Page 49 of Skysong

What would happen to the world, she wondered, if the skylark saw fit to keep her voice inside?

She looked out at them all, the people she had been so desperate to please. At the life that awaited her now – the one her father had paid for with blood. Would she perform, then, like the good little songbird she was, to admiration and rapturous applause? Would she mark her father’s death with music and light and a fluttering of wings, with a world that kept turning when her own had shuddered to a halt?

No.173

Her mind had turned clear again, sharp, and it was made up.No. They would not have her any longer. None of them would. Not the king or his guards, not the many faceless others who had no idea what they had cost her.

She pushed down the heat in her chest, smothering it, absorbing it. It hurt. She did not care.

Let the night linger. Let the darkness reign. Let their only light be the flames of her burning home, of her father’s funeral pyre.

The skylark would keep her song to herself.174

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Part II176

177

Chapter 23

The world had ended, and it was Andala’s fault.

Seven dawns should have come and gone by now; seven bright, warm days filled with midsummer sunlight. But instead it was dark. Unnaturally, unendingly dark. Ever since the solstice ball, night had held the kingdom in its unflinching grip. And the sun was nowhere to be seen.

For seven days, Andala had not felt the usual urge to transform. There was no spear of ice, no stabbing in her chest. She was just … herself, no trace of the nightingale at all. And she could not deny the feeling of relief it had given her.

It was tempered by shame, of course. Shame that she should be so selfish as to celebrate the end of the world because it made her feel better. And beneath the shame was the guilt, because, after all, everything was her fault; everything that had happened since the skylark had arrived.

Oriane.

The thought of her sent a different sort of spike through Andala’s chest. Images from the ball were burned into her mind, flashing before her like a set of cards in the hand of a trickster. Oriane all in gold. Oriane’s eyes, dark wells of grief smeared with shimmering paint.

Oriane in a cage.178

That guilt bit at Andala with small, sharp teeth as she made her way deeper into the woods. It left tiny wounds that bled and closed and opened again. She shivered, drawing her winter cloak tighter about herself. The temperature had been dropping steadily. Andala was always dressed warmly thanks to the ever-present chill that pervaded her blood, but even she’d had to dig warmer clothes out of her storage chest.

She stopped, hung her lantern on a tree branch. She needed to push away the image of Oriane behind those gilded bars. It was the hour that would have been sunset, had the world been turning as it usually did, and she needed to know whether she could transform if she really, truly tried.

She drew in a breath and let it out. Focusing. Concentrating on the place where it usually started. But there was no agonising chill in her chest. The spark of metamorphosis was dormant, her heart beating warm when it should now be turning to ice.

Andala opened her eyes. It was useless. She had never been able to control her transformations. Why should she be able to start now? And even if she could, what good would it do? She had thought at first that if she sang it would somehow snap the sky out of its spell. But things didn’t work like that. In truth, this had been a last resort, a final attempt to right all the wrongs she had set into motion.

As long as Oriane kept the sun from rising, there would be no need to call the night. But a world of perpetual night was a world nobody wanted to live in – a world in which no one would live at all, if it went on long enough.

But what would she prefer, really? To live the rest of her long, long life the way she had been living?

What if the rest of that life were short, but entirely free?

‘No.’179

Something skittered away in the undergrowth at the sound of her voice. Andala had not meant to speak aloud, but something in her had rebelled against the intrusive thought. Because if she let this happen, let the world die simply because it would beeasierfor her to do so, then she was not the only one who would die with it.

Her stomach lurched unpleasantly, as it always did when she thought of Amie.

The palace soon came into view, lit up from within like a festive tree. That seemed to be their only recourse: light everything up as if it were day, to forget the fact that the day had not dawned.

Andala took the servants’ entrance, hoping not to run into anyone on her way to find Kitt. She had no such luck. Ildrie bustled by, two dusty bottles of wine in her hands. She lurched to a stop when she spotted Andala.

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