Page 64 of Skysong

But like a predator sensing weakness, Leilyn advanced, and Andala shrank back, a weakling, a mouse.

‘Are you sure about that?’ she asked. ‘Doyoueven know why you’ve really come?’

Before she could help it, Andala had let the question under her skin.

Wasshe sure?Didshe know why she had come? Was she here to try to help Oriane – or had she simply fled from the chaos she’d caused, running not towards salvation but away from another thing that scared her?

Because she was a coward, after all. Andala could not deny that. She was afraid of the dark, afraid of her daughter, afraid of herself. Afraid of how much she might care for Oriane. Afraid that she had doomed her, and the rest of the world, to eternal darkness, and to death.

‘Is everything all right?’

Girard’s voice snapped her out of her spiral. He entered the kitchen slowly, looking between Andala and Leilyn with concern. Leilyn turned away from them both. Andala could not speak.227

She didn’t need to. Girard seemed to sense what had happened.

‘There is so much at stake,’ he said quietly. He sounded disappointed. ‘You need to put your differences aside. You need to talk about this properly.’

Shame spiralled through Andala. Girard was right. It was foolish of them to have wasted so much time arguing. She took a steadying breath and a step forward.

‘Mother,’ she said. ‘I just need to know what you know about the skylark, about the nightingale – anything at all that might help.’ She paused, eyes trained on her mother’s back. ‘If not for me, then for Amie.’

Something in Leilyn seemed to sag at the sound of her granddaughter’s name. Her shoulders rose and fell in a sigh, and she turned to face Andala.

‘I don’t know much,’ she said. ‘But I will tell you what I’ve heard.’

228

Chapter 31

Andala and her mother returned to their chairs, opposite one another at the table. Girard took his own seat quietly, clearly hoping to blend into the background, but Andala was glad of his presence.

‘It’s funny, I suppose, that this is all happening as King Tomas Meridea sits the throne,’ Leilyn said, ‘seeing as it was his ancestors who moved away from the worship of the skysingers in the first place.’

She paused, seeming to gather her thoughts, then began.

‘We were never really worshipped. Not the nightingales. But the skylarks were. There are few around who still remember, but there was a time in Cielore when faith was the heart of everything – and the faith of the sky was everybody’s faith.

‘The holy books told that from the beginning of time, the cycle of night and day had been governed by goddesses. At first, they were formless, bringing darkness and dawn by turns through the invisible force of their will. But then, as life blossomed in our lands, they saw a form they liked, and they mirrored it. They became birds, and their songs became the conduit that channelled their power.

‘According to legend, the goddesses first came into being on a little islet somewhere off one of Cielore’s coasts. But with their new forms came wings. And with their wings, of course, came a desire to fly. One day they flew all the way to the mainland, and there, for229the first time, they saw people. And once again it was a form that intrigued them. They tried it out, then and there. For the first time, they changed from lark and nightingale to two humans, women made of flesh and blood.’

Leilyn glanced briefly at Andala. She seemed to have heard her unspoken question:How?‘They were goddesses, don’t forget. Their power was immense in those early days. Nothing like ours, I’m afraid.’ A faint smile on her lips, Leilyn returned her eyes to the table, where they took on the faraway film of the storyteller again. ‘It’s said that back then they could do almost anything. Not only change their form and call the sun and moon with their song, but raise structures from the earth itself if they wished it, or travel great distances in the blink of an eye, or heal human illness. Some of it is likely just myth or exaggeration, of course. But I’ve no doubt at least some of it is true.

‘The longer they remained in their new human forms, though, the more their power began to wane. For a while they flew back and forth between their little island and the land that would become Cielore, changing from bird to woman and back again as they pleased. But one day, as they prepared to fly back to their island, one of them discovered she could not transform.’

‘Which one?’ Andala asked, though she already knew.

‘The nightingale, so the stories go,’ her mother confirmed. ‘It was daytime, and she could not regain her bird form until it came time for night to fall. But just as she changed, the skylark changed back, and could not become a bird again until morning. No matter how they tried, they could not align their transformations anymore. That power seemed to have gone, leaving them for the first time at the mercy of dawn and dusk, rather than the other way around. It was not until many, many years later that some of us began to learn how to transform at will again.’230

Some of us.Andala ignored the pointed words. ‘What does all this have to do with the Merideans?’ she asked, remembering what her mother had said at the start of her story.

‘The Meridea family first came to power several centuries ago. But hundreds of years before they did, an entire branch of faith grew around the first skylark, who now lived permanently on the mainland of Cielore. She grew close to the humans there. And as she did so, somewhere along the way, she and the nightingale drifted further apart. Perhaps it was because the people did not worship the darkness as they did the light. Perhaps it was because the goddesses were human now, more human than they had ever been, and it is sometimes in the nature of humans to drift away from those they had once kept close.’

Guilt spiked in Andala at the words. Thankfully, neither her mother nor Girard looked her way, and she pushed the feeling aside.

‘Whatever the reason, the nightingale faded into obscurity, while the skylark rose to new heights as the centre of the Cieloran faith,’ Leilyn went on. ‘The skylarks, I should say. It was during this time that the first lark – and the nightingale too, I assume – first partnered with humans, and began to pass down their power. The lark line continued to be worshipped, but at some point – most agree it was around the time the Merideans came to power – the faith, and the skylarks, faded and then disappeared, just like the nightingales had before them.’

‘What happened to the skylarks?’ Andala asked.

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