Page 59 of The Starling and the Hatter

“Ah,” she said, holding up a finger, then placing it on my palm and tracing one of the lines. “We don’t just gather for others. We don’t just sing for others. The wolf woman—the mother of wolves as you call her—she was once like us. She learned to gather bones, she learned how to put them back together. And we too can learn such a thing. We can learn to repair things that have been torn apart. With enough wisdom, we can make things whole again. But,” she said, holding up one finger for emphasis, “you must remember to gather yourself first.”

The profundity of her statement struck me so hard that tears burned my eyes.

“Build your own skeleton first. It will take time.” She cradled my cheek and I felt comforted instead of discomfited. “You’ve been torn apart.” She said the words as if she were looking into my soul. “And your pieces have been tossed here and there by those who should have held you together.”

A tear slipped past my lashes.

“But bones are hard. They’re resilient. You just need to gather them up.” She tilted her head down a little, nodding her head until I found myself nodding along with her. “And when you’ve found all of your pieces and gathered them up, you must sing over them.”

“Sing them to life?” I asked, knowing that’s what the mother of wolves was fabled to do, but also knowing it was too lofty a goal for me.

She nodded vigorously and placed her fingers at my throat. “You know how to sing for others, but what is your song? The song you sing only to yourself? What is the melody of your soul and the harmony of your heart? Find your song—your woman’s song, your mother song. Sing that, and those bones, those pieces of yourself, they’ll become alive again.”

I was desperate to understand what she was saying, and she must have seen my confusion, because she kept going.

“Our soul needs to sing, but before we can sing with our soul, we must listen with our soul.”

I knew immediately that I wanted that, that I needed it. “How?”

“Practice. Be still and learn to listen to your own voice. Stop imagining what others want for you or demand of you. Stop trying to make yourself into someone else’s dream. Listen to you—all of you. If you can do that, you’ll remember the things you knew as a child, before the world broke you apart.”

I was crying in earnest now, and her face held no theatrical mask or dramatic flare. It held compassion and understanding. “Sing yourself back to life,” she said. “Be wild. Run free.”

I longed for her words to be true. They resonated within me, begging me to find a way to listen to my soul, to know myself. Her eyes were genuine and hopeful, like she believed I could be that mythical wolf mother. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough,” I confessed. “It’s so hard to do it all by myself.”

“Ah,” she said in her sage way. “Running free doesn’t have to mean running alone. Wolves run in packs, my dear. Who will run at your side? Who will lead when you need it and follow when you know the better way?”

I blinked as Robert’s face flashed through my mind, and then Hatcher’s. “I don’t know.”

She smiled with kindness in her eyes. “You can work it out. You can unearth that part of yourself.” She dropped her hands.

I sniffed and brushed at my cheeks, suddenly embarrassed. I dug into my pouch and offered her a bit, feeling deep down that her words were worth more than I could ever repay. “Thank you,” I said.

But she shook her head, not accepting my money. “All I ask is that once you know, once you’ve started giving heed to the voice of your soul, and gone to meet her, you come back and tell me. All right?”

I nodded, taking two reluctant steps back.

“Go on,” she encouraged. “Feel what it’s like to run free.”

I walked away in a daze, my mind tumbling end over end. I’d believed that by leaving the Hatchers and striking out on my own, that I was running free. But these past few days hadn’t felt like freedom. They’d felt like drudgery. What did that mean? Did it mean I needed to hurry to Robert and find an adventure with him? Or would that be just as unsatisfying as my current predicament?

I didn’t know, and I had a feeling I wouldn’t know until I found him.

Maddox

I worked like a madman for that week as my father and I expanded the shop. We’d needed to do it for years, but the months that were dry enough for this sort of construction were the ones filled with festivals and traveling. So we’d decided to skip our trip to Faehurst, get the work done all at once, and then rejoin the other travelers in Winhaven.

I had been looking forward to this time. Time to be here at home. Time to work alongside not only my family, but Elise as well. Yes, I’d planned to work hard, but it was supposed to be enjoyable work, work where I could talk with Elise and tease her. I was supposed to know she was safe and well because she was with me.

Her departure was something I couldn’t make sense of. Why had she gone? I knew she had feelings for Robert; that was more than obvious, but her insistence that she go after him was out of character. It didn’t seem like a decision she would make. Had she changed and I hadn’t noticed? Had Robert rubbed off on her, making her think that a frantic search for excitement was what she wanted?

Elise loved mending by the fire for hours a day over the winter. She loved quiet dinners. She loved it when my father would read to us in the evening. Once she’d settled into her life with us, she had been the picture of contentment. Yes, she liked to have a new costume. She loved to travel and perform, but she always came back to sit at the fire and talk with us in the evening. She cherished that time…didn’t she?

In the midst of my fear-fueled work, my father interrupted my brooding thoughts. “I’ve been thinking,” he started.

I snorted. “Should I be worried?”

“Not at all. It’s just that with Elise gone, I realized she won’t be traveling to Winhaven with us.”