Prava shrugged. “It could always be worse.”
And so, each day, Araminta gulped down the hope. She hoped that Prava would change. That he would free her. Barring that, she hoped that what he said was true.
It could always be worse.
Araminta’s nesting tower was a thing of extraordinary beauty. The glass staircase led to a platform lofted into the clouds themselves, which skimmed the edge of a marble platform shaped like a star. A carved onyx pillar stood at each point, connecting a hanging garden that arced above the floor. Araminta spied tendrils of billow lilies and gloom violets, bone lichen and great tufts of drifting roses. Her heart ached, for these flowers did not grow on the Isle of Malys. They belonged to the sky realm and grew by the edges of the salt pools.
Araminta knew nothing of motherhood, but some ancient instinct reared up inside her as she brooded. The moment she saw the nesting tower, she sat in the middle of the floor and brushed her hair until she had amassed what looked like a pile of combed gold. She hummed and she sang, she braided and she wove. She grabbed glass baublesfrom Prava’s study and the fallen prologues from the library, which shushed and murmured as she tucked them amongst the strands. She took bales of straw and silk dresses, cobwebs and calligraphy pens. For two whole days, she waited by the edge of the platform, snatching snowflakes out of the sky so that her daughters would have only the softest lace upon which to rest their heads. Once her nest was complete, she crawled into its center and did not move.
Twelve days later, Prava checked on his wife. Per her request, he had left baskets of tadpoles and marsh grass outside the behemoth of her nest. But today, the nest was noisy. Little cries and chirps echoed and Prava held his breath.
“Come see! Come look!” called Araminta.
Prava walked to the nest. It was a huge structure, shaped like a beehive, with the hanging garden of the tower serving as a living ceiling. The fragrance of the billow lilies suffused the warm nest. All around, the walls sparkled from Araminta’s hair woven into and around a thousand books and baubles. The floor was strewn with eggshells that were a riot of colors—mint and persimmon, sapphire and garnet. And the sound. Even when they were hatchlings, the powerful magic of truth glittered in the air like stars pulverized to a fine grit.
It was thus that the wizard Prava beheld his daughters for the first time. Since they were part veritas swan, they were not red and wrinkled like typical newborns, but appeared more like toddlers. They were plump and mobile, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed, with a pair of fuzzy wings folded between their shoulder blades. They sat amidst thewreckage of their eggshells, so that it looked as if they had emerged from shattered rainbows. His daughters had big, wet eyes and their mother’s rosebud mouth, and the love that he felt in that moment was unlike any he had ever known.
“They are… they are perfect,” he said. He turned to Araminta and kissed her hands. “Thank you.”
At first, Araminta beamed. She could not stop staring at her chicks. She was certain that any moment now she would collapse beneath the weight of this new love. She could see in Prava’s eyes that he was equally smitten… but a monster’s love is its own cage.
Thank you.
Her mind snagged on this. She swallowed.
By then, Prava had waded into the nest. He sat amongst their chicks, cooing at them, counting fingers and toes, blowing raspberries on little bellies. Prava named them one by one. “Eulalia, Euphemia, Evadne, Eustacia, Dulcinea and—”
One chick, with chestnut curls and a dimple, clambered into his lap. Prava stroked her wings.
“And you shall be Corisande,” he said, gently depositing her amidst her sisters.
“What do you mean to do with them?” asked Araminta.
“Why, use them, of course! What else does one do with daughters?” said Prava. “They will be my greatest weapons. They will level empires. They will destroy kings. They will bring me the secrets of the universe… and all thanks to this.”
Araminta’s heart sank. She had been too exhausted to notice it before, but the slender chain around each of her daughters’ necks was unmistakable. Prava lifted one of the chains, revealing the pendant of a small, winged key.
“But that isn’t… that can’t be possible,” said Araminta.
Prava gathered his daughters’ necklaces. With them, he took control of their ability to transform. The chicks did not notice. They were sleepy and had crawled over their shattered eggshells to gather in a soft, downy pile.
“I did not think such a thing was possible either,” said Prava, with all the indifference of remarking on the weather. “I came across the theory in a text made of mist, which wrote itself upon the moors for only a week before dispersing, presumably until the next decade.” The necklaces chimed like bells in Prava’s grip. “Such a powerful idea that the union of a mortal and a veritas swan might bring forth a brood whose transformation is not tied to love. Can you imagine, Araminta? One merely has to possess the necklace and all the powers of the veritas swan are theirs. Imagine what a ruler of a distant land would do to have such a beauty in their court! A courtesan who can sing before enemies and draw out the secrets of their military strategy? Invaluable. Imagine what they would give me in return…”
Prava smiled.
“You will barter them off!” said Araminta, stunned. “You will leave them powerless—”
“I will make them formidable,” said Prava, patting one of the chicks’ heads. “They shall not be powerless. They will have the magic of their song and the weight of my instruction. They will be bartered, yes, but armed with such skill that they will soon take over the ones they are betrothed to. Our daughters will be unstoppable.”
At that moment, a soft crack disturbed the silence. Prava raised an eyebrow. The sound was coming from the edge of the nest. Araminta followed the noise to a small egg nearly obscured by a trellis of gloom violets. The egg was the color of an emerald and veined all over in gold. It was beautiful and exquisite and smaller than all of its siblings. A crack appeared down the center.
“A late bloomer!” said Prava, excited. “Six necklaces were already more than I had hoped, but seven is a very good number indeed.”
When her daughters had begun to hatch, their chirps were the sweetest music to grace the Silent Lakes district in hundreds of years. Birds paused mid-flight. The sun halted its course.
The sound coming from this egg was Araminta’s first clue that something was deeply wrong. To call it a song would be an insult to music. It sounded like a cat trying to expel a cursed bell from its throat. Prava clapped his hands over his ears.
“What in Wrate’s name!” he said, shuddering.
