Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

It glanced around itself once, and Triss thought she glimpsed a tiny pallid face, no bigger than an egg, with sparks for eyes. Then there was a roar of air and rapid flapping, like a flag in the wind, and it was gone.

Long after the sound of its wings had faded, Triss lay still, carpet rough against her chin. She was seeing the impossible again. But somehow, alone at midnight in her dead brother’s darkened room, the impossible was easier to handle.

Mouth dry, she crept back to the desk. One corner of the latest delivery was just visible, jutting out of the crack. She pulled it out using the tweezers, then scurried back to her own room, where she ripped it open and pulled out the letter. It bore the date of that very day, and the handwriting was achingly familiar.

Dear Father, Mother, Triss, Pen,

I am writing again, even though I know it is hopeless. I no longer believe that any of these notes are reaching you, let alone that I will ever receive a reply. I cannot stop myself, however. Writing these letters is all that I have, even though now it is just a make-believe game I play to make the cold less bitter.

Even if I thought that you would actually see this letter, I no longer have the strength to put on a brave face for you. This is a place where all bravery is broken on the rack.

This winter never ends. I can no longer remember when it started. It seems to me that I have been suffering the same bleak skies and bitter snows for years. Perhaps it is the same day, stretching on and on forever like barbed wire. I have lost track of everything. My friends are all dead. The men who fight alongside me are strangers, always dying before I can learn their names. Their faces are nothing but a smudge in my mind.

My hands and feet are in agony from the cold, but at least pain is better than thought. I am a shattered thing now, I know it. I can feel my soul sticking out at twisted angles like a broken limb. All I can hope for is numbness and an end.

Forgive me,

Sebastian

‘Sebastian…’ Triss was barely aware that she had whispered the name aloud.

What had she expected? A list of demands from the mysterious ‘him’, perhaps. She had not been ready for this .

Triss held Sebastian’s letter in unsteady hands, shaken by how much and how little she remembered him. Triss had already known that there had been special days that she had enjoyed with him, such as the birthday when he had helped her dress as an Egyptian queen, and a picnic outing where he had carried her on his shoulders for hours. These were family folklore, recited by her parents in a solemn ritual fashion on the few occasions when they felt it appropriate to mention their lost son. Over the years her parents had herded Triss’s woolly memories into the neat pens of their stories, until she no longer knew what she actually remembered.

This was different. This was shocking, like the warmth of a teardrop falling on her skin. Suddenly Sebastian was a person, a lost, frightened, desperate person in pain. It caused her a deep pang of sympathetic horror, and she realized that she did feel love for the lost Sebastian, despite the fog of the years.

But he’s dead.

Sebastian had died five years before, during a bitter winter. There had been a letter from his commanding officer, talking about a detonation in his side of the trench, his deepest regrets, no possibility that anybody could have survived. There could be no mistake.

Triss could make no sense of her parents’ behaviour. The drawer was crammed full of envelopes. For months then, or perhaps even years, Sebastian’s messages had been arriving, and her parents had known about it. They had traded solemn words about their long-lost son, and all the while they had been locking his heartfelt letters in a drawer and pretending they did not exist. Their dignified grief was a lie. Everything was a lie.

Her parents had talked about the letters being sent by ‘that man’, the mysterious ‘he’ who they thought might have attacked Triss. Now that she thought about it though, they had never said that ‘he’ had actually written them. Indeed, her father had said that receiving a letter from ‘the man himself’ would be different from ‘the usual’.

How could Sebastian still be fighting in a war that had been over for five years, and how could he write letters from beyond the grave? If they were not cruel and clever fakes, and if Sebastian really had written that desperate note, he needed help. Either way, Triss needed to understand the riddle of the letters.

The beginnings of an idea started to form in Triss’s mind. The drawer was crammed to bursting. How often had this strange flitting thing been invading the Crescent house to deliver letters? Every month? Every week? Or every night?

Whatever it is, it’s weird and scary, but it’s also smaller than me. So if it comes again tomorrow night, maybe I can catch it.

It was raining steadily, and the raindrops fell with a rustle, not a splash. They fell right into the house, settling on the carpet and furniture, and Triss could see that they were actually dead leaves. They landed on the heads and shoulders of the family as they sat at the breakfast table, all trying to pretend that nothing was happening.

‘Triss did it!’ Pen was shouting, strident with glee. ‘Look!’ The younger girl pointed towards the ceiling, and when Triss glanced upwards she realized to her horror that great holes had been gnawed in the ceilings and the roof, so that the sky glowered greyly through. Triss could even make out her own teeth-marks on some of the rafters.

I didn’t , she tried to protest. But it was a lie, and she knew it. She had no voice, only a dry rustling like a forest path underfoot.

‘Triss ate the ceilings!’ shouted Pen. ‘Triss ate the walls! There are only four left now! Only four!’

Triss woke with a jerk and spent a long minute panting and waiting for her heart to slow. A dream, just a dream. She rolled over on to her side, and her cheek pressed against something rough that crackled with the pressure. She sat up with a gasp.

There were dead leaves on her pillow, several of them. Slowly she raked her fingers through her hair, and her hand came away with a fistful more brown, broken leaves. Her eye crept to the chair she had propped against her door, and her heart sank. Only then did she realize how much she had been hoping that the ever-malicious Pen had been responsible for the mysteriously appearing leaves.

Triss sat up, carefully, and pulled back the covers. There were more leaves on the sheet around her, some inside her nightdress, and a few tiny twigs and wisps of hay.

Mouth dry, she cleaned away the debris once again, then moved to the dresser for her hairbrush. To her surprise, she found tiny flakes of dead leaf clinging to the bristles, despite the fact she was certain she had removed from it everything but a few strands of her own hair. As she stared at it, however, a horrible suspicion crept spider-like into her mind.

No. It can’t be.

She had to know. After shaking off all the leaf fragments, Triss plucked a few hairs from her own head and trailed them over the brush. Then she forced herself to look away for a time, counting to three hundred under her breath. When she looked back, her spirits plummeted like a stone. There were no hairs draped across the brush’s bristles. Instead there was a piece of a skeleton leaf, moth-wing dry and more frail than any lace.

The leaves in my hair, the dirt on my floor – I didn’t bring them in from outside. And Pen didn’t scatter them over my room.