Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

She smothered her mouth with her hands, but she was full of a great swelling laugh and there was nothing her small frame could do to keep it in. It swelled, and swelled, and swelled, and it was only in the moment before it broke forth that she was afraid, and knew it was not her laugh, not her hilarity that was bursting out of her.

Then the Laugh escaped. Not-Triss rolled on the bench, laughing with the creak and thrash of a forest in a gale. She laughed until the windows rattled and the flames of the hearth dipped and quivered. Words came from her mouth, but they were not hers, nor could the voice that spoke them be mistaken for human.

Dot stood motionless, her face set and unreadable, watching Not-Triss until her helpless mirth subsided. Then she looked past her towards the door, her expression suddenly youthful and uncertain.

‘Will that do?’ she asked, in a surprisingly respectful tone.

‘Thank you, Dot, that will do very well,’ said Mr Grace the tailor. He stood just within the doorway, and a pace behind him Not-Triss could see her parents, gazing aghast into the kitchen.

Dot gathered up her kitchen knives, gave Not-Triss one glance of thinly veiled fear and revulsion and hurried for the door. She pushed hastily past the Crescents and vanished from view.

‘Eggshells used as cooking pots,’ Mr Grace said, as he advanced slowly and carefully into the room. ‘It never fails, for some reason. The sight always makes them laugh so hard that they give themselves away. They just can’t help it.’ He sighed. ‘I promised you proof, my friends. Now you have seen the truth. This is not your child .’

Not-Triss was breathing hard, but there did not seem to be any air in her lungs. There were stone flags under her feet, and yet she felt as if she was falling.

‘I’m… ill.’ Her voice was a breathless, helpless creak. Everything she had fought so hard to find out, she wanted none of it now. She wanted to be wrong after all, anything to stop her parents looking at her that way. She was wrong. She had to be. ‘I’ve been ill, that’s all. You said so. You all did. I’m just ill. I’ll… I’ll get better. I… I promise I will.’ Her eyes began to mist.

‘Stop!’ The tailor threw out an arm to stop her mother stepping forward. ‘Don’t play into its hands. I’m sorry, but you have to be strong. It’s cornered – it knows that its only hope is to tug at your emotions.’

‘But…’ Her mother cast an uncertain glance at Not-Triss’s face, her gaze bluer and more fragile than ever before. ‘But look at her!’

‘I am looking at her,’ murmured the tailor, and gave a short, dark laugh, a bit like a cough. Before Triss could react, he had sprinted forward and grabbed her by the chin, so that she gave a squawk of shock and fear. Both her parents cried out and stepped forward to intervene, but the tailor’s expression stopped them in their tracks. His face was that of a man bracing himself for battle, or staring into a hurricane. ‘You think those are tears shining in her eyes?’ he demanded. ‘Let me show you these “tears”.’ With his free hand he tweaked out a handkerchief, and as Not-Triss tried to jerk her chin free he gently dabbed at the corner of her eye, catching a long silvery strand and drawing it out for her parents to see.

‘What… ?’ Her father had turned ashen.

‘Spiderweb,’ the tailor replied curtly. ‘That’s all. Just another part of the disguise. This creature has no tears.’

Not-Triss dug her fingernails into the tailor’s hand. When his grip on her chin slipped, she bit him and sprinted away to the far corner of the room. There was a small scream of horror from her mother.

‘Her teeth!’

‘You saw that?’ The tailor was wrapping his handkerchief around his hand. The back of it was marked by small bleeding puncture wounds, not like the dents left by normal teeth at all. Not-Triss raised hesitant fingers to her mouth, and their questing tips touched tooth-points that were slender and unbelievably sharp. ‘Thorns for teeth. Yes, that’s its real appearance. Sometimes they revert when they’re frightened or angry. I am so sorry you had to see that, Mrs Crescent, but now at least you know. This is not your daughter. ’

‘I…’ Not-Triss looked from face to face in desperation, feeling the cradle of love disintegrating around her. ‘I am Triss! I… I can be! I want to be! Let me try again – I’ll get it right this time! Please…’ They were backing away; her parents were backing away.

‘Triss.’ There was a soft, broken look on the face of her mother.

But she’s not your mother , her wits told her, in a voice as soft and terrible as thunder. Too late Not-Triss realized how blind she had been. Even after she had found out that she was an imposter, she had still been thinking of this man and woman as her father, her mother. It had been second nature. She had not even noticed herself doing it.

It was Triss’s mother who stood before her now, Triss’s mother who was flinching away from her in horror, Triss’s mother whose expression was ebbing into pale shaking rage.

‘Triss – where is she?’ Celeste Crescent’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. ‘You little monster, what have you done with her? Where’s my little girl?’

‘Mother…’ With a sick feeling in her stomach, Not-Triss could feel her mouth drooping into the little sob-shape that always worked, that always made everybody soften and look after her. But it was a stolen mannerism, and today it only made things worse.

‘Tell us what we have to do,’ asked Piers Crescent through his teeth.

‘It will be unpleasant,’ answered the tailor, ‘so we should spare Mrs Crescent. She’s been brave enough already.’

‘Celeste –’ Piers gave his wife a look of tender appeal – ‘love – please – can you leave us? Triss will need you strong and well, when we get her back.’

‘Don’t go!’ Not-Triss knew at once that something terrible was going to happen, something that the tailor was not willing to do in front of Mrs Crescent. ‘Don’t leave me!’

But her mouth was full of thorns, and her voice came out wrong. With one last white-faced, appalled look at Not-Triss, Celeste Crescent tottered weakly from the room and closed the door behind her.

‘Now, Mr Crescent,’ continued the tailor in a deliberately calm and steady voice, ‘I will need you to stoke up the fire. Make it as fierce as you can.’

Not-Triss leaped towards the door by which Mrs Crescent had left, but the tailor seized her, wrapping both arms around her so that her own were pinned to her sides.

‘It’s the only way,’ he added through clenched teeth as Not-Triss scratched, struggled and tried to bite him with her thorn-teeth. ‘The only way to show the Besiders that we mean business. This creature is either one of their own children, or it is even less than that – a doll made of dead leaves, perhaps, or carved from a block of wood. If it is a child of theirs, the Besiders will not wish to see it hurt. The best ways of dealing with a changeling – the oldest, tried and tested ways – are to force them to save it. Beat it with a switch till it screams. Throw it into fast-flowing water. Or push it into a blazing fire.’

‘God above,’ whispered Piers, as he shakily piled more wood on the fire and nursed it to a roar. ‘Isn’t there any other way?’

Not-Triss gave a wordless wail of terror, but it sounded ghastly even to her ears. There was the whickering of bat wings in it, the whistle of November winds, the scream of gulls. The kindling in the hearth snapped with a sound like castanets, spitting sparks to dance lazily up the flue.