Chapter 16
XVI.
Once brought back to my enclosure, I struck my head against the wall with persistent determination.
It was a messy, ineffective, and crude method of trying to kill myself, but I had exhausted my options.
I had played every card of my hand and lost. Not just lost. I had lost spectacularly.
The caretaker found me trying to bash my brains out.
He dragged me from the wall and called for aid. I was too weak to fight.
While he cleaned me up, others tied my jesses to a bolt set into a boulder that was then set into the ground, where I could not repeat my attempt.
The next day, although they removed the muzzle, they fitted me with a falconry hood.
Silenced by my circumstances, collared by the tsarina’s will, and now blinded by a precautionary measure, my days existed in the chill of the outdoors, in darkness, and in fear of the next time I would be brought to the tsarina.
I didn’t know what I was anymore. Not a prince. Not a jester. Not a man. Not even a bird. I was lower than any creature of the menagerie, a depth to which I never imagined one could fall. Did that make me a monster?
Each day, the caretaker came by, but I didn’t stir for him.
Not even when he removed the hood to check on my head wound.
Not even when he unbound my wings. I just sat there, defeated.
I barely ate or drank. I withdrew from every other action or indication of awareness.
Even without a muzzle, I kept silent and still for unknown stretches of time.
I did little more than sit or sleep now.
Perhaps the caretaker thought I sustained damage from my foolishness.
I would let him think that. I would let everyone think that if my disinclination to react discouraged them from visiting the famed firebird.
I hoped the tsarina heard about it. Maybe she would have no more use for me if she thought me mentally compromised too.
I grew accustomed to silence and darkness. I never wandered more than a step or two from my tether in the ground. If I somehow got loose, I would never have known, and I wouldn’t have cared. This wasn’t a life, and mine had become too cheap to fight for.
The rustle of skirts one afternoon perked my attention as my body stiffened with horrible expectation.
I did not move or otherwise shift from my curled-up position on the ground.
If it were the tsarina, she would have ample access without having to fight for it this time, and I could remain blissfully distant from my body.
If it were anyone else, I would not give them the satisfaction of a reaction.
But the skirts did not venture close to me.
They stopped just inside the enclosure, and I guessed that the person had taken a seat on the bench.
When the skirts stopped filling the space with their swishes, only then could the muffled sniffling be heard.
A lady was crying. Why not? And why not my enclosure?
After all, misery had dogged my footsteps for so long and finally taken a firm foothold in a tortured shape destined to be misused.
Why shouldn’t everyone with tears to shed come here?
It was private enough, at least if they didn’t mind a hooded, silent Otherland creature keeping them company.
She sniffled and hiccupped for a long stretch of time, ignoring me. Eventually, tears dried and hiccups stopped, and only her skirts could be heard. And then they rustled again, this time louder as she approached.
“I don’t know if you’re the firebird,” she said. “The tsarina says you are. I know it’s too much to hope for, but if you could, grant me a wish?”
It was Princess Alaina. Although she spoke low and secretively, the faint Altanian accent betrayed her to my sightless eyes.
I probably could have lived up to my reputation as the firebird and stopped her there.
I could have told her what her wish was — to go home — and she would have gaped and gasped and would have run to tell everyone else in the palace that I truly was the firebird.
And then I would be treated to months of everyone, nobles and staff and groundkeepers alike, lining up to see if I would grant their deepest longings and secret desires.
I didn't say anything. I had more than my fill of being displayed.
“I want, more than anything, to go home.”
She should have added quantifiers like “while still young” or “with my pride intact” since I well knew the treachery of the court and the empress who ruled over it.
She added, as if she could hear my thoughts, “Alive. And soon, preferably.”
Smart lady.
When I still did not respond, she harrumphed, and something hit me in the shoulder.
“Are you dead?” she asked. It wasn’t a question of concern, but of petulant discontent at my lack of response.
I rolled farther away from her, putting my back to her to indicate that she, and thus her question, meant nothing to me, and she was dismissed.
“I should have known better,” she sighed. “A creature as ugly as you could never be the firebird.”
Yes, precisely. So please, leave me alone.
“You’re just a stupid misshapen monster,” she paused and added under her breath, “but I’m desperate.”
She visited several more times. Sometimes she came to sit on the bench quietly for hours.
Sometimes she moved near my shelter and watched me.
Through it all, I remained hooded, but now I could recognize her perfume, so even when she said nothing, I knew it was she who kept me company.
Having discovered how private my enclosure was, doubtless she too took comfort in being away from the glittering, farcical spectacle of court life.
I missed my friends, those jesters who had made my days bearable, and wished it were Drook or Klessa who visited me now.
They might have inspired me to care a little more about my days or have more hope about the course of my life, but they couldn’t know me now.
And it was probably just as well. I would never want them to suffer for their association with me.
I didn’t think Princess Alaina would benefit from the association either, but at least her company came only because I was a silent creature in a private enclosure in an otherwise noisy place without privacy.
She did not visit me because of who I had been when I simply wore a costume.
And for the tsarina, there would be a difference.
Sometimes the princess read aloud, which was a nice change from the days of silence or the casual verbal abuse she sprinkled into anything she said to me directly.
Sometimes it was Ilyichian, and I could get lost in the text.
Other times, it was Altanian, and I settled in to listen to the cadence of her speech and occasionally pick out a word or two that I thought I knew.
Altanian was not a language I had any confidence in speaking or writing, but then again, I was not confident in any language other than Ilyichian, despite my best efforts.
But it still flowed beautifully from someone whose familiarity with it extended from childhood.
Most of the time, she picked poetry, usually on the side of sentimental if not outright maudlin, although the occasional philosophical discourse joined the selections.
I instinctively slipped into listening and absorbing appreciatively as I had done with my jester friends during their nightly gatherings.
Especially in this trying time, I found solace in the beauty of the sentiments, wisdom in well-turned phrases, and hope in others’ daunting experiences, even if they were but fictions to inspire and amuse.
“‘and when love be true,
not form or face or silver shines warmer through,
not the snowy Kind and Fair brilliance of old
nor the fear fire that blazes but dies in the cold.’”
A fanciful, idealistic poem from a vapid poet with no life experience or hardships endured.
Wouldn’t it be nice if love did not depend upon appearance or wealth?
But that wasn’t life. If it were, I might have a hope, but I had already realized that the tsarina dangled a futile method of escape as a way to keep me compliant, not as a way to be rid of her forever.
Did it matter then if anyone knew about me?
The princess closed the book with a soft thwump and then sat there in silence for a long time.
“Firebird,” she said when her reveries were over, “if you can’t get me home, can you do anything else to help me? Please?”
It didn’t matter if I spoke to her, did it?
Not when I was certain that the tsarina’s promise of a way out was false.
Even if it wasn’t, it was impossible. By design.
But I didn’t ever want to be Mikhail again, not like this, in bird shape, degraded beyond even what I had imagined were my lowest points.
Perhaps the tsarina had truly done me a favor then in announcing to all that she had me executed.
I didn’t want to be Mikhail like this, and I didn’t have to be.
I could be the firebird. Or at least a pathetic imitation of one.
And why shouldn’t an Otherland creature have the power of speech?
“Useless!” she declared while I was still considering my options. “I hate you,” the princess added. “You refuse to grant wishes. You have no responsibilities or obligations. You don’t have to keep company with odious people that you secretly loathe.”
I had to keep company with her, so I did not think her assessment entirely fair.
“You can just sleep all day. You have your meals brought to you. No one cares about what you wear or don’t wear. You aren’t under supervision every moment of your life. You don’t know how well you have it.”
No, of course not, because I only existed now in bindings so that I could fulfill the tsarina’s needs when she felt so inclined.