Page 101 of Skysong

She was crying in earnest now; she could not help it. ‘I’m glad to have met you, too,’ she choked out. ‘I’m glad to call you my friend.’

He squeezed her hand, then glanced towards the road. ‘Go now. Good luck.’

‘My lady.’

Tomas’s voice, quiet, tentative. Oriane turned to him; for a moment she had forgotten the king was there. He gave her a look that was rich with sorrow, regret etched deep into the lines that now stood out sharply on his face.355

‘I am sorry,’ he said again, simply. ‘I know it can never be enough. I do not ask for your forgiveness. But for what I’ve done, for my role in this – know that I am sorry, and that I will do everything in my power to deserve that forgiveness, even though I won’t seek it.’

Oriane couldn’t speak. She had not forgiven the king for what he’d done. But she had not forgiven herself either. Tomas was not the only one to blame. Oriane was, too, and Terault, and no one at all – for things went the way they went, fate unfolding before them all like a sheet of stars, catching them up in its light, flinging them into the dark spaces between. All they could do was figure out how to navigate it. Oriane understood that now, somewhat, and so she nodded once at the king: an acknowledgement, an understanding, a farewell.

Without another word, Kitt and Tomas slipped away. Oriane turned, reached for Andala, but she was already there.

‘Sing for me when you get there,’ Andala said, holding both Oriane’s hands in hers. ‘I’ll need a light. A beacon, to guide me across the water. Sing for me and I’ll follow.’

A light. A beacon. That was what Oriane had hoped to be for the people of Cielore, at the beginning of all this.

She had failed. She had lost her way, strayed from her path – stumbled right into an abyss, cold and ruthless and seemingly infinite. The fall had cost her. But the pit had not swallowed her whole. Something had pulled her out of it: something familiar and yet brand new, warm as the light of a new day.

That warmth ignited at her heart now. Oriane felt it travel through her body, spreading from her chest out to her limbs, all the way to her fingertips as she held a hand once more to Andala’s face.

For one person, at least, she could still be a signal fire.356

Before Oriane could speak, or even think of what to say, the look in Andala’s eyes changed. In the space of a breath she closed the gap between them, and pressed her lips to Oriane’s own.

After a moment, a heartbeat, a lifetime, they broke apart.

‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ Oriane whispered. Andala’s answering smile was bright as flame.

Oriane pushed through her panic, her fear and her sorrow, and called on her power. In no time at all she was the lark again – and she had never felt more at home in her form. She was no longer alone. Not alone, not singular, butseen. Part of a balance, half of a whole.

She knew her father would have been glad of it.

If she were still human, she might have gone on weeping: tears of grief and newfound happiness, tears for all she’d gained and all she’d lost.

If she were still human, she might have been ready to die. To give up her heart, pay penance for her mistakes, breathe her last here on this land as her mother and father had before her.

But Oriane was not human. Not right now. She was a bird, a beacon, a god; everything she’d been born to be, everything her father had brought her up to be. And she would live.

She would fly to the island. She would sing a dawn more beautiful than any that had come before. She would reclaim the great stone castle of the skysingers, and wait there for the nightingale to follow the light.

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Chapter 44

Andala’s face was still burning from Oriane’s touch as she watched her transform, soar upwards, disappear.

Her heart thrummed as if she’d been running, and unshed tears stung the backs of her eyes. All her senses felt heightened, her body alight, her mind hyperaware.

She had been drawn to Oriane from the moment she’d first laid eyes on her. Was it inevitable that it should happen, like calling to like? A simple matter of the two of them being the only two of their kind? Andala did not think so, somehow. It was more than that.

The specifics of it didn’t matter, though. Not anymore. She had always pulled back from the lure of the lovely, lonely girl from the cottage in the woods, shied away from the connection even as it settled in her soul. But she was past denying it now.

She couldn’t see beyond the trees in front of her, but she faced east. The direction of the island that awaited Oriane – awaited them both, if Andala could manage to do what she’d done but once before: take control of her power, claim it as her own. The way she felt right now, she thought she might be able to—

A sound in the woods behind her. A bootstep? Another?

Andala turned. Her heart, soaring hopefully before, crashed low and set to furious beating.358

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