House of Sand and Secrets (Books of Oreyn #2)(81)

He lets me slip inside his head, thought to thought. I have never seen this house of his, only ever felt its walls. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this.

Where my one little room is a memory of something real, this place where Jannik keeps his secrets is malleable, a strange world of sand, a golden labyrinth of twists and tunnels.

The walls shift to rearrange their shapes. A window falls, widens, and the spilled sand on the golden floor hisses into a lintel and a frieze of vines and wide-eyed little night-monkeys.

Jannik is standing before me, dressed in shirt and trousers, barefoot and calm, completely at ease for the first time. I am seeing him as he really is. “Come on.” He holds out his hand and I take it. The warmth seeps into me, making me real. The sand crunches between my toes and the thin shift I’m wearing flutters in the warm breeze.

There is light everywhere. I look up; the roof is arched and solid, but as we walk, more windows grow, letting in sunlight and air. Others close, mourning our passing. The hiss of sand is everywhere, and under it, the trickle of streams and the liquid trill of birds.

“Look,” Jannik says, and points to a wall that grows a vast window. We step through together into another room. Streams flow across the sandy floor, and on their banks grow vines and flowers.

“This isn’t a house,” I point out. “You said, ‘build a house in your head.’”

“It depends on your definition.” Jannik lets go of my hand and crouches at the bank of one of the streams. A sly bittern peers out at him. He grins back at me and lifts one hand. “There are walls, windows, a roof over your head.”

“Yes.” I turn about, taking in the vast central room. “There’s also not a stick of furniture. You made me hide my secrets in my chest of drawers.”

“I did nothing of the sort,” he says. “I just told you to hide them.”

The birds arc and wheel. A small gathering of green-headed parrots are chattering at me from a tree made of sand. A lone ivory-winged ibis eyes me with disdain.

“So where are yours hidden then?”

“Felicita. In your head, you don’t have to do anything as prosaic as set your secrets on paper and stuff them in a locked drawer. It’s your mind. You can do whatever you want.” He stands, folds his hands behind his back. “The birds.”

I look again, just as a flock of bumble-bee sized finches hums past me to land on Jannik’s shirt. The whir and whisper at him in their high bee voices. “Every bird is a secret – a thought?”

He nods.

And now it makes sense, the sombre hulking pied-crows, the owls secretive in the whorls of the ceiling; the black gatherings of ravens – the dark thoughts, the happy ones, the scared and lonely, the night-time-never-spoken-aloud thoughts. I laugh. “So, show me something.”

“What do you want to see?”

I don’t know, and here, in this place where I am a guest, I don’t want to ask. “Whatever you want me to know.”

One of the little finches leaves Jannik’s collar and flies over to settle on my shoulder. It hop-walks along my shift, pin-sharp nails poking through the thin material. Its tiny heart is vibrating against my body – a thrumming that matches my own – and then the room is gone. The bird, Jannik, the heat. All obliterated.



I am standing in misty drizzle, breathing in salt-tinged air, looking at myself. A younger self, with my hair bound up and my dress damp despite the whalebone and oiled-silk umbrella I’m holding. The memory-me frowns, her face tight and wan as she pulls away from the crowd around her. The umbrella shivers, sending spray dancing in spirals as she folds it closed. And then she smiles, leans back against the wall of one of Pelimburg’s old buildings and she lifts her face to the clouds, and she doesn’t look like a spoiled House daughter but a girl in love with the rain.

The image of me greys, fades, and I am back in a golden room filled with heat and feathers.

Jannik is watching me, waiting. His hands are behind his back as if he doesn’t want me to see them. “So?” he says, but his voice is too controlled, too light.

“Memories.”

“I know what they are, Fil.” He smiles awkwardly. It is the first time he has called me anything but Felicita, or the fake name I used when I ran away from home. Something so small and intimate, and it destroys my desperation to not rely on anyone but myself, as if doing that would make me as pathetic as my brother thought I was.

My fear of weakness falls away from me. It is a strange and innocent truth, that although I can do things alone – we all can – together we are stronger. “You’ll help me?” I ask him softly.

“Of course.”

The little finch flies away from me to join the flock and I reach up just as it opens its wings, catch it as easily as a dandelion seed. The tiny creature goes still in my cupped hand and I think it into a new form. When I open my palm, the finch is blue, a strange dusky colour like the sea in the rain. I let it go and it flies back to its yellow-barred flock.

“And that?” Jannik says.

I shrug, and almost smile. “A thank you, of sorts.”

“Of sorts?”

We say the things we can’t say with memories.



*



Carien is still here when we come back downstairs. Whatever was said in our absence, it has left her white-faced, her eyes glassy. She keeps twisting the woven silver at her throat, tangling her fingers in the fine chains.