CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Pheasants of the wood kept themselves scarce.
Canny creatures, woodland pheasants – almost a different animal to their half-domesticated country cousins.
Preferred solitude. Kept their own company.
They understood that the greatest prize of all was safety, and that true safety could lie only in remaining sharp. Self-reliant. Solitary.
The phoenix was even more cunning. It was the only one of its kind. It had to be.
But, magic or no, the phoenix was prey. Any prey, however cunning, could be outmatched by a canny hunter.
And Anya may be more insect than human, but she was more human than bird and – whether or not she had thorns in her blood, whether or not an invisible hand had plucked and pulled and pulverized all of her until she didn’t know what was left of herself at all – she was still the most cunning thing in that damn forest.
She had all night to travel. All day to plan.
Safe and hidden in the dark shelter of a great, hollow oak, a dozen oak moths gathered on the bark around her, she planned.
The phoenix knew it was being hunted; Anya knew the phoenix was intelligent.
It would be hiding, alone. Away from other birds, other pheasants, who had been scared away by the shooting in the meadow.
Away from all other creatures, creatures that would coax and craft, that would lead it down paths it should never have wandered, that would show it sweet, enticing sights it should never have seen.
A hunted thing could not rest, could never let down its guard. Still, even a predator could be tricked by sweetness, by softness. And even a hunted thing, canny or not, longed for sun, for a home. Still a hunted thing must eat, craved delights rich and sweet when dull, simple fare would do.
The phoenix would eat at dawn, midday, and sunset. Midday was impossible. She needed night to prepare. The midsummer solstice would occur after the sunrise lit the sky on fire, then cooled it to morning blue.
Dawn it was.
Anya knew a thicket of black ash bordered the northern edge of Augur Meadow, beside the Warbler. Wide open space to graze. An escape route in the running water nearby. A dense thicket of trees to shelter in.
It was just the place for a hunted thing to hide. A place of safety, of comfort. Of, as much as a bird could know it, beauty.
Just the place for a predator to lay her trap.
The oak moths in the hollow tree fled, one by one, until at last, the sun vanished.
Before, Anya avoided traveling at night, but it wasn’t always possible – if a tricky quarry was on the move, or if something was on her trail and staying still meant certain death.
Johanna taught Anya her constellations, something not even her governess had done, before she taught her how to hold a gun.
She could make them out even through the indigo shade of the pine needles above her. But she didn’t need to. The stars spelled secrets to her – in her. She could feel them. They sang jagged dancing trails, a tug in the right direction, a hiss in the wrong one.
They led her, and she followed, and they did not lead her astray. They couldn’t; the stars turned steady and spoke no lies.
She retraced her steps to the patch of sunny buttercups she had seen before.
First, by their scent; then, when she was close enough, by their violet-white glow.
With broken, muddy fingernails, she dug them up by their roots and placed them in her bag.
From the same bag, she removed her net. The one Goose had slipped.
Her frame had not been secure enough, then. She had never made that mistake twice.
She worked quickly, with single-minded devotion. First, she crept into the ash thicket and found two tall, healthy saplings. She cut them down with her hatchet, stripped them of their leaves, then cut them in half. First with her hatchet, then with her knife, she filed the ends to sharp points.
As she worked, summer smells assaulted her from every direction; creamy buttercup, noble edelweiss, bitter gentian, heady hyacinth. They no longer filled her with hunger or longing. Nothing did. Even this task, though she drove at it without rest, felt rote.
Once her stakes were sharp, she dipped back into the wood and found an oak branch in the dark, then repeated her process in miniature: scraping and whittling bark and wood like peeling a potato until she had four sharp, sturdy tree nails.
These, she gently hammered into each stake using the blunt end of her hatchet.
Near the water, beneath a tall ash, after marking the distance by her feet, she plunged each stake into the soft ground.
Her four stakes secured, she cut a short length of cord and tied it, end to end, to the two stakes facing the thicket where she would hide.
She unwound her length of rope, then tied one end tightly to the cord.
Loosely, she trailed the rope into the brush.
At the right moment, she would jerk the rope, dislodging the two stakes and releasing the resting net, sending it plummeting atop the pile of roots – and, with luck, the phoenix.
She spread the net wide and tied it with twine to a frame of four sturdy sticks cut of ash branches.
Carefully, she nestled the net frame onto the tree nails.
She spread the leafy branches she had cut from the saplings along the top of the net, disguising it in a canopy of leaves.
From a distance, the trap did not look entirely distinct from the thicket behind it.
Satisfied, she spread the buttercup roots in the grass, crushing some of them in her fingernails to enrich their peppery scent.
Dropping them, she made a winding trail: from the densest part of the thicket away from her hiding place, into the meadow, then back around to the shade of the tree where she had built her trap.
The rest she piled directly beneath the net.
All through the night, she felt eyes upon her. An owl, or a bat, confused by this thing that smelled like prey but behaved like a predator. Spirits, perhaps, come to finish what they couldn’t twenty years ago.
Or most likely, the last twitch of the long, white-fingered curse, waiting for its moment, fast approaching, to pull the vines tight, sever her voice from her throat, her bones from their joints, unravel her completely.
Hurry, said the moon, said the song of the crickets, the scurry of the minks back to their dens. Time was growing short. Morning approached.
The feeling of being watched lingered as she crept into the grass in the thick shelter of the trees. As she clutched the end of her rope, wrapped it tight around her hand, ready to yank.
But as she lurked, crouched, waiting, the feeling went away. Or perhaps she forgot about it. She couldn’t say.
The wind blew from the west, tickling her wings, her antennae. When she’d first unfurled her wings, the thought came unbidden, a child’s spontaneous joy: flight. But she was too heavy; her wings were too soft, too ephemeral. Nothing more than a burdensome adornment.
If she failed, she could fly in that wind.
The thought did not disturb her as it once had.
None of her thoughts did. Not wondering if the moon moth craved flight the way a bird craved song.
If it ever broke her heart that she could only stretch her beautiful wings for one week.
If she ever wished for a better lot. Wished for anything.
And then, like she stopped feeling eyes upon her, she stopped wondering.
She did not wonder if the moth watched the sunrise from the dark of the trees.
She did not wonder if she chased the flame because she longed to feel the sun’s touch upon her back.
She did not wonder how much time she had left. She did not wonder anything.
The sky crawled from black to indigo, from indigo to royal blue.
She watched it. Inexplicably, though it was far from bright enough to hurt her, her eyes began to burn.
She felt wetness on her cheek and reached up to brush it away, confused.
It wasn’t raining; had dew fallen upon her from the leaves?
More water came, and more burning. She touched her cheek again, then her eyes.
Her forehead wrinkled. The water. It was leaking from her eyes.
What was this water leaking from her eyes?
Then, like lightning, it seized her – all of it. Fury, fear, wondering, wanting. Desperation – the desperate yearning only seeing a sunrise could make.
Johanna, she thought, frantic, wild with that yearning, and desperate, desperate to keep it. Old mother, rowan, wind from every side. You sheltered me; you grew me. If you ever loved me–
“Aid me in this,” she whispered, urgently. “Do not leave me alone.”
No – that wasn’t what she meant.
She opened her mouth to speak, to correct, to ask instead for cunning, for luck, for aim true as the stars. But no sound would come. Her tongue had been taken.
Before she could mourn it, the phoenix appeared.
Gold and orange as dawn, even in the dim light, it picked its way through the grass, bending and pecking at the trail of roots she had laid. Closer and closer it drew, stopping to peck and swallow each crushed root.
She crouched lower, mindful of the rope in her grip. If she moved it too early, the phoenix would see it, assume it was a snake, flee. If she pulled it too soon, her chance was ruined.
The first white claws of morning ripped through the deep blue. Something shifted in the brush behind her. Her grip tightened on the rope; her wrist ached from the strain of not pulling.
The phoenix continued its slow creep forward, oblivious to midsummer’s imminent passing in the sky, oblivious to the danger lurking in the trees.
The danger’s heart was ramming against her ribs, her hands slick with sweat and sticky slime. Patience, she cautioned herself. She had only moments; she had only one chance.