The Girl With Borrowed Wings (6 page)

“I wasn’t worried,” I said. The situation was too unreal for me to worry about it. My head was still floating in the sky, and I, in my starched school shirt and proper shoes that remained warm from the heat of the oasis, touched a few scaly branches just to see if they were solid.

Right beside the place we’d landed, a couple of trees arched together in the crowded gloom, moss streaming down like gray mermaid-hair, to conceal the gap between their trunks. Sangris ducked beneath. I followed, pushing the moss apart and squeezing through, and was blinded momentarily by the sun at high noon.

I’d unfolded into another country. The forest had ended—abruptly, as if it had been slashed away with a knife.

A line ran through this world. On one side, the confused forest; on the other, this endless grassland. It must have just rained, because the sky was a living, breathing gray, and the ground shone intense green. Not khaki, but
real
green. Hills rolled over the distance. Light and shadows rippled down their sides, according to the clouds. Where sunshine billowed through, a few shallow puddles flashed like isolated spots of light.

This was a country of space and cool air and emptiness, different from the forest, though so close, and unimaginably different from the desert. The sky was open wide. Above me, a bird wheeled round and round with a high, piercing cry. Every time it came directly overhead, the light of the low sun hit the underside of its wings, and for a split second it seemed to be struck motionless, in full display, the bones glowing gold through its feathers. Then it would swing away again.

I felt some part of me lift right out of my body. A breeze blew in my face.

“Moorland. This is the other side of Ae,” Sangris was saying, “but nobody lives here. They’re all packed into the forest because they’re afraid to be seen. Only the birds—”

“Let’s run,” I said breathlessly.

“What?”

I ran.

For someone who had not done more than walk (and walk slowly, at that) for five years, I was fast. In the back of my mind was a flicker of surprise. The ground swept past, thrumming lightly like the taut string of a guitar, beneath my feet. I suppose that, in the oasis, in my caverns of stone walls, I had forgotten how young I was. But my body hadn’t forgotten. Somehow, in hibernation, it had managed to grow fluid and long and light. Ye gods, I thought, running faster and finding with joy that I could do so, I’m
young
. Who would have guessed? It was almost like discovering I could fly.

And I was
out of the oasis
. Past the desert—hah! I laughed without slowing down.

A jaguar loped beside me. I jumped before spotting the deep yellow eyes and realizing that it was Sangris. I expected him to look as surprised as I felt, but he seemed to think my mad dash was perfectly natural.

“I’m young!” I shouted at him in exhilaration.

“What?”

“I’m young!”

His gaze flickered over me. From my free-flying hair—I became very aware of it as soon as he looked at it; I felt it lifting off the base of my neck where the spine is tender, and streaming out behind me in tendrils—to the tightness of my stomach—I realized for the first time that I had a narrow waist and hips rather than the straight lines of my childhood; when had
that
happened?—and down to the legs. At that point he pulled his gaze back up to my face. “Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

“No! And I—I’m strong! How’s that possible? I’m light, I can run!”

This time his gaze wavered all the way down to my feet. “Yeah,” he repeated, turning his face away. “Didn’t you know?”

“How could I? I never left my bedroom! And I always wanted to look like my friends!”

A hint of amusement came to his voice. “What do
they
look like?” he said, keeping pace with me effortlessly.

I ran faster. The blood was pounding now, but I didn’t want to stop, not yet. “They—ah.”

“They’re fat and lazy?” he guessed, beginning to grin.

“No! But they favor—more womanly forms, you know. They always say I’m too skinny,” I said. I concentrated on my flying feet. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not it was proper to tell him this. “A girl ought to be plump.”

“I bet
they’re
plump,” he said.

“Yes.”

“No wonder they say so, then.”

My legs carried me up a hill. I was amazed they could still move, but move they did, and it wasn’t even difficult. Then I hurtled down the other side, the heather billowing all around me, like the sea shocked by a storm. “They say I look like a boy,” I panted.

“
That
you do not,” he said, with another sideways glance.

“I know!” I said gleefully. “I look like a horse!”

He braked. “What?”

I went on for a while longer, shooting alone, a comet over the grassy world, and then finally, when my head was so light it was dizzying and I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, I threw myself into a heap of hazy purple heather. I rolled over. The sky swam above me. My entire body had become a pair of lungs, heaving, but my breaths were luxurious, enjoying the fresh, impossible, unbaked air.

Sangris approached my head. I saw his face—a black cat’s again—upside down. “Did you just say you look like a horse?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?” he said, his tone baffled.

“Because I do. The way a horse looks when it runs.”

“Oh. I think you mean ‘graceful.’”

“No.”

“Agile?”

“No.”

“Glossy?” he said, obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel.

“I was thinking more a baby horse. Long legs, bony body, you know, but at least it’s fast and it can run. My friends can’t run. I didn’t know I could.” I grabbed at the plants all around me, holding on to them in fistfuls, to make sure they were real. I would never take grass for granted again. Breezes, like currents of water, slid lights over the heather as I lay there.

“Your body isn’t bony,” Sangris said blankly. “It’s as soft and slenderly curved as the throat of a swan.”

What?

I stared at him for a full minute.

“Um,” he said.

I continued to stare.

“Never mind,” he said.

“Did you prepare that phrase in advance?” I was genuinely curious. “Do you sit awake at night and write secret odes to the bodies of girls you’ve just met? Or was that stolen from somewhere? How many times have you used it?”

“I can’t help it if I’m eloquent,” he said. He studied one of his paws, grooming it.

“It sounded rehearsed,” I said.

“Why would I rehearse? How could I have known that you were going to call yourself bony? Like you said, I’ve just met you.” He fussed over the paw, licking it with a small red tongue tip. “You’re the one who brought up the subject. It just so happens that I thought of the phrase a little while ago. I resent your accusation of plagiarism,” he added virtuously.

“Were you in a particularly poetic mood when you thought of it?” I said, beginning to smirk. I felt as though I should have been embarrassed, and it was probably coarse of me to keep asking questions, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease him. And besides, those concerns were far away, sitting with my parents in the distant oasis.

“I wouldn’t call it poetic, no. Not particularly,” Sangris said. He was still licking his paw. Having clean paws was evidently the most important thing in his private universe right now.

My smirk slipped away then.

Not because of what he’d said. Not because of anything logical. No, I stopped talking and scrunched up my nose because it had just occurred to me how easy it would be for him to turn human right now.

And the thought was more vivid than I would have liked. I had a mental image of Sangris grinning up at me through a screen of wavy black hair, eyes slanted and yellow the way they had been in my bedroom, and the way they were
now
. He was a cat. It didn’t make any sense, except . . . well, except for the fact that, at a moment’s notice, he could become something else, and—oh, gross. I thought the word loudly enough to drown out everything else. Gross. Maybe I made a noise, because he glanced up at me, and that made it worse. His eyes weren’t catlike at all, at least not as far as their expression went. They were intelligent and far too male. That look was almost enough to make me go back to the oasis and shut myself in my cage, never fly again, and allow the cords of heat to bind me down to the ground—just because Sangris happened to have a knack of making me uncomfortable. I glared until he looked down again.

Then I had a cheering thought. He couldn’t have been talking about
me
; it must be someone else. I rolled over onto my elbows, preparing to be vindicated. I was up to my chin in the heather. “Who were you with at the time?” I said.

His eyes flashed up at me from his self-appointed task. “What?”

“I know it wasn’t about me,” I said. I tried not to sound hopeful. “What do you know about how soft, or how hard, or even how spiky I might be? I’m always swathed in clothes right down to my wrists and ankles. So who was that phrase really about?”

A pause.

“Um,” he said at last. “A girl I knew. Before.”

There. My shoulders relaxed. I’d been right.

“How long ago?”

“Months?” He said it as if it was a question.

I propped up my chin on my hands. He wasn’t telling the story very well, I thought. “What was she like?”

“Beautiful, of course. She had fur like shining duckweed and big round eyes that almost popped out whenever anyone called her name.” (
There’s no accounting for taste,
I thought, but I was careful to keep my expression blank for fear of offending him. Duckweed, indeed.) “Her name was Loll,” he continued.

“Loll?” I couldn’t help but sound a bit disdainful now.

“Because of the way her tongue lolled out. She was a dog, you see. Sadly, she’d been spayed, but we decided that it was for the best . . .” He broke off, struggling.

Startled, I said, “I—I’m sorry.”

“You idiot,” he gasped out. He fell onto his side laughing. “It was you! I thought about orchid’s stems and swan’s necks and all sorts of other nonsense while you were cuddling me in your room, remember, because you thought I was a cat. You weren’t swaddled in clothes
then
. You weren’t even paying attention—you were reading
Of Human Bondage
. A tattered copy with a boring brown cover and so many pages that it was thicker than most religious texts. But you were absorbed in it for hours and hours, as though it was the most interesting thing in the world. I’d just woken up, and I had to wait there, held against your—ah—your nightshirt, until you finished the book and went to sleep, before I could try to sneak away.”

I hid behind my hair. So he’d been conscious after all. I thanked my luck that he wasn’t in human form right now. It was disconcerting enough to have a cat speak to me in this way. “But you didn’t!” I said to the grass. “You didn’t try to leave until hours later. I went to sleep at midnight, and you woke me up around four.”

“I fell back to sleep when you did,” he said, not laughing anymore. His gaze slid away from me. “You were—” He stopped.

“I was . . . ?”

Mumble.

“Was
what
?” I demanded.

“Warm.”

That did it. I began to inch away. I hoped that maybe, if I did it slowly enough, he wouldn’t notice.

“What?” Sangris protested. “It isn’t
dirty
. I was comfortable, and I still hadn’t recovered properly from the souk, so I thought, a few more minutes, and when I woke up it was almost dawn.”

“Argh,” I said. It was the only way I felt I could fairly sum up the situation.

“I should’ve stuck with the story about the dog, huh?”

“Mm.” I hesitated. “That one was a lie, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

Good. I didn’t think I’d be able to handle any more revelations.

“We should probably head back,” he muttered, pulling himself up to his paws, “if you want to be at school by three forty-five.”

“I don’t want to be, I have to be,” I said. “My father’s going to pick me up. If I’m not there . . .”

“Pity,” he said. “You sure I can’t just drop you off at your house? We could get around your father.” Sangris had a way of saying things as though his suggestions alone were enough to solve all the problems in the world.

“My father,” I repeated. The word sounded strange here, with the open sky and the purple-gray grasses, the green hills, and the black line of the forest just clinging to the horizon behind us. But it was as powerful a sound as ever, the strength of the rising
fa,
then the graveness of the
ther
bringing it back down to earth. Sangris didn’t seem to understand that
want
was irrelevant beside the word
father
.

Without having to be prompted, Sangris changed back into his feathered dragon form. I climbed up gingerly. What if he was thinking of more embarrassing phrases?
The taut instep of each tiny fairy-like foot . . .
or worse,
the orchid-petal smoothness of the skin on her palms was . . .