Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

Over one arm hung a woollen shawl, which she hoped might serve as a net to throw over her winged quarry. In her hands she carried her sewing box, a gift from her mother. It was made of wood, painted with forest scenes. The inside was lined with silk, the sewing tools housed in sheathes in the underside of the lid. Not-Triss had emptied out the box’s store of cotton reels and wool balls, and could only hope that it would be large and sturdy enough to act as an improvised cage. The night was thistle-sharp, spider-web tense. Not-Triss was part of its secrecy and danger now, but she sensed that she was not the most secretive or dangerous thing abroad. The night had no favourites. She could almost sense it curled around the world, dispassionate as a dragon, the stars mere glints in its black scales.

Not-Triss slipped into the forbidden room and found it much as she had last seen it. Once again, she slid under Sebastian’s bed to hide and wait.

Whatever that bird-thing is, it comes at midnight. If I can catch it, and if it’s able to talk, perhaps I can force it to tell me what’s going on. Maybe it knows what happened to the real Triss, and to Sebastian.

The little mantel clock downstairs could just be heard chiming twelve.

After the lost chimes had hung in the air for a few seconds, the sound Not-Triss was waiting to hear reached her ears. It was the same dry, wispy flutter-tap as before. It was out in the corridor. It was growing nearer. And then, with a whirr like the wind through dry wheat husks, it was in the bedroom.

The room was too dark to see it clearly, but now and then she could just make out the small airborne shape careering hither and thither. A dark shuttlecock in an invisible game, each wing-brush like a rasped breath, the motions unnerving in their unpredictability. Not-Triss could predict it though. That was her one advantage. She knew that it had come to deliver a letter, and that sooner or later it would have to perch on the drawer handle in order to do so.

Flutter-tap, flutter-rasp-bangitty-flap, flappety-flap. Flap. And perch.

There it was, a tiny shape perched on the drawer handle, so small that she would not have seen it if she had not been looking for it. Even now it melted into shadow before her direct gaze, and only kept its outline when she looked slightly away. It was distracted for the moment, sliding an envelope in through the narrow gap above the drawer.

Her instincts prickled in her veins like a thousand tiny thorns, causing her muscles to tense and coil.

Now.

Not-Triss sprang from cover, the motion as easy as falling. The only sound she made was a faint flap from the counterpane, stirred by her passing. Nonetheless the perching thing heard it, and looked around in time to see her landing neatly on her bare feet. Its shocked cry sounded the way a scar looks. The thing spread its wings, but Not-Triss was already hurling the shawl.

The fabric swamped the creature, but even the heavy wool was not enough to keep it down. A moment later there was a shawl-smothered shape crashing blindly around the room, bouncing off walls. All the while it hissed and screamed, in a voice like hot embers dropped down a well. Not-Triss could just make out gabbled curses and muffled abuse.

Not-Triss made a few jumps in an attempt to catch it, only to have the trailing fronds tease through her fingertips. She bounded on to the desk, landing so lightly that it did not even shudder, and leaped out into the centre of the room, seizing the loose ends of the shawl with both hands. She landed with a triumphant huff of breath, but the next moment her feet were dragged from the floor again as the thing fought its way back into the air and Not-Triss clung on to the shawl like grim death as she was lifted from the ground, swung against shelves and then dropped floorward by sudden cruel swoops so that she landed awkwardly.

‘Twig-minx!’ it screamed. ‘Scrap-brat!’

It tired in time, though its torrent of shrieked abuse continued. When Not-Triss found her feet on the ground, she threw herself on top of the struggling mass of increasingly ragged shawl, and then forced the bundle into her sewing box. Before it could burst out of her grip again, she slammed the lid and sat on it.

There was a wail of utter horror, like a wind-change before a storm.

‘Let me out! Let me out or I’ll bonfire you! I’ll make nests of your bones!’

The box jumped under Not-Triss, and she could hear rending within. She could picture the wicked little beak tearing the shawl apart.

‘Not till you tell me what I want to know!’ she hissed back. ‘What are you?’

‘Just a messenger! Deliver letters!’

‘Where’s the man who wrote the letters? Where’s Sebastian?’

‘Don’t know! Don’t know any Sebastian! Don’t know what is in letters! Not my fault! Not my fault!’

‘Whose fault then? Who sent you?’

The response the creature gave might have been a name. It slithered over the eardrum the way moonlight slides over the surface of a rippling pool. It was unfamiliar, but Not-Triss already had an idea who might have sent the bird-thing.

‘Is that the same man they call the Architect?’

‘Yes! Brick-magic. Insidey-outsidey-hiding-magic. Let me out!’

‘Did he steal away the other me – the real Theresa?’

‘Yes! Needles and pins, they burn! Let me out!’

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know – only a messenger. Architect would know. The Shrike might know.’

‘The Shrike?’ The box was rattling so badly that Not-Triss had to brace her feet against the floor to stop herself tumbling off.

‘The one who made you. Skraaark!’

The one who made me. It’s true then. It’s really true. An unacknowledged shoot of hope that Pen had been wrong withered and died.

‘What am I?’

‘Rag doll, thorn-doll, seven-day doll! Cruel doll! Killing doll!’

‘Stop it!’ snapped Not-Triss, bouncing hard on the box lid, her mind a simmering turbulence of rage and fear once more.

‘Killing me!’ insisted the voice again, now rising in what sounded like pain and panic. ‘Killing me! Let me out! Stop killing me!’

‘Well, stop flapping if you don’t want to hurt yourself!’ Not-Triss whispered back, but the sounds from the box were becoming troubling. The wingbeats were more frenzied and intermittent, and there was a rattle now and then as if something hard and heavy was lurching about inside.

‘Please!’ For all the voice’s strangeness, the panic sounded real. ‘Get it away from me! It’s killing me!’ There followed an incoherent susurration which sounded like sizzizzizzizzizz …

Scissors.

With a stone-cold jolt, Not-Triss remembered her mother’s scissors twisting antagonistically in her hand and the vast cast-iron shears falling down towards her head outside the dressmakers’ shop… and the sewing scissors sheathed in the silk-lined lid of the sewing box. Scissors had turned on Not-Triss, wanting to hurt her. If this creature was like her in some ways, perhaps she had just shut it in a box with a tool that wanted to kill it…

Her conscience smote her. Whatever this creature was, even if it was sent by her enemies, she had not seen it do anything that deserved death at her hands.

‘Promise you won’t attack me!’ she whispered.

‘I swear!’ came the shriek.

‘Promise you won’t lie to me!’

‘I swear!’

‘Promise me you’ll stay and answer my questions!’

‘Three questions, three answers – I swear!’

Not-Triss would have liked to insist on more promises, but there was a terrible breathy wailing and whimpering coming from within the box, and she was afraid if she waited a moment more the creature within might actually perish. She had no idea whether her captive would really consider promises binding, but she slid off the sewing box and flung open the lid.