“My son, I have your queen,” Zoltev bellowed. “She bleeds, and I am not a Healer. Join me, and I will let you keep her.”
Tiras’s eyes shot to mine, and his regret was eclipsed only by his resolve. “Even you do not have that power, father,” he murmured.
“But I do! We can have anything we want. We are Gifted. We are kings. You are exactly like me,” Zoltev urged.
“You are a beast. And I have spent my whole life trying to be a man,” Tiras said.
“Then you have failed. You are a bird. Your kingdom conspires against you, your city burns, and your queen . . . bleeds,” Zoltev hissed, and he flung me aside. He shot upward, wings spread, even as Tiras swooped, catching me up against him.
“I build my own armies, I don’t need lords and councils. I don’t need knights and guards,” Zoltev bellowed, commanding the attention of every man, woman, and child. With infinite care, Tiras descended and laid me on the cobblestones, shouting for Boojohni and retrieving his swords, preparing for battle as Zoltev called down his minions.
The Volgar Liege extended his arms, and his creations swarmed around him, falling from the haze and the darkness like he was the God of Words. Zoltev had not stopped with vultures. These new creatures had wings, but they were various shapes and sizes with differing colors and characteristics. Some breathed fire and others sprayed venom, some were the size of small children, others as large as three men, as if Zoltev had attempted to turn flying lizards and poisonous serpents into giants.
I closed my eyes and bid them adieu.
Zoltev roared in stunned outrage, and I clamped my hands over my ears, gasping in pain at the head-splitting volume, as the creatures began to writhe and die, falling to the courtyard like overripe fruit and spilling their juices over the cobblestones.
Tiras shot from the ground, swords drawn back, and thrust upward into Zoltev’s belly. Zoltev’s wings jerked and seized in stunned agony, and he dropped from the sky, hitting the ground with a sickening thud. In an instant he shifted, becoming Zoltev the man before transforming into the Volgar Liege once again, healed.
The king’s guard ran toward him, lances raised, only to be swept off their feet by the dragon’s spiked tail or engulfed in flame. Tiras rose above the beast, wings extended, drawing Zoltev into the sky. I willed the arrows of the archers to bury themselves in his scaly skin, but the dragon was wily, his hide was thick, and he rose above the smoke, beyond the view of the king’s men, and we could only watch the haze in trepidation, eyes peeled, necks craned, listening to the battle of wings and wills above us.
Then through the hovering smoke, the Volgar Liege hurtled, wings pinned back, Tiras clinging to the hilt of the sword that protruded from Zoltev’s reptilian chest. The dragon roared, shooting flames that engulfed Tiras’s wing. With an inhuman cry, Tiras swung his right hand upward, thrusting his second sword through Zoltev’s dragon-like snout, pinning his mouth closed and trapping the flames inside him. They collided with the cobblestones, the dragon king taking the brunt of the fall, wings twisted and trapped beneath him, Tiras still clinging to the hilts of both swords.
Warriors pounced from every direction, running their swords through Zoltev’s body, ensuring he wouldn’t change and rise again.
But the king didn’t rise either.
The two lay motionless, a crumpled heap of limbs and wings, man and beast, and I heard a cry echoing across the courtyard, keening and sharp, reverberating down my throat and into my belly, lodging around my heart.
Screaming. I was screaming, just like before, the sound breaking through the rust in my throat and the walls of my mind. Then I was running and falling and running again, reaching Tiras’s body as he was rolled from the beast onto his back, victorious yet overcome.
“Tiras.” His name felt bigger than life on my tongue, and it rolled through my mouth like a growing storm. I realized his name wasn’t just in my head but in my throat and on my lips. It sprang forth and rang in my ears.
“Tiras,” I said again, calling him back with my will and my voice, demanding he answer. But he didn’t open his eyes, and his breath whistled from his lips, wispy and faint. The left side of his body was charred and black, his left wing a shriveled mass of melted feathers and exposed cartilage.
I placed my hands above his heart, avoiding the wounded flesh and the seared skin.
Wounded flesh beneath my hands,
Be new again as I demand.
Wing that withers, singed and shorn,
Heal thyself, be whole once more.
His blackened skin began to pink, and his feathers unfurled, but my body quaked, and my sight began to fail. There was blood seeping through my gown, and pain radiated deep in my belly.
I lay beside him, my head on his heart, listening to the dreadful slog, heavy and slow. If he could change, he could heal.
“His gift is strange,” the old Teller had said.
“He was not born this way,” Kjell had argued.
But my mother had prophesied his change. She’d pressed words into the air, promising fate. And on the night she died, King Zoltev had begun to lose his soul and his son to the sky.
Realization flooded me.
I could not heal what wasn’t broken. I could not alter Tiras’s gift. But if the change was not his gift, if it was not something woven into his cells and sinews, then I could take it away. I could take my mother’s words away. It was the first thing my mother had taught me. Take the word away, Lark.
I closed my eyes and focused on the day when I’d swallowed the words back into myself, just as I’d been commanded. The words on my lips, the shape of them, the weight of them, the rumble of the sound releasing from my throat as they came into being. I’d done as I was told. I’d remembered and obeyed. I’d swallowed every word, every syllable.
Curse not, cure not, ‘til the hour.
That hour was at hand. The most important hour of my life. Dawn was nearing and Tiras would not live to see it. Not as a bird or a man. The hour was at hand, and I could not afford to be silent anymore.
I pressed my mouth to Tiras’s chest and moved my lips around the shape of the word he’d become, taking it from him.
“Elgae.”
His breast was warm, and his life force lingered, but his spirit wanted to fly, fly, fly. It was the only word left, and it resisted me even as I called it back and took it away, just like I’d done to the poppet clenched in my mother’s fist the day it all began.
“Ylf.”
As I moved my lips against his chest, pulling the word into myself, I felt the smallest crack, a fissure, and wind whistled through my lips. Just like the poppet, Tiras was quiet, a shell of something that no longer stirred.
I’d taken his word, his final word, and drawn it into myself.
And still he lay motionless, wings fluttering in the pre-dawn darkness, eyes closed, not an eagle, not a man.
“Tiras.” I spoke against his lips, desperate to give him a new word, new life. “Tiras,” I said again, straining against the rust in my throat, wanting to speak his name into being, but there was no change in him.
I threw back my head in rage and sorrow, the fissure in my throat widening, even as I tried to reclaim Tiras from the sky, taking away my mother’s words.
Yks eht morf! I mourned, Yks eht morf!
But there was no answer from the sky. I had lost him. It was foretold, and it had come to pass.
I felt a hand on my arm and heard my name being spoken, but I would not lift my head from the king.
“Yer wounded, Lark. Yer bleeding.” Boojohni tried to pull me away.
I can’t heal him, Boojohni. I tried to make him change so he could heal himself. But he’s not a man or a bird . . . He’s both.
“What word did ye give him, Lark?” Boojohni asked urgently.
I moaned, trying to speak out loud and failing, the words like rocks against my teeth, awkward and sharp.
“The day yer mother died, ye kissed his hand. I saw ye! And ye whispered something. What word did ye give him?”
I could only stare in despair, shaking my head. I didn’t give him a word.