Page 75 of Skysong

The murmurs and moans and cries around the dungeon continued, but the sounds had faded into the background to Andala. She had never heard the king talk like this, had never thought of him as a real person – one who cried, one who cared for his sister. And she felt sorry for him now, desperately so. She knew what it felt like to be266helpless, to see something terrible happening to somebody you cared about and only being able to stand by and watch.

‘It’s like this … darkness has overtaken her,’ Tomas continued. His voice was steadier now. It sounded as if he was relieved to be talking about this. ‘Like she’s herself a fraction of the time, as if the sun has broken through the clouds … And then they gather again, and she just … sinks. She can’t eat or sleep. She can’t talk to me about it, or she won’t. Most of the time she just sits. Stares. And the look on her face …’ He paused, as if trying to find the words, or trying to run from them. ‘Sometimes it’s like she doesn’t want to be here anymore. Like if the world ended, she wouldn’t even care.’

Andala heard the king shift again, and she could tell instinctively that he was curling in on himself. She had sat that way on her own floor before. She was never sure whether it was a way to keep the world out, or to keep something else in.

‘I tried everything,’ King Tomas went on. ‘Healers. Alchemists. Hedge witches. I had them test her and treat her in every way they could think of. All failed. And all were sworn to absolute secrecy, of course. I didn’t want anybody to know what was really wrong with Hana.’ A pause, fraught, heavy. ‘I suppose I was ashamed. When it first started happening – when the darkness first started coming for her – I did not respond well. I thought it was the usual kind of sadness, the kind everybody feels now and then. I called her selfish, weak, immature. She was older than me, technically, and better prepared for the throne – better at everything than I was, really. But I started acting as ifIwas older, as ifIknew better. You can imagine how little it helped.

‘So after I’d tried for months to make some impact on her, with no change, and Terault started talking to me about the skylark, and the nightingale … I knew I had to find them – one of them, at least.267If their healing powers had once been as great as he said, why should they not be able to heal an illness that can’t be seen? A disease that has no name and no cure? When you found the skylark, Andala—’

She jumped slightly at being addressed, at realising Tomas knew her name. Pain ricocheted through her skull, but she fought it back, listening.

‘—I was overjoyed. I’d never been so happy. I was convinced, utterly convinced, that this was the answer. Hana wasn’t so sure, but then, I never expected her to be. I kept hoping, though. Every day we watched Oriane sing, and every day I watched Hana. I kept expecting to see her change before my eyes – come back to life like some instantly blooming flower. But it never happened. The song never worked that way. It brought joy to everyone else, but never to the one person who really, truly needed it.

‘I had Oriane become her companion. I hoped being in the skylark’s presence might help – that the more time Hana spent with her, the better chance she’d have at being healed. When that didn’t help either, I wanted to give up. But Terault told me to keep trying. He said that the more people who began to worship Oriane – and that word,worship: I should have thought that odd far earlier, but I didn’t – the more people who began to worship her, the stronger her song would become. The stronger its healing powers would be. That was the purpose of the solstice ball: to debut her song for the kingdom and begin her rise. The anticipation was so great that I was convinced it would happen that very night.’

Tomas’s voice dropped lower, tight with shame.

‘But I had grown afraid, the longer Oriane had stayed here. Afraid of losing her, losing the one chance my sister had at happiness, and the one chance this kingdom had at being overseen by someone worthy. And so I trapped her here. I stopped her letters. I built a cage268around her, and when she escaped it, and flew home to see her family, the only thing I could think of was what it meant for mine.

‘And then I lost my head. It’s part of the reason I always knew I would make a terrible king. Hana was never like that. She was always the calm one, the wise one. She could make good decisions under pressure. That’s something I’ve never learned to do.

‘So when the skylark escaped, I sent soldiers after her. I think I knew what would happen. I knew that she wouldn’t come back without a fight, and that the only person there to fight with her was her ageing father. I sent my men with strict instructions not to harm Oriane. But I provided no such instructions regarding her father.’ He scoffed. ‘I don’t know what I expected when I dragged her back here. Why was I surprised she did not sing when she was a shell of herself? How could I still think of what Hana and I had lost, when Oriane had lost just as much, and when the world stood to lose so much more? Well – the answer is that it was easy. I have not thought of anything but Hana and myself in years. And now, in trying to save her from one kind of darkness, I’ve doomed her to another.’ He drew a final great, shuddering breath. ‘I’ve failed her for good this time.’

The quiet stretched on now the king’s tale was done. The whispers and cries of the prisoners flooded in to fill the void. Andala lay there, trying to comprehend what she’d just heard. This man who sat here with them in this cell, who had just poured out his entire heart as if it were a goblet full of wine … He did not resemble the king she thought she’d known at all. He was a different person. A real person. One Andala could relate to more than she’d ever thought she would.

‘Tomas,’ Kitt said eventually. He sounded very far away to Andala, though she knew he was still right there beside her. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I … I wish I could have done something to help.’

‘It’s all right, my friend,’ Tomas murmured back. Despair and269defeat and exhaustion wove through his usually rich voice, black threads in a bright tapestry. ‘Nobody had any idea. That was the way I wanted it. It was my responsibility. My problem to solve.’

‘My lord?’ Andala offered tentatively.

‘Yes?’ the king replied, sounding slightly surprised. Then he softened his tone, speaking as a person to a person rather than a king to his subject. ‘Yes, Andala?’

She swallowed. It was not proper of her to talk to the king the way she was about to. But then, he had not been speaking to them as their king. Not really.

‘Might I ask … what Hana’s role was in all this? During all the tests and treatments? How did she feel about them?’

Tomas shifted again; perhaps he was turning to face Andala, as if he could see her in the dungeon’s gloom. ‘Well, she … she never thought they would work, never had any real hope that she could be cured. I cannot see how she could have hoped, though. Her condition … It seems to render hope an unreachable thing.’

Andala understood that feeling. Hope had been a foreign thing to her once, too. But she also understood that it might not have been Hana’s condition alone that caused her to feel such a way.

‘I wonder,’ she said carefully, ‘whether Hana might have realised that her condition – the way she was … was not something in need of a cure?’

‘She wanted to be cured,’ Tomas said at once. ‘She told me so, more than once. She wanted to stop feeling the way she was feeling, to go back to being her old self.’

‘I wonder, though,’ said Andala again, ‘whether she realised eventually that that was not possible – that she would never go back to the way she was, and that instead of trying to do so, she should be … trying something else instead.’270

‘Trying what?’ The king sounded confused now, even a little impatient. Andala couldn’t blame him. It had been a hard concept for her to come to grips with herself, until very recently. She wrestled with the words in her mind before she answered him.

‘Trying to find a way to … to live with the darkness, rather than banish it entirely,’ she said eventually. ‘Trying to accept that it is part of her, and that it might always be, but that it isn’t something that needs to be feared – just … understood. Managed. Dealt with carefully, as and when it comes.’

A brief silence. Then—

‘With all due respect, Andala, look at us now. Look outside. There are some forms of darkness that cannot be lived with. This mess that we’re in – it occurred to me, after a few days of this skies-forsaken dark, that this must be what Hana feels like, all the time.’ His voice threatened to break again at the last words. Andala felt a surge of sympathy at the sound.

‘All of us tend to feel safer in the light,’ she answered. She hardly knew what she was saying; her head was still spinning, and the words seemed to be streaming from her unchecked, flowing from some hidden, unfamiliar place. ‘But darkness is the default, isn’t it? The natural state. We’re just lucky to have the light to keep it at bay. And when the light fails, I suppose … instead of banishing the dark, we’re meant to learn how to live without the light for a while, and how to focus on when we might see it again someday.’

Silence returned. A more complete silence this time. The voices in the dungeon had died down; perhaps people were trying to get some sleep. Andala’s face grew warm. Had anyone else heard the strange little speech she had just given to their king?

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