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Andala was so startled that she failed to notice her transformation ending. Instead of settling herself on the ground in advance as she usually did, she changed back suddenly mid-flight. Human again, she landed with a graceless crash.
Her face burned with embarrassment, and her body smarted where she’d hit the ground, but the soft grass of the clearing had helped to break the worst of her fall. Oriane was at her side in an instant.
‘Are you all right?’ Her voice was brimming with worry as she helped Andala sit up.
Andala brushed a leaf from her hair, trying to ignore her flaming cheeks. ‘I’m fine.’308
Oriane knelt on the ground beside her. Her eyes still shone, and that brilliant, beaming smile was still upon her face. Andala could not help but smile back at her. It was an instinctive reaction, easier than any of her transformations, like hearing the call of one’s kind and calling back in answer.
‘Was that how I looked, too?’ she asked Oriane, trying to keep her tone light as emotion flooded through her – relief and gratitude and other things she couldn’t name. ‘The first time I saw you transform?’
Oriane let out a laugh in response, wiping away a diamond tear.
Andala had never heard a more wonderful sound.
They stayed in the woods a while longer, by unspoken mutual agreement. Neither of them wanted to go back to the people or the problems that awaited them just yet. Instead, they climbed the tree-covered hillside, navigating by the last splashes of fading light filtering down through the twilit canopy. Andala had spent enough time in these woods – by herself, as a bird, with Girard – to know her way in the dark.
At the crest of the hill was another clearing. It was a wash of silver, painted by the faint sheen of fresh stars. Andala sat on a fallen log, and after a moment Oriane joined her. They looked back upon the flickering lights of the village below.
‘You’ve been up here before,’ Oriane said. It wasn’t a question.
Andala nodded. She was conflicted by the swarm of memories that had enveloped her from the moment they’d stepped over the rise that afternoon. She did not trust herself to speak about them yet.
‘That was your family? Back in the inn?’
Before, Andala would have baulked at the thought of sharing any of it, like a creature of the deep shying away from bright light. But she309found she could bear the idea of such scrutiny now. The skylark sat at her side, the only person in the world who might begin to understand. If Andala could not be honest with her now, when could she?
‘The older woman is my mother,’ she began. Oriane was perfectly still at her side; Andala kept her eyes on the village below. ‘She was the nightingale before me.’
And then Andala was telling her everything.
It was hard, but she kept going, right up until the present. She did not censor the story, did not shy away from the details that showed the depths of her. The weakness. The ugliness. The thousand forms of fear. The choices she’d made, and the way she wondered every day if they had been the wrong ones.
Through it all, Oriane was quiet. There was no sound but the wind, and the soft night chorus of the woods, and Andala’s voice, spilling her secrets into the silence.
By the time she was done, the night had deepened fully. The lights of the village glowed brighter below them, burning against the black. Andala lit the lantern she had brought, glad of the excuse to occupy herself for a moment.
‘You must have been lonely, these past few years,’ Oriane said.
Andala’s head whipped towards her. There was none of the horror or disgust she’d expected in her expression. No – that looked like understanding etched into the faint crease of her delicate brow.
Andala did not know how to respond.
‘It took me a while to learn what it was to be lonely,’ Oriane went on. She held Andala’s gaze, held it with a look so open that it was all Andala could do not to close her own eyes at the force of it. ‘But you … you went willingly into loneliness, after knowing what it was to be without it. You locked yourself away to spare your daughter from a fate she might not want.’310
But Andala shook her head, looking away. ‘It’s not as simple as that. I should have … I didn’t even try, Oriane. I couldn’t even trust myself to be in her presence for more than a few minutes without using her to get rid of this – this burden. She’s growing up without a mother, all because I’mweak.’
‘I grew up without a mother,’ Oriane said. ‘And in my view, it’s not so different. My mother had no choice but to leave me, either. But she made sure I would be safe, and loved, and well cared for.’ A hand, gentle, tentative, alighted on Andala’s knee. ‘You’ve done the same for Amie.’
Without thinking, Andala took that hand, gripping it in her own as if it were a lifeline and she were drowning.
‘But I still left her,’ she whispered. ‘I left them all. Everyone who’s ever cared for me – everyone I’ve ever cared for. My mother. Girard. Amie. Even Kitt, now.’
‘You never left me.’
Andala looked up. The words had been quiet, touched with a hint of hesitance, but there was something like determination on Oriane’s face. It flickered there, then flamed.
‘You never left me,’ she repeated. ‘Even when I was so lost in my grief that I would have drowned and taken the whole world with me. You stayed. You brought me back.’
