from his eyes. The blood got under his fingernails, and it took him days to scrub it away, until the skin around his nails was raw.
The next time was less horrifying, though he still gagged at the coppery smell.
He learned to use gloves, scalpels, anesthetics.
To prepare two workstations, one for the extraction of vocal cords—and later, syrinx—the other for weaving them in; otherwise, everything got soaked with blood and became too slippery to hold.
He learned to go elsewhere in his head. Sometimes, he imagined that he was a butcher’s apprentice.
Or that he was in class, and the lecturer just exited the room after giving instructions about where and how to cut.
He tried to tell himself that there was no difference between the animal lying on the table and the flowers he collected every turn of the season: the blood—berry juice and flower petals; the bones—branches; the skin and feathers—leaves.
In his dreams, wilted flowers and fallen fingers mixed with fur and blood.
Sometimes it was people lying on the table: Elliott and Wynne and Maggie, lying frozen as he picked up the knife, their skin parting like flowers slowly opening for the sun; his fingers slick with their blood as they delved inside them, groping around tendons and bone.
Sometimes it was him on the table, his wounds weeping flower petals and rotting leaves.
He’d wake up with bile already climbing up his throat.
It got easier, eventually. Later, it became, simply, routine.
Over the summer, Rory learned what he needed to look for: long-lived animals with a vocal range as close as possible to human speech; ones he could buy at the pet store and that were small enough to transport home by train.
Birds, he realized, were a good fit. Exotic parrots, the kind that lived for decades and could mimic words, the best.
In the end, these were the realities of it: Blood blooming red. The smell of iron and anesthetic. A feather stuck to his shirt. And this: a bird woven from sticks and flower petals, opening its beak, and singing.