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
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
She may not braid her hair as her Ma does, but it is because she doesn’t that Leonidas finds her.
There is a feather upon the ground. It is cobalt blue above and cream below. It gleams like water and yet its underside is pale carmel. The wild wood boy has come across many feathers loosed from a bird, yet none are like this. He thinks on his mother, who used to shed petals as if she were a wilting flower. It might be the only the thing he remembers of her, except for the day she left. Her screams still waken him at night, when all the wood is hushed and silent. Her echo cries through the cathedral trees and he shivers in his bed of leaves.
He picks up the small and delicate feather and carries it with him. Its barbs are soft as satin. Why he carries it he does not know, but pauses when a stag lifts its head from behind a berry bush. It’s lips are red, its brow painted with an intricate pattern that Leonidas has no name for. Its antlers are pale as bone and maybe they are. The boy is used to seeing stags within the woods, but none were quite like this. For a while the regard each other in silence, a boy with his crown of gilded antlers and the deer, blacker than black and whiter than white.
Leonidas does not know that the stag has a name, Rook. Nor does he know that he holds a feather the stag recognises, that the feather will draw him to a girl hidden by bone and beautiful butterfly wings. Eventually it is Leonidas who moves on, graceful and nimble through the wood.
There is no rush this night and he wanders and roams and does not cease until there is a scent, faint and sweet, in the air. He thinks of the feather he carries, their scents are the same. The boy’s head tilts, curious and feral. With leonine eyes he looks ahead through brush and clearing to where a pale girl wanders like a phantom, silver and blue. She is the dust of galaxies he thinks, and in her hair he sees blues and gems of myriad hues.
The feather tips in the wind, as if to drift back to the one who lost it, the girl who wanders like a nymph through the woodland. Elven the boy hurries after her. He does not listen to the way the leaves press against his mahogany skin and the way the boughs whisper to him slow Leonidas.
In his hair are leaves and twigs and petals of foliage that caught within his snarls. But as he draws close to the nymph he sees the art of her hair. Braids are plaited carefully beautifully, they weave and look about her slender throat. He has seen nothing like it, the wild wood boy it too rough for such delicate art. It gives him pause and the feather in his grasp flutters tremulously.
Nimbly, quiet as a fawn, he draws close to her and lets his eyes trail over the skull that covers her face. His gaze lingers along the delicate line of her jaw, so fragile compared to the skull above it. Pausing, his lashes press atop his cheek in a blink before he steps in beside her, elegant as a stag within his realm. “You dropped a feather.” He whispers, for already his attention is drawn back to her hair, its beauty, its art. The wild wood boy reaches to touch a loop of hair where fragile wings are woven in like shavings of gems so rare and exquisite. Is he the rough stone and she the gentleness of water that grazes itself upon him? He breathes gently, warm across her braid, her neck. The wings flutter delicate in the wind and he loses confidence, too rough, he thinks, too rough. He holds out the small kingfisher feather, it matches the ones in her hair. He does not think of the number of feathers nor the number of butterfly wings. He does not think of souls, but if he did, he would ask this nymph how many pieces his sister’s soul has.
A rabbit with a tail like a trembling cotton ball stumbles out from the blackberry bush I've found, bumps into my leg, and plops onto its haunches to level its black, droopy eyes at my mask.
“... You should run away," I tell it, not very kindly. It merely blinks. Stupid rabbit. Reproachfully I consider scaring it off, but then it wiggles its velvety pink nose at me and I sigh, my head tilting in defeat.
“Is that what you do? Wiggle your nose at the fox until he puts his teeth away and plops right next to you in the meadow?"
But I know how the story ends. You still get eaten, and then the fox cries.
Ignoring me, Bird?
My nose nudges against a ripe blackberry, close to bursting; it smells decadently sweet, like one of Ma's tarts. Gingerly I pluck it with my teeth and drop it to the forest floor. (Already I am regretting doing so. My stomach howls like a neglected child.) The blackberry's fall is cushioned by pine needles. Slowly, it rolls to a stop just shy of the rabbit's wiggling nose.
He's a pretty one. Gold all over his wings. Should I catch him for you?
“Don't," I growl, and the little rabbit stills, before darting for the berry, stuffing it into its mouth, and fleeing cowardly into a shrub of nettles. This is what you get for being kind, Bird! I think, and I stamp my hoof down angrily.
There is a boy in the forest, and worse, Rook has seen him.
Do I need to remind you, Rook? You set a hive on me, not many hours ago. Touch him and I'll drop scorpions on you in your sleep.
I still haven't seen this boy and already he is causing me so much trouble. My braids thump like a heartbeat against my neck as I stalk out of the blackberry bush into a clearing where the ancient evergreens thin out to reedy saplings, their spring green leaves spiderwebbed with a dusting of frost.
Rook is silent. Perhaps I've made him feel guilty. Sometimes, the emotion catches him off-guard and he gets so angry about it that he slips away into the dark until dawn breaks like an egg over the horizon, and his cloven hooves crackle on a skin of new ice.
When he returns, there are always strands of berries in his mouth that he leaves quietly by my head as I doze.
I see the boy first as a flash of gold antlers and then, all at once: a ghost clothed in earthen browns besides me. He's a pretty one. Gold all over his wings. I think I feel the butterfly wings in my hair tremble against my skin.
But that can't be, because they are dead. And, I tell myself, their souls had been emptied out when I ripped away their wings. (Ma said never to worry about it, because butterflies didn't really have souls but the illusion of one. Ma hugged me to her chest when I turned to the struggling monarch, peeled off a golden wing, and handed it over to her.)
There's a blue feather in the boy's mouth. Warily, I look from the feather to his face—golden eyes, golden antlers, golden fairytale prince—but with the mask on I know I seem, to him, like I'm not really moving at all.
Beneath my mask my eyes are wide, as wide as the Goddess' sky.
“You dropped a feather.”
When I see that it is my feather, one that I'd shed like a cat's dead prize, I startle back to life. I feel his breath on my neck as he whispers, like he is talking to something sacred. Or scared. I've always thought them the same: only two letters out of place.
“I didn't kill the kingfisher," I say, slowly, even though he hasn't accused me of anything. “It was already dead." I'd even buried it, because Rook had stared at it for a long time and I'd worried that if I didn't bury it, he would accuse me of something.
Of being just like Ma.
“You also shouldn't stand so close to a girl you just met." My words reverberate strangely through the beak of my mask. It comes out like a starling's warble—like something small, trying hard to make itself heard. My brows knit together when he touches a loop of my hair. It falls river-sleek through his grasp, though I say nothing more except:
“You might give her a fright."
And there's a praying mantis
Prancing on your bathtub
And you swear it's a priest
From a past life out to getcha
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
As he wandered to the girl, Leo did not know how his safety was debated. When he cast his eyes upon that strange stag, who faded into the dark loam (except for his antlers that were as uncovered bone reborn into light), Leonidas did not immediately think of malevolence with which the beast watched him. Yet the feral boy has come to learn how to live amidst the perils of the wilds. So he watched the stag, gold upon white, until the woodland broke their stare and Leonidas ambled slowly on. He did not see the ominous berry juice that dripped, dripped like blood from the bonded’s lips.
When he reaches the girl and looks upon her slim figure, her delicate jaw and the bone mask that makes her large eyes secret, he still does not think that the stag might be hers. Even when he lifts his lips to breathe upon her hair and curiously watch how the dismembered butterfly wings beat, he still does not think how his safety is at all at risk.
I didn’t kill the kingfisher. It was already dead.
He lowers his lips from near her hair and tips his chin down, gazing at her beneath the heavy throw of his forelock. His skull tilts and he regards her as a stag might - no, as a normal stag might, not like hers who asks whether to kill him. The boy’s nose wrinkles, an echo of his mother who is little more than a ghost to him now, “Did you kill the butterflies then?” He asks low and curious, his eyes drifting to their wings, brighter than shards of stained glass in her hair. She is defensive and even though she is delicate as a flower, slim as a bird, she wears a mask atop her face. It is the most sinister part of her. The rest is beautiful. He thinks of her a meadow, her skull a revealing of its myriad past. What secrets does she have? He wants to ask her for them all, to clutch them as close as Maret holds his. Leonidas thinks this fae girl will have so many intriguing secrets. He wants to start with her eyes.
She chastises him for standing close. He turns from her instantly, his head snaking, twisting as he shakes off her retort. The ivy and leaves tangled through his brace of tines rustle and float like woodland bunting with his moving. He looks back to her at her final comment and thinks that he has never met a girl like her, with hair so perfect, her body so still. Though she pushes him, commands him with words alone.
“And what of you?” Leonidas asks at last, his voice a flute, like the wind singing between the arms of trees. “Do you not like it when boys stand so close? You did not spook?” The wild-wood boy watches her, curious, confused. Apsara touched, he resisted. She made him bolder. He still remembers the fear clattering in his heart when her body turned to smoke and his touch passed through her. His body too, turned spirit pale and faded into nothing. He feared never touching again. It made him bolder. Yet this girl fine-boned as a bird chastens him, obediently he stands back and feels relief course through his blood like bliss.
and i don't want your pity i just want somebody near me
The boy with the wings of gold is studying me. As if I were the pinned butterfly beneath the taxidermist's glass, and not him.
If I were any other girl, this would embarrass me. To be studied so intently, and with such a look! It was one of those looks that Elder would drag out with a purr—a look he sure gave me, wouldn't you say?—as she inspected herself in her ceiling-high mirror, and waited impatiently for me to agree. I would, eventually. With Elder I was always less on guard, and more of the brat she accused me of being.
"Did you kill the butterflies then?"
Even the hushed darkness of my mask can't quite dull the gold ocean of his eyes, made brighter by their frame of thick black lashes, and the way they are fixated wholly on me. I don't really wish to scare him away, because he is pretty—and like Elder, I have always had a weakness for pretty things. But I dislike the way he is not scared of me. I dislike that I am the butterfly under the glass.
“Yes.” My voice is sure and steady. I am not repentant. He is much taller than me and I despise how I must tilt my head up to meet his stare, even if he doesn't know I am staring back. Determined now, I step cautiously forwards, my butterfly braids brushing featherlight along my neck. I shift to the tips of my hooves to whisper into his slender ear, "Fourteen." I almost add for each piece of Ma's soul until I remember that outsiders are never to hear of our witchcraft.
Even if I can never go back, I wasn't raised a traitor.
Elder had warned us about the trickster ways of the outsiders. About the kindness, or the sincerity, or the concern they wear like masks to enchant you with (like ours but more sinister) only to gut you open when you finally hand your trust over to them like a bleeding heart. Hadn't Linus done exactly that to Dyani? Hadn't I warned Rook never to try it on me?
A shiver shoots up my spine, and I dart shakily back again, my mask wobbling in consternation.
“And what of you?” We are like two rabbits in a glen, each unsure if behind the rabbit's pelt writhes a hissing green snake. He shies away just like I had and the sight of it on another is almost comical. Had I frightened him? My tail pushes up against the rough trunk of an ancient oak. Strangely, I am not as comforted as I'd thought I'd be.
“Do you not like it when boys stand so close? You did not spook?” I frown, annoyed that he thinks me frightened. I am only wary. Ma has always praised me for my wariness. “Well—don't go away. I was only surprised.” I don't want him to leave me here, without Rook, in the growing dark. If he does I will sacrifice my pride and trot after him, a burr stuck to his side.
I nod grimly to myself when I reach this conclusion, before pawing at the frozen dirt. Winter is the season of death, and there are no daisies left for me to pluck; only butterflies, and the ones that stay for winter are never as pretty as the ones that leave in great blue clouds when the air begins to taste of chill.
“Don't you know what your stare would do to a girl other than me?” I ask him carefully, though my voice is not so rough as it is curious. Does he not know? Is he a rabbit wilder than I, abandoned to the cold, skeletal forest?
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Oh Leonidas. He does not know how she interprets the way he watches her. He does not think that she might be offended by the way he gazes in a golden mixture of curiosity and wariness upon her beautifully woven mane. He thinks her a strange and enchanting enigma. She will only become more so in his mind. Leonidas has been a solitary lonely boy for most of his life and this girl is a puzzle he has no experience in deciphering.
Maybe he is too much his mother’s son.
Maybe his thoughts are too clearly etched upon his beautiful elven face, gleaming out as clear and bright as the sun. Does she see them as clearly as she sees the gold of his body?
The wildwood boy is taken aback at her bold confession. He looks to the butterfly wings and knows how they flutter when alive. Leonidas has done terrible things to remain alive within his dangerous woods, he does not think for a moment to judge her. Yet his stomach does twist for the lives lost at this girl’s delicate hands. He would count the wings (if he knew how) and note each life lost - even if he does not know their significance, how they represent each piece of a lost soul. Fourteen. The girl says and he does not react except to repeat the word, softly, rough as new bark, as he gazes at her hair and wonders what that word might mean.
Poor Leonidas cannot stop watching her. Her every reaction is an unsettling surprise. She is brave in a moment and then in the beat of a dismembered wing she shivers like a fearful fawn. She backs away as he too flees her, chastised. Her bottom is against a tree and as he glances warily to her from the corner of his eye, he sees how her own eyes gleam in the dark hollows of the mask.
He is indeed thinking of leaving, at least putting more distance between them when she commands him to stay. Only surprised, the girl says pressed up against her tree. The orphan boy is unconvinced, yet turns to gaze at her more fully again. He watches the way her slender limb paws at the frozen ground. She seems restless, she makes him ever more uneasy, unsure. He thinks she is the strangest thing the wood has ever yielded. Beautiful, but odd. Not once does Leonidas think that he is the strange one, the boy without any social skills, fumbling his way through each and every encounter. This is his strange and lonely life, he does not think it could be any other way.
Leonidas would grow daisies for her, if he could hear how she laments their winter death. He would raise flowers for her if it might stop her peeling the wings off butterflies.
Don't you know what your stare would do to a girl other than me? Still the boy stands, caught in an uneasy mix between a brave stag and a wary rabbit. His antlers, gold and bright as a crown, dip with the submissive, wary lowering of his head. “No.” The boy breathes, his thick, dark lashes lowering with confusion over his brow.
Should he know what his stare would do to another girl? Suddenly he realises how he has still been staring at her, attempting to fathom what she means and how to act around her. He blinks, looking away, out into the wood. It is easier there, he thinks, in the wood where no one can find him. The temptation to flee rises, his limbs itch. The girl steps out from under the bough like a fairy, and her skull gleams bewitchingly. Should he look at her? The feral boy wonders and sighs with bemused confused and frustration. Still he does not dare look at her, but gazes intently at a blade of grass as if it might expose for him the answer to this girl’s enigmatic manner. Instead his magic blooms beneath his intent and a flower buds, blossoming and unfurling out into the cold.
