Chapter Eighty-Three. Daye
Daye
For the rest of the night, Daye wove.
She collected the candles she and Rory had stashed in the fortress.
A box of matches, still half full. Fixed a candle on a tree stump beside her bundle of feathers.
Under the flickering light, her fingers seemed to move by themselves, twining branches and ivy and feathers in every color in neat little rows.
Beneath her hands, two shapes slowly grew.
An owl landed beside Daye, a mouse clutched in its talons. “Night,” it hooted.
“Night,” Daye hooted back.
The owl ate the mouse. “Do you need any more feathers?” it asked. “I have some in the nest from my meal last night, if you want them.”
“This should be enough,” Daye answered. “But would you tell me about the world outside?”
For the rest of the night hours, Daye wove as the owl told her of villages and train tracks, lakes big enough to fit the whole valley, and mountains that would take Daye days to climb.
And even as tears kept sliding down her cheeks, little by little, Daye began to smile.
She’d get to see them. The mountains. The fields.
The valleys. She might never know if she could go to the city, but the horizon was dotted with trees she’d never climbed and lakes she’d never swum in.
Somewhere, far in the distance, there was the ocean the geese had told her about, large and blue.
She’d like to see it. She would see it. All of it.
The knowledge sparkled inside her, fizzy and bright.
In just a few hours, she’d start.
She was almost done. An hour or two, at most. Just in time to slip away with the dawn.
Daye lit a new candle, and kept on weaving as the night slowly pulled toward its end.