Page 81 of Skysong

Part III290

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Chapter 39

Oriane awoke on fire.

It was some strong, sharp relative of the feeling that usually woke her before dawn. The warmth that preceded her song was always gentle, pleasant. This was not warmth but heat. Not pleasant but painful. And it was consuming her, like the fire had consumed her cottage, and her father’s body with it.

She struggled to stay calm, to breathe. She studied her surroundings. As her skylark’s senses adjusted, she could hear noise from the distant palace. Shouting. Confusion.

Something was wrong.

‘Oriane?’

She nearly fell from the branch to the leaf litter below. Had that sound been real? Had that been her name floating through the black woods, or was it only in her mind? The voice was familiar either way, and the timbre of it only made her heart blaze hotter.

‘Oriane!’

Who was it that called for her? Whose voice floated above the distant din, rising as if in song, inviting her to answer?

Oriane knew. She knew that voice, and she knew what she had to do. Some part of her had known it from the moment she had woken with a fire in her heart.292

She needed to sing.

She feared she had forgotten how. Her song felt distant, hidden, tucked away inside her like treasure buried and long abandoned. She felt she could have left it there forever – let it wither under miles of earth, let it calcify and fade. Because to dig it up, to sing again … That would cast light upon a world without her father, a world where she was utterly alone.

‘Oriane.’

The voice called to her with something more than her name.

‘Oriane,’ Andala called – Andala, the woman who had become her friend, who had danced with her at the solstice ball and cared for her in the throes of her grief. There was something in Andala’s voice that reached out for Oriane’s song. It was a question to answer, a fear to assuage, a need to fulfil. It was a hand outstretched in hope, and Oriane found herself wanting to take it.

So she focused on the heat of her heart. Imagined that it cleansed rather than burned. Spread her wings and took to the air. And even after so long in the quiet, in the dark, Oriane found she remembered how to sing after all.

It was, she thought, like being reborn.

It was frightening, too, the way it must have been frightening for an infant to leave the safety of its mother’s womb and greet the strange, harsh world beyond. But Oriane swallowed her fear. She was done with it now.

And there was somebody she needed to sing for.

The sun filtered prettily through the waking forest as Oriane flew. She stayed low in the canopy, unwilling to rise where she might be293seen now that the world was lit up again. Her dawnsong was done. It had streamed from her freely, as if she’d never locked it away. The burning at her breast had lessened, but a dull glow still lingered there, like a gentle hook beneath her ribs: some tiny, cautious, distant echo of the connection she felt to the sun itself. And it was somehow leading her towards Andala.

Sure enough, it was not long before the sounds of footsteps crunching through the brush echoed up from the undergrowth. But … that was more than one set of footsteps. And that was more than one voice she could hear as she dipped cautiously lower.

‘I don’t understand why you’rehere, Girard—’

Andala.That was Andala’s voice, at least – the one that had called for Oriane in the everlasting dark, coaxing her song from her for the first time in skies knew how long. But she didn’t dare reveal herself, not yet.

‘To find you. And thank the skies I did, before …’ Another voice – a man’s, one Oriane didn’t recognise. ‘We have to go. While everything’s still in an uproar.’

‘We can’t go yet,’ Andala protested. Oriane dared to flit down to a lower branch, so she might see her. ‘I need to find—’

‘There’s no time!’

Oriane knew that voice, too – that one belonged to Kitt. If she were human, she would have smiled to hear her friend once more. But she had never heard him use this tone before. It was sharp, urgent, frightened.

‘I’ll find Oriane and make sure she’s all right,’ he continued, ‘but you need to go while you can. Now they know you’re the nightingale, Andala, they’ll never let you—’

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