“The king told me ye were in your chamber, but I could smell ye out here.” His eyes narrowed on my neck, and his smile disappeared. “What happened, Bird?”
I pressed my hand to my throat and shook my head.
“Come with me. I’ll take care of ye.” He reached for my arm, but I shook him off. I didn’t want to be taken care of. I wanted to run away from all the men who sought dominion over me, who thought they could own me, imprison me, use me, cut me. I wiped a furious hand at the blood on my neck and the tears on my cheeks that I hadn’t realized I’d shed.
Can you hear me, Boojohni?
He hissed and stepped back, his eyes filled with horror.
I bowed my head in defeat, sorrow making my chest constrict and my eyes overflow. Boojohni could hear me, and he was afraid. I felt the air around him swell with revulsion and dismay. His breathing was harsh, and I tried again, my inner voice broken and sad even to my own ears.
Are you afraid of me, my friend?
I felt his hand touch my hair, just a tentative brush of his fingertips, but I didn’t look up at him.
“Bird?” he whispered, as if he still wasn’t sure about the voice in his head. “Bird, is that ye?”
Yes. It’s me. I nodded as I spoke, and he gasped again, like he couldn’t believe it. He reached toward my lips, and his hand fell away like he’d changed his mind at the last second. He took several steps back, and I rose on quaking legs and followed him, wanting to plead with him, needing to convince him of things I wasn’t sure of myself.
I found my voice, I tried to explain. At least . . . a piece of it.
He nodded slowly, his eyes still impossibly wide, but the horror he had exuded was abating.
You can hear me now. I can talk to you.
“I have always been able to hear ye, Lark. But before it was a feeling. An instinct. Now I hear a voice . . . your voice. And it’s going to take some getting used to.”
I understand. I’m afraid too. I’m so afraid, Boojohni.
His mouth trembled, and his compassion sang sweetly in the air. It was like a salve to my soul. He wiped at his eyes and pointed to the wound on my neck.
“Did the king do that?”
I shook my head. No.
“Good. I don’t want to hate him. He’s different from what I expected. Different from his father.”
I don’t want to hate him either, I confessed, and Boojohni looked at me sharply. I don’t know what he saw, but I allowed him to take my hand and lead me out of the garden and up the wide, winding staircase to my tower room. “You need to prepare yourself, Lark. Yer father is here, and there are rumors afoot,” he whispered, his eyes darting right and left like there were ears and eyes everywhere.
Tell me.
“The king is young. The members of the Council of Lords think he is too lax on the Gifted.”
My eyes shot to his, and he grabbed my hand, comforting me. He said no more until we were alone in my chamber.
He doctored the wound at my throat as he talked, his voice barely above a whisper.
“They blame him for the rise of the Volgar. They say he has encouraged revolution. He has led the Volgar to believe he is weak and lenient.”
I thought of the way Tiras and Kjell had fought the terrifying bird people, hacking them out of the sky, and wondered at the delegation’s definition of lenient.
The Volgar are not . . . Gifted. They are monsters.
“The council believes there is no difference,” he said.
I winced, and Boojohni patted my hand again. It was what King Zoltev, Tiras’s father, had believed. But my mother was not a monster. I was not a monster.
We continued with our conversation, my words slow and small as I did my best to assemble them in my head. Boojohni listened in wonder as I answered his tentative questions, and at one point, wiped his eyes and smiled at me tearfully.
“Ye sound like a nightingale, Bird. Yer voice is beautiful. Sweet. I could listen all day.”
Before long, Greta and the maid I’d just learned was Pia brought steaming buckets of water to my room and pulled a gown from my wardrobe. Boojohni informed us all that he would be waiting outside my door to escort me to the Great Hall when I was ready.
He shot me a sheepish gaze as he excused himself, and I pressed a frantic question on his mind that he studiously ignored. He wasn’t telling me all that the king had communicated.
Pia’s eyes grew round at the blood on my dress, and Greta was less abrasive than usual as I was bathed and primped, then dressed in a silvery silk that made me feel like a raindrop—grey, small, and all but invisible. Pia wrapped a diamond choker around my neck to hide the thin slice Kjell had carved into my throat. They didn’t ask about the wound, and I wondered if it was because I couldn’t speak or because they regularly saw things in the king’s employ that they were forced to ignore. Pia informed me the choker had belonged to the king’s mother, Aurelia, and that it suited me. It didn’t. But it was beautiful, and its weight gave me courage.
Pia brushed a drop of lavender oil into my heavy hair so it would shine and held the length back from my face with a thin band of braided silver studded with diamonds that matched the jewels at my neck. The lavender eased my nerves, and I tried to focus on the scent so I wouldn’t think about the evening ahead as Greta lined my grey eyes with kohl, blackened my lashes, and stained my lips and cheeks with rose-colored face paint.
I had the distinct impression I was being prepared for something I was not at all ready for, and when Boojohni rapped on the door and urged us to hurry, the maids stepped back and admired their handiwork like I had been the ultimate challenge, and they had succeeded with their task.