My Lady Jane(47)

The king (the actual king, we mean), through no particular fault of his own, was lost.

During the first few hours in his newly acquired E?ian form, he’d been caught up in what he could only describe as a kind of beautiful bird joy—the sweet euphoria of flight, of riding the wind, testing the strength of his wings, encompassed in the soundless serenity of the world as seen from so high above. He’d lost himself in how good it felt to no longer be . . . well, dying.

Edward didn’t know this at the time, because he had no way of looking at himself and assessing what kind of species of bird he actually was, but he had transformed into a kestrel, which is, for those readers who are not bird-enthusiasts, a small falcon—Falco tinnunculus—with very handsome brown-speckled feathers. Edward simply knew that he had wings and a beak and two legs that ended in talons, which made him some kind of bird. And he knew that up there, against the sky, he was free in a way that he had never been free before.

But after a while—who knows how long, really, as kestrels aren’t known for their ability to keep track of time—he began to have a nagging human thought in the back of his brain, and it was this:

I should be doing something.

Which led to: I should be going somewhere.

He strained to remember more. It’s not somewhere that I should be going to, so much as someone, he thought. Someone who will help me.

Then he remembered that he was not just a bird, but a king, and someone had attempted to assassinate him and steal his throne, and he had a sister named Bess who had told him—what had she told him? That his mother had also been a bird, a beautiful white bird, and wasn’t it divine to be a bird, to rule the air, to dive and lift so, to hover, and then the bird joy had him again.

Some time later he thought, No, that wasn’t all Bess told me. She said to go to Gran—his grandmother—although he hadn’t seen the old lady in years.

At Helmsley. Which was an abandoned, half-fallen-down old castle.

North, somewhere.

Now which way was north?

As a sixteen-year-old human boy, Edward had never possessed the keenest sense of direction, since most of the time when he wished to travel to a place he was taken by carriage and did none of the driving. As an only-a-few-hours-old bird, he didn’t know north, either. He knew there was a river in one direction, and a series of low hills in another direction, an expanse of green field below him, and in that field he somehow knew there was a little brown field mouse, just coming out of its hole. Without consulting him at all, his body plummeted toward the defenseless creature, wings tucking in, talons reaching, until Edward-the-bird struck the mouse with tremendous force and snatched it from the face of the earth. The poor thing gave a rather awful shriek, which was understandable, and then went quiet. Edward-the-bird flapped off to a nearby tree branch, still clutching the mouse, and then, to Edward-the-boy’s horror . . . he ate it, bones and fur and all.

Edward stayed in the tree for a while, disgusted with himself on the one hand, and on the other wanting to go out and find another delicious mouse, or perhaps a tasty garter snake. A growing bird has to eat. But he needed to get control of these bird impulses, he decided. He needed to get moving. The sun was going down. Hadn’t it just been morning?

North. I need to find my way north, he told himself sternly.

Which way was north, again?

The sun goes down in the west, he recalled vaguely. He subsequently pointed himself toward what would be, by extension, north. But once he was in the air, it was only a few minutes before the wind charmed him again, and the bird joy overtook him, and when he came back to himself more hours had passed and it was dark and there was no way to know which direction he’d been flying in, and which way he should go.

So, as we said before, the king was lost.

For a while he followed a carriage that was making its way slowly down a road. The carriage must be carrying someone important, he concluded, because there were mounted guards riding on all sides of it. Then he figured that someone with so many men—perhaps twenty—could be heading toward London, and that was the last place he wanted to go, so he turned around and flew in the opposite direction.

The road led him to a shabby-looking village. At the edge of the small cluster of buildings there was a large oak tree, and he settled into the upper branches and looked around. His eyesight, he found, was quite marvelous in the dark.

The village was comprised of a scattering of cottages with thatched roofs, and a smoke-bellowing building that must be the blacksmith, a small stable, and a large ramshackle wooden building in the center that seemed to loom over all the others, with lit windows and a sign over its door with a horse head carved into it. He could hear bawdy music from inside, and men laughing and talking loudly. An inn.

He could become human again, and go inside. People would surely recognize him—after all, his face was on their coins. His subjects loved him, didn’t they? He was their beloved king, deigned by God to be their ruler. That was what he’d always been told.

But how did one return from bird to human, exactly? There were no magic words that he was aware of, no series of gestures, no spells to transform him. He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d managed to go from human to bird, before. He’d simply jumped from the window and wished for wings and hoped he wouldn’t die.

He glanced at the inn again. In an inn, there’d be food. Real food, not mice. And dinner rolls. And tall glasses of ale. All of which would almost certainly not be poisoned.