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‘I am here for you, Andala,’ her mother said, rising with her. ‘I’ll help you in any way I can. You don’t have to bear this burden on your own.’
Burden.
The word from her mother’s lips was jarring, like an off-key note in a song.
‘What did you say?’ Andala asked, voice deathly quiet.
Leilyn hesitated. Something in her eyes said she knew what Andala was thinking. She opened her mouth, closed it again. ‘I said I am here to help you,’ she murmured finally. ‘That I—’
‘No,’ Andala barked. ‘The part about the burden. That part sounded familiar.’
A silence, stone-heavy.
‘I think you’ve said something similar to me before, haven’t you, Mother? Do you remember what it was? Because I do.’
She took a step towards Leilyn, so that they stood face-to-face. Her mother’s expression was unreadable, her features set like stone.224
‘Iamthenightingale,andyouaremydaughter,’ Andala recited. ‘Thisisourburdentobeartogether. That was what you said to me, wasn’t it, when I told you how afraid I was? I was five years old, Mother.’ She spat the word as if it were a curse. ‘Five years old when you transferred your power to me. Because you had tired of it. Because you wished to live your life unencumbered, free of the pain, free of the cold and the dark. You gave that burden to a five-year-old child because you had tired of carrying it yourself. Have you come to understand that in the years I’ve been gone?’
There. She had said it. The thing they had always talked around, but not directly about; the thing that lingered in the back of her mind, in the pit of her stomach, every time that ice pierced her chest and she changed.
Andala had not become the nightingale at the moment of her birth, the way that Oriane had become the skylark. It had not been some natural transfer, some inevitable fate to which she had been born. Her mother had chosen tomakeher the nightingale without her consent, back when she had still been too young to give it, and too naive to understand what being the nightingale truly meant.
‘I didn’t even really know,’ she went on, unable to stop now she had started, ‘the extent of what you were passing down. The constant pain. The chill you can never shake. The loneliness that rots away at your damned core.’ She let out another involuntary laugh, this one bitter as bile in her throat. ‘But you did. You knew, and you did it anyway. We didn’t bear the burdentogether– you got rid of it for yourself and gave it to me. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you really are here for me, or that you ever were. If that were the case, you would have held on to that burden yourself as long as you could. You would have done what you had to do to keep it away from your child.’225
Andala stopped, finally, breathing heavily, as if she’d been running for her life. Leilyn’s face was very white. It looked almost skeletal, like something that had loomed in the black depths of Andala’s childhood nightmares.
‘What of the skylark?’ Leilyn asked eventually, her voice measured and cool. ‘Did her mother not pass the power down to her daughter, as I did?’
‘Oriane’s mother died after giving birth to her,’ Andala spat. ‘If she passed it on willingly, it was only because she had no other choice.’
They stayed there, both still as stone.
‘What are you really doing here, Andala?’
Andala stared at her. ‘What do you mean, what am I doing here? I’ve just told you—’
Leilyn gave a dismissive wave. ‘What are youreallydoing, though? Have you come all this way just to berate me for the things that I’ve done?’
‘I’ve told you why I’m here,’ she repeated, forcing herself to stay calm. ‘I’m trying to save the skylark, along with the rest of the world.’
Leilyn considered her. Her face was smooth, unreadable to anyone else. But Andala knew her mother, and she knew what that look meant.
‘You don’t believe me.’
Leilyn said nothing.
Andala’s brimming frustration spilled over. ‘For skies’ sake, Mother, why else would I be here?’
Leilyn threw up her hands. ‘I don’t know, Andala! Perhaps because you’re running away again? You’ve run from everything else in your life, why shouldn’t you be doing the same thing now?’
The accusation drove the air from her lungs like a gut-punch. But her mother wasn’t done. Her gaze pierced Andala like a blade.226
‘You ran away from me. You ran away from your husband. You ran away from yourdaughterbefore the girl had even known the touch of your hand. So when you come here out of the blue, and you tell me it’s because there’s something wrong with the skylark, can you blame me for thinking you’re trying to run from that too?’
Every word was like a blow to bruised flesh. Leilyn knew the places to target, the wounds that had never quite healed. They all opened again now, one by one. Andala was defenceless. She could not deny any of it. Except, perhaps—
‘I’m not running from Oriane,’ she mumbled, the words quiet, indistinct.
