The top of the egg popped off. The chick inside squeaked. Alone of her sisters, Demelza was her father’s double. She had his russet hair, but by way of her mother’s ethereal nature so that it looked as if her locks were woven from the sunset itself. She had his serpent green eyes, though the pupils were not vertical slits. She had his pearly skin, sodifferent from the golden tones of her siblings. When the little Demelza toppled over, her parents gasped.
Demelza had no wings.
And when she was raised out of her cracked eggshell, there was no key around her neck. It was locked deep, deep in her heart. And like any veritas swan, only one thing would summon it into being:
Love.
3Woe, Woe, Woe Shall Cry the Men Who Know You!
Demelza loved to sing.
That she was abysmal at it made no difference since she rarely had an audience anyway. Before her sisters had flown the nest, they used to hold contests seeing who could listen to Demelza the longest before finally clapping their hands over their ears. The last one standing was allowed to choose that night’s bedtime story.
“Father could offer you to a warlord, sister, and surely all his enemies would fall upon a sword rather than endure that screeching,” Eulalia had once said with an admiring sigh.
Eulalia was the most violent of Araminta and Prava’s brood. She wore spikes of glass in her elaborately braided golden hair and had filed her teeth to points. Long ago Eulalia had been promised to a lesser baron far from the Isle in exchange for a torn scroll. The baron thought the wizard Prava was a fool, for the torn bit of parchment was nothing but an obscure cooking recipe passed down as an oddity. Prava did not correct the baron of its true import: a piece ofthe puzzle to life everlasting. Once the marriage contracts were struck, Prava gave thanks that the baron was a fool, for he loved his daughters and hoped they’d be quick about dispatching any husbands, if only so they could come home faster.
Once Eulalia’s wings turned white, she would be wed to the baron. The baron planned to use her to lure out his brothers’ secrets and take control of his father’s land. After that, who knew what the future held. Eulalia’s betrothed might think he could control her since he possessed her swan key, but he was no match for her.
With the exception of Demelza, all the girls were promised to rulers in distant lands. Although the day they would fly the nest loomed over all of them, such an occasion felt as distant to Demelza as the horizon. At least, it did until it abruptly… didn’t.
As a hatchling, Demelza’s differences hardly mattered. There was only ever the warm weight of her sisters’ fuzzy, fog-colored wings, the sound of their mother’s humming and the wind rustling the gloom violets above them. In the dark nest, the chicks’ sole source of light was Araminta’s hair sewn through the twigs, snowflakes and book pages like a living wisp of sunshine. Each night, their father, Prava, kissed their heads and sang them a lullaby to sleep:
My darlings, my dears, my sweet little fears
Together, the world will be ours
Your keys are my might
Your truth songs my sight
Woe, woe, woe
Shall cry the men who know you!
Now sleep and sleep, grow strong
Sleep now and develop your song
For one day you’ll fly and you’ll be my eye
Over mountains and river and streams
You’ll bring me power and you’ll be my spy
And soon, I shall have all my dreams
Woe, woe, woe
Shall cry the men who know you!
Sharpen your teeth and stretch out your wings
And the world shall be yours for the taking
One day you’ll be grown and then you shall sing
And you shall set all the lands a’shaking
