Chapter Seventy-Six. Daye
Daye
The next morning, there was smoke in the distance.
“A person at the house,” the blue jay told her.
Lately, it had taken to spending the day with Daye, riding on her shoulder or gliding above her from branch to branch.
She was happy for the company. Right then, she was more than happy—she was wholeheartedly grateful.
She cupped the blue wings in her hand and laid her cheek against its body.
Tried to breathe through the panic. So soon.
Too soon. She knew it was coming, but still.
She’d hoped for weeks more. Now she was down to minutes, hours at best.
It’s probably not Rory yet. It’s probably Mrs. Matthews, come to prepare the house for his return.
Even repeating that to herself, her lungs wouldn’t seem to work right, not until she checked. She scaled a tree shading the back garden and watched, barely daring to breathe, as movement flickered through the house, dim shadows moving through windows stained with months’ worth of pollen and rain.
It was an endless, breathless wait until Mrs. Matthews bustled into the kitchen. Alone.
The relief that washed through Daye almost made her grip on the branch falter. Still, she didn’t dare move until she was sure there was no movement but that of Mrs. Matthews in the house, that the second-story window was still latched shut.
Through the kitchen window, Mrs. Matthews’s voice drifted, spilling songs into the rabbit-ravaged garden.
What did Mrs. Matthews think about this midwinter springtime?
Daye wondered. How did Rory explain it to her?
An experiment, Daye could imagine him saying, smiling his boyish, crooked smile.
Nothing to worry about. Daye could almost see the way Mrs. Matthews’s mouth would tighten, the small sniff of disapproval she’d aim at Rory before turning away.
Daye wasn’t even surprised that the endless spring hadn’t driven Mrs. Matthews away.
What’s a little spring stranded at the border of winter, after years of tolerating me?
Daye slid down the tree and slunk back to the fortress. Then to the border, where the poppies washed across one side and snow piled on the other. She paced and paced and paced.
Days. She had days at most until Rory returned.
It took that much, she guessed, for her to know. To know it, all the way to her branch-marrow. She couldn’t stay here. She had to find a way out.
Daye looked at her right hand. Then at the border.
At the snow, quilted with squirrel tracks and the odd blackthorn flower, frozen through.
She took a deep breath. It might break her again, worse than ever.
But, really, she had nothing left to lose.
Holding her breath, she knelt at the border.
Reached past it. Plunged both hands into the deep, soft snow.
One, two, three, she counted in her head.
Fifteen, sixteen.
At twenty, the cold stopped being pleasant.
At thirty, the fatigue started coming. But it did so jaggedly, unevenly, like a spider missing a few legs.
At seventy, the skin of her left hand started splitting.
At one hundred and twelve, her left pinkie cracked.
At one hundred and eighty, Daye pulled her hands back.
The left one was a mess of crooked fingers and seeping, purple-tinged skin; a horror story of dislocation, written in flesh.
The right one was an angry shade of red from the cold and wet with snowmelt, but whole. Untouched by winter or spring or both.
Daye waited for the cracks to close under the bright sun of spring. Fixed her fingers. Then, just to be sure, she unwove her right hand. There, in the middle of her palm, lay a single feather, blue and white and gray and slightly mussed.
“What does it mean?” clacked the blue jay from its perch above her.
“It means—” Daye said, and faltered.
It means I’m going to break a second time.
It won’t work. It never works.
And even if it does, it’s too late. He might return any moment. I’ll never make it before he comes back. It’ll all be for nothing.
I can’t take any more hope.
“… it means that if I’m fast enough, I might have a way out.”