Chapter 22
XXII.
With the removal of the jesses, I could walk a natural gait for the first time since the beginning of my captivity.
The only distance I needed to walk, however, consisted of five steps into my new inside accommodation, those rendered unnecessary by a forceful shove from one of the guards.
Unbound though I was, the cage door then swung shut behind me and the lock engaged.
For a pair of parrots, the cage might have sufficed.
Although sizable enough for anything smaller, the bars were too widely spaced.
For anything larger — a person, for example, even if that person looked like a bird — it offered no space at all.
I couldn’t lie down without feet and legs sticking out.
I couldn’t stretch my wings. Sitting, my tail feathers butted up against the bars.
And, to make my exposure worse, the cage took a place of prominence in the middle of a public foyer. I couldn’t even keep a wall at my back.
I resumed being the most boring creature in the tsarina’s menagerie, curling up and sleeping, or pretending to sleep, most of the time.
Even when people paused by the bars, no one remained for long.
Even the offhand insult failed to reach me nowadays, desensitized as I had become to the casual abuse.
When Alaina visited me that first night, I asked her if she could tie the chain up as she had at our picnic. The task was a little more complicated through the bars, but she accomplished it skillfully, even taking a blue ribbon from her hair to secure it so that it would not come loose.
“I can probably get the bands off too,” she said, taking one of my hands and looking at the ties on the wrist guard.
“Maybe you could just knot up the laces?”
The bows she made were too pretty to be of my doing, but effective, so I did not say anything but thank you.
“I’m sorry I cannot visit during the day now,” she said.
All four hours of day that we had left at this time of year.
“Evening visits will suffice,” I assured her.
“Can I do anything else?”
“A blanket?”
“Only if you promise that you won’t hurt yourself with it.”
“I will be much less likely to harm myself if I’m not cold all the time.”
“Then that is easily accomplished. Is there—”
Voices came from down the hall, and she froze like a child caught stealing a sweet.
“Should I run?” she asked.
I whispered, “Take several steps back.”
Alaina put a respectable distance between us.
The voices grew louder upon approach, oblivious to the princess.
“Have you seen it yet?”
“Only in passing. But I tell you, there’s something different about it.”
“I haven’t.”
“I kept meaning to get outside, but it’s been so cold.”
“I’m glad she took it in.”
“She should have brought it in weeks ago.”
“Your Highness!”
Alaina forced a smile in their direction.
I turned just a little to see the newcomers, and both to my relief and my shame, Drook, Agara, and Grigga stood in the foyer. They bowed and curtsied respectively as they approached the princess, presumably all there for the same thing: me.
“I did not expect anyone about at this time,” Alaina explained.
“We aren’t anyone,” Drook said.
“Have you seen it before, Your Highness?” Grigga asked.
“The tsarina gave me charge of it some time ago,” Alaina answered, “and since then, I think it knows who I am.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Drook furrowed his brows and approached. “I keep telling anyone who will listen — I think it’s intelligent.”
“Birds of prey are well known for their cleverness,” Alaina said to downplay Drook’s implication.
“More than that,” said Drook as he approached the bars. “It has human eyes.”
“And it’s not just a man dressed to look like a bird?” asked Grigga. “With a good mask perhaps?”
“No,” Drook said a touch mournfully. “We know what a mask looks like.”
“Have you seen such a mask before?” Alaina asked.
“We once had a friend with a beak,” Drook said to Alaina. Then he turned to me. “Do you speak, friend?”
The temptation to reveal myself nearly overwhelmed me.
This was forever, so what did it matter if I told these people who had been so dear and so good to me during my earlier trials?
But Alaina was there too, and I didn’t want her to know that her pathetic bird friend was the disgraced prince of months earlier.
Maybe, without Alaina, I could have reclaimed them, but not with her. And so I said nothing.
“And it hasn’t said anything to you, Your Highness?” Drook spoke to Alaina but never took his eyes from me. “Even though it knows you?”
“He stays quiet most of the time,” Alaina said.
“I’m sure he does.” Drook smiled. “Safest that way.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean—-”
“Of course you didn’t,” Drook interrupted.
To a princess, such an interruption was beyond rude, but Alaina relaxed at the assurance. Grigga and Agara turned their attention to Alaina, then to me, then pointedly to Drook.
“I was wrong,” Drook declared. “He doesn’t speak.”
“Thank you, Pietrodillo,” Alaina said.
“It’s nothing. And no one knows because we’re no one.” Drook tipped his scarlet hat at her and then gathered up his two companions. He took another long look at me, no recognition in his face but deep furrows in his craggy brows. “Glad to see he’s indoors. Good night, Your Highness!”
“Good night,” she said as the three of them departed.
When their voices no longer echoed through the halls, Alaina flew to the cage. “They know!”
“They guess,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to give anything away.”
“They won’t say anything,” I assured her.
“Are you sure?” She looked up into my face through the bars and reached her hand into the cage to take mine. “I couldn’t bear it if you came to any harm because I did something silly.”
“You’re a princess,” I told her. “You have a propensity for doing silly things.”
“That’s a mean thing to say,” she scolded me.
“I know a little something about princesses. And about princes too.” I squeezed her hand. “Your privilege makes you all do silly things.”
“You’re not angry with me?”
“They aren’t the first to guess.”
“I hadn’t heard any rumors. Who?”
“The caretaker,” I admitted. “Apparently, I am built in a way that made him suspect when he first looked at me.”
“And you really aren’t just a man dressed as a bird?”
I released her hand. How did I answer that? Because I was. And I wasn’t.
“You’re not, are you?”
“Would that I were,” I whispered.
“I didn’t think so, but I had to ask after they suggested it. You are too stately to be the result of some tar and a bunch of feathers.”
“Disappointed?”
“No, but it would have been easier if you were. Whenever I get back to Altania, I’m not sure how I’m going to explain bringing a man-sized bird with me.”
“You would want me to join you in Altania?”
“Of course! If you wanted, that is.”
“Is it warmer than Ilyichia?”
“My dear Kaylay, everywhere is warmer than Ilyichia.”
That strange warmth spread through me. It wasn’t just that little joyous ember of her using my Varnasian name either. Irena had abbreviated it once, and now Alaina had too, in a different way, partnering it with an endearment.
“True.” If being a bird was my future, then at least I could be a bird somewhere other than under the rule of someone who misused me. “You would really want me with you in Altania?”
“I would miss you dreadfully,” she confessed. “And I don’t think I would ever rest if I knowingly left you with her.”