Chapter Eighty-One. Daye
Daye
Evening had fallen.
In the center of her nest of feathers, Daye looked at her stomach, her forearms. Touched the base of her neck.
They all looked the same, though they were rewoven with feathers.
All of her was. And there was still a whole night before her, hours and hours until Rory would arrive, and still more feathers than she could count.
She got up. Her movement stirred the hundreds of quills surrounding her, soft down floating up like dandelion seeds.
To keep the feathers from blowing away, she removed her dress and bundled them inside it.
Naked, she walked through the trees, caressing this stump, this branch, this shrub. Saying goodbye.
At the fortress, she glided her fingers across every surface—the pile of blankets and pillows she slept on, the wooden chest, her skates. She put on a winter dress. From her shelf of treasures, she picked a single shell, heart-shaped and white with age and handling, and tucked it into a pocket.
Then she went to the house.
She stopped by the back gate. She didn’t open it.
She didn’t want to go in. But for a while, she stood and looked.
At the back door, where they’d sat so many times.
At the garden, the neat rows of plants overrun by bunnies and time.
At the window to their room, where she’d spent so many nights looking out.
“Goodbye,” Daye said. Even soft, her voice cracked the evening’s quiet like a stone through glass, shattering the stillness.
From the corner of the garden, the sound of scrabbling answered.
Daye flinched with fear so well worn she slipped into it without noticing. Of the shed and its skittering shadows. Of their subtly wrong silhouettes. Of their endless scrabbling for escape, so much like her own that, even now, it made her want to look away, to run, to hide.
Enough, she thought. Enough.
She took a deep breath, and opened the back gate. Her feet sank into the familiar ground, made soft by recent rains, the mud sliding against the arches of her feet, her ankles, her toes, as if it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to caress her goodbye or hold her in place.
Her hands shook only a little as she slid the latch aside and opened the shed’s door.
For a long moment, there was silence. Daye pushed the door wider, letting the moonlight spill onto the floor, illuminating a tail twisting sinuously as tiny legs scrambled away from the light.
She waited, heart pounding, feeling strangely exposed.
As if her presence here, in the back garden of the house she and Rory had shared for so many years, was an acquiescence, an invitation.
Something that could conjure his presence all by itself.
Even knowing that the house was empty, that Rory wouldn’t arrive before morning at the earliest, oceans of night away, she felt the urge to shrink away, out of sight.
But she waited, just for a little bit, before she left for the border. After all these years of averted eyes and heart-pounding dread, she could wait just a while longer, to see.
Finally, they emerged. There were only five of them left, held together by spring and forgetfulness, like toys that a child forgot to neaten away.
A lizard. A rabbit. A mouse. Two birds, one raven-sized, the other no bigger than her palm.
All of them slightly … wrong. A tangle of uncompleted limbs and half-withered appendages, scales giving way to flower petals, talons to twigs that scraped against the floor.
Daye looked and looked and looked, years of horror melting into something very much like kinship. She had been right, after all. All that separated them from her really was shape and goodwill.
As she watched, the smaller of the woven birds hopped once, twice, as if testing the ground’s pliancy. It flapped its wings experimentally, looking almost startled at the feel of the breeze against its feathers and trailing vines, and even more startled when it lifted off the ground.
“Good luck,” Daye trilled quietly as the woven bird disappeared into the night.
All at once, a sense of urgency filled her. There were suddenly so many things left to do, hours and hours of work left, and the night was already shrinking into itself, dawn creeping closer minute by minute. And then—
She shuddered. She couldn’t be here once the sun came up and the trains started working. Rory had once told her that the earliest he could arrive from the city was ten, but what if he lied? For all she knew, he could be here at the first hint of light. He could be on his way right now.
Daye hurried to the back gate, the sound of the woven animals hobbling and skittering behind her so much like a person’s footsteps that she had to quell the urge to check over her shoulder that it wasn’t Rory, stepping out of the back door.
Somewhere in the house behind her, a clock struck nine.