—
I
can never do my braids like Ma does them. They're always too loose no matter how hard I pull, and the songbird feathers and daisy flowers I string into them fall out with every step I take. Rook says I shed a trail of feathers behind me, like a cat who has just killed a bird.
And then he laughs at the irony, a hollow, keening giggle. I know he thinks of himself as the cat.
But today, I am determined to get it right. Maybe it's because it's been over a moon since I left the swamplands behind me and resolved never to go back—maybe it's because, no matter what I do, my chest always hurts when I think of Ma, alone, frantic, sad. Elder promised she would watch over her. Though Elder appears unreliable because of her childish faces, I know that she isn't, really, and that there is no one else (I know of) who can keep a promise as well as Elder.
She'd promised to herself that one day, death would to bow her. Elder's promises, you see, are always kept.
Today, I will braid butterfly wings into my hair. Fourteen, for each piece of Ma's soul.
I glance down at the mossy log I am perched upon and count out the butterflies I have already caught. Five of them flap their jewel-blue wings lazily in the sun, their stomachs growing fat with the honey water I have diluted and poured carefully into a leaf as large as a bowl.
It had been difficult to get the honey. I'd had to beg Rook to sniff out a hive with that nose of his (sharper than any bear's) and then, when I'd caught up to him, he'd set the hive upon me.
It is getting annoying being at the end of Rook's jokes.
He never harms me much, less than he'd like to, I'm sure, but the bees' stingers had hurt and I'd wasted an hour of daylight picking them off of me as Rook gallivanted away into the darker parts of the forest, his moon-white antlers sticking out like bones from skin in the underbrush. I don't know where he is now; secretly, a dark part of my heart wishes that he won't come back, until the guilt washes over me like a gale force tide and I have to shove my face into the moss to keep myself from retching.
It is an extreme reaction. I've never really had one before, and so I still have trouble controlling it.
But there are now seven butterflies sipping at honey water in the leaf and I smile a little at how successfully my trap has proven itself. Ma had taught it to me; how butterflies loved honey water, she'd sang, filling up the cracked marble birdbath behind our house with it every morning, killing ants off of the sides every night.
With my telekinesis I gently lift up the first blue butterfly and it wiggles a little in the air, distraught at being torn away from its meal. When really, it should be focusing on me. I feel a bit sorry, when I tear off its wings and let its sliver of a body flutter down to the forest floor, until I remind myself that it is only a butterfly and that I have doomed far bigger things than that.
It is a comforting thought until it isn't.
When I am done I admire my reflection in the mirror-like surface of the honey water, checking for stray hairs (nodding when I find none) before pulling my mask halfway over my head and dusting off the metallic blue powder sprinkling my legs. Tentatively I test my connection to Rook—Where are you? I'm leaving the clearing.—and sigh when it is swallowed by silence.
Unsurprising. He is probably off stalking a rabbit, or painting his mouth red with berries. Sometimes, when he is feeling kind, he brings a handful back for me.
But this morning he set off a hive on me and I am still too angry about it to go looking for him between the shadows of the trees.
So I set off in the opposite direction and hope that wherever I end up, there will at least be berries to eat.
Standing there, killing time
Can't commit to anything but a crime
Peter's on vacation, an open invitation
Animals, evidence
Pearly gates look more like a picket fence
