Chapter 32
Thirty-Two
Afternoon sunlight scallops the water. All around the shore ancient trees and just-begun saplings gaze down at their reflections. At the opposite end of the lake, someone else’s boat sits on the muddy shore. A dragonfly whizzes by your nose, but once it disappears: silence. Stillness.
“When I was a swan,” says Cyrus, “and especially toward the end of those six years… Sometimes I just wanted to bite her. One sound and it would be over.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“For her sake,” he says. “For my brothers. You notice how grateful they are— didn’t even stick around for a week before they all ran off. Hardly even write.”
“I did say you were the only one with princely manners.”
He snorts. “And the only one who doesn’t want to be a prince.”
“Is that why you live in a cottage in the woods instead of the palace? And here I thought you just liked the scenery.”
Cyrus takes his boots off. Socks, trousers, shirt. He lays his things on a nearby rock, then turns to you. He catches you looking at him and smiles.
“Are you coming in with me?”
“If you want me to.”
“I want you to.”
You let him go first. You watch him wade out until his thighs are steeped in sunlight, and for a moment, you can see him clearly as he was and wishes he could be again. Seeing how the light limns his feathers, you think: I’d give you back the sky if I could.
Of course, that means you’d lose him. Or at least, this version of him.
Luckily, that’s not in your power, which means he can’t leave you. He can never really be happy, but he can always be yours.
Stripping down, you join him in the cool water. Silt slips by under your feet. Little fish tickle your toes.
“I haven’t gone swimming since…” You want to say since we were children, except you were a child, and he was a swan. It feels wrong to highlight that difference now. Instead, you sink under the water and come back up shaking droplets out of your face.
“Watch out for snappers,” he warns. Then he takes off. With arm and wing, he has to figure out how to swim again. The arm is meant to cut through the water and pull him forward; the wing is meant to stay buoyant and keep him high on the surface. It’s not the same as it used to be.
But the choices are this:
It can be different than it used to be, or it can simply not happen at all.
Both choices hurt. It’s up to Cyrus to decide which hurt is more bearable.
You follow him through the lake, splashing and laughing and leaping on each other like the children you never got to be together.
On your back, he wraps his legs around your waist, his arm around your clavicle, and as you carry him, he drags his wing across the lake’s surface.
The water rushes right off of him, but he leaves a long, trailing ripple behind.
Part of you wants to go diving for mussels.
Part of you wants to be right where you are.
* * *
Climbing out of the water, Cyrus squeezes out his hair and sits down on a boulder to dry out in what remains of the late afternoon sun.
You follow him up the bank. “Are you glad you tried?”
That gives him pause. He sucks down a deep breath, and looks back toward the water, away from you, away from the rivulets dripping down your shoulders and disappearing in your chest hair.
“The questions are always simple,” he says, “but the answers are always hard.”
Moments pass.
Him, sitting on the rock. You, standing on the shore.
“Felt like going home to find I didn’t quite belong anymore,” he says.
“And yet… The happiness of being in the water was exactly the same kind of happiness. Not a lesser kind at all. Not… sullied, or shadowed. I felt like myself again. A few times I even forgot I was a man. Then I remembered, and my heart broke. Splash your fist against the water, and that was my heart, all those little fragmentary droplets. But then I was glad to be a man because I could shove you under the water and hang on your shoulders and make myself an utter nuisance to you.”
You laugh. He laughs.
He glances at you. He looks away.
Silence.
Until:
“I wished for you, Hans.” His throat bobs as he swallows, still looking at the lake. “I could have wished for anything, and I wished for you.”
“What?”
“After Gertrude made me human. After I told her what happened that day in the woods. After she wrote to the Fair Queen. I found a Mothering Tree… and I wished for you. Not with words. I couldn’t articulate a single thing.
But I remember thinking, Don’t let me be too late.
And then I was too late. And then I wasn’t.
And now you’re here, and the only reason I haven’t kissed you yet is because you deserve to be someone’s True Love. ”
Everything in your body goes still. Almost numb.
Not even the beat of your heart reaches your ears.
“I made a wish too,” you say. “A long time ago. I wished someone in the world would care about me.”
“That’s a heartbreaking wish.”
“I was heartbroken when I made it.”
When he meets your eyes again, he hesitates to speak. “I care about you,” he says.
The soft earth squelches underfoot as you close the distance. You crouch next to his boulder, a little lower than his eye level. The sun plays in his hair, along his shoulder. It haloes his feathers.
“I don’t have to be your True Love,” you say. “I could share you with the lake, with the sky, with the fish and the stars and…”
Cyrus shakes his head as you speak. He cups your chin with his fingers and makes you look at him shaking his head.
“Let me have a say in this,” you plead.
“I’d only give you scraps.”
“How different would it be from what we already are?” you ask. “What you’ve given me is more than scraps.”
You reach for his jaw and swipe your thumb over a patch of flaxen stubble. His jaw clenches under your hand. Words take shape before he even begins to speak.
“I love the world. I love my sister. I love you. But it’s also not enough.
It’s all there is, and it’s not enough. I liked life better when I was cursed.
When Gertrude broke the curse, she broke me, too.
She broke me. My heart, my spirit, the ineffable forces that move me…
I spent years before you came back trying to fix it.
But I think I just… can’t. I can’t. Can’t fix it, can’t make myself right again, can’t.
I wished for you, and I can’t give you what I’d hoped I could. ”
“I will take whatever you can give,” you say.
With those words, you have pledged your troth. You both know it. The weight of that admission—that promise—prevents Cyrus from rejecting you for a blessed half a minute.
“Eventually you’d feel it. That I was settling for you. ‘Since I can’t be truly happy, I might as well pass the time with Hans.’”
“How else should we pass the time, if not together? Why must we be perfectly happy in order to be happy together?”
He places his thumb on your lips, silencing you.
You stare into his eyes. He stares into yours.
And for the first time, it strikes you:
You’re kneeling before a prince. A prince who doesn’t want to be a prince, but a prince nonetheless. A prince who doesn’t want to be human, but is human nonetheless. So much of his life isn’t what he wants.
If he doesn’t want you to speak, to protest—fine.
If he wants, but doesn’t want, your heart—… fine.
“That’s not the way it should be,” he says. “You shouldn’t wake up next to me every morning knowing I’d leave you in a heartbeat if it meant I could be a swan again. I care about you too much to make you feel that way.”
You’d half-hoped for this. You dreamt of your bloody hand staining his white feathers, and it was nearly enough to make you leave for good. Now he’s made certain you can’t ruin him, and you should be glad because you wanted him to push you away, reject you.
You wanted this. It’s better this way.
wait. that can’t be how this story ends. let me try again.
Other people make their choices.
Other people write their stories.
You cannot make him change his story,
even if it changes yours.