When the sick child drew his last breath, the ink on the poet's quill had dried and his notebook was still empty.
In the room were present only he, the father, and the priest, who placed a veil over the ashen face of the boy and whispered a last prayer to the almighty. The priest had traded places with the doctor in the early hours of the evening, when the latter had given up hope for recovery, and a ritual for a dimming soul had commenced in place of treatment.
In the other room, the weeping of the boy's mother had ceased. Maybe she had passed out; she had stayed by the bedside for two days and nights, doing her best to aid the doctor. The poet had observed it all, absorbed the grief thick in the house, but become so overwhelmed with their suffering he could not shape it into words.
Upon finding the poet's notebook empty, the father drove him out. If he could not fulfil the task he was given, to find something beautiful in the family's bleakest moment, he was no longer welcome. The poet gathered his things in defeat and left with the priest, letting the howls of the father follow them out into the night and cut off when the front door of the farmhouse was shut, sealing its pain into privacy.
The priest and the poet exchanged no words before parting at the crossroads down the lane, one carrying on toward the parish, the latter choosing a detour through the woods for quiet contemplation. This was not the first time the poet had failed his task; his quill moved for great adventures and strong winds in sails, for young women laughing with the brightness of bells at young men's boasting. Asking him to sit and watch the suffering of his fellows was perverse to his nature and paralysed him, yet those were the poems people wanted to hear. The things he wanted to write about, they said, were "trivial" and "banal."
His brooding thoughts took away the weight in his steps, and before he noticed, the flame of the poet's lantern glistened in the cowberry bushes wet with the evening dew of the deep woods. He had long passed the fork in the road that would circle him back to the parish, but the night was warm and the stars bright, and so he decided to keep going and sleep in the woods. Eventually he found his way to an old oak growing alone in a barren opening, as though the other trees had each taken ten steps back to allow their sylvan king to build wide his court of roots. The poet set his lantern on the ground, took out his notebook and his quill, but could only stare at the blank page. His heart was still too heavy from absorbing the vicarious grief of losing a child, and writing a sonnet for the splendour of a summer night felt just as wrong as his given task had been.
It was then a nightingale burst into song somewhere in the green palace of the oak's branches. The poet listened in wonder to the chirping of the bird, felt it lift the black pall shrouding his heart and mind. How odd was it, he thought, that his colleagues had chosen a bird with such a bright, cheerful note to be their tragedienne. He heard no melancholy in the nightingale's song, but was reminded of how the family on the farm had been before sickness sent their son to bed: Out on the fields together, coming to the parish every Sunday to trade their goods, all sun-tanned, strong, and lean from hard work. The poet listened, smiling fondly at the memory, until the image began to darken, tear from the edges, and run into drabber colours as tonight took over. The poet did not realise he was weeping until tears disturbed the ink of his musing sketch of nothing at all, and when the nightingale tired of singing, a part of his grief quieted with it. He fell asleep against the rough bark of the oak, drifting off with a muttered thank-you to the small bird, who had flown off without a care for the poet's earthly worries.
The next afternoon, the poet sat on the edge of a fountain, watching the townsfolk go by and thinking about the nightingale. Somehow, the bird had tapped into his sorrow in a way that made it release rather than surmount. It was as though the bird knew things beyond his life, something that united all mankind in their darkest moments—or perhaps he was simply thinking with his heart rather than his head, and ascribed to it the same doleful qualities as did the bard of Avon and the Greek tragedians. If only he could've asked the bird what the song meant, whether it sang of brightness and life, just as he wanted to, and did not know some thought it a channeller of gloom.
But such wishes were witchcraft the poet could not abide. There was, however, an alchemist staying in the parish, and though speaking with wildlife more befit crones hissing with their feline familiars, he was said to be a man of strange sciences, and the poet thought there was no harm in asking if he knew of a way.
"Such wishes are witchcraft I cannot abide," the alchemist said, leering at the poet standing in the doorway of his workshop. "Do you understand how much work it would take to make you commune with birdsong in a natural way? It would be beyond translating a language; a human tongue is not meant to lift the way a bird's does, his throat not to chirp."
"I don't at all," said the poet, his hat in his hands in deference, "but you clearly do, and so you might be able to think of a way."
The alchemist stared at him, smacked his mouth, and went to search the drawers of his desk. He slammed a great tome on the table, set a pair of spectacles on his nose, began making drawings and calculations. All the while he muttered and mumbled to himself, then said, "I will need an afternoon."
Delighted, the poet returned to his spot of people-watching. If the alchemist would succeed, it wasn't only the nightingale he would talk to. He'd ask the skylarks what they'd seen, learn the secrets of the clever crows, sit with swallowtails and listen to the news they brought from afar.
"Now, while this device is doubtless marvelous," said the alchemist to the returning poet, "it will only let you speak with the one nightingale. Just as every human, every bird is a soul of its own. The device is attuned to let you understand it, and only it."
"Fascinating," the poet said, at once awestruck and disappointed. He spun the small contraption between his index finger and thumb, taking in all the minute details. It looked much like a locket, or a thin pocket watch, giving off the constant hum of grinding wheels inside a brass shell of ornate grooves and runic inscriptions. "But how is that possible? If you've gone beyond translating a language, should it not at least let me speak with all nightingales? Should you not be able to translate the caws and the chirps of others, given time?"
"Well, I could, if science fuelled my invention, but as it stands…" He gave a shifty look around his workshop, as though someone could've snuck in without his notice and listened under his desk or between the shelves, then beckoned the poet closer to whisper in his ear, "I dabble in witchcraft."
With a sly wink and a tap of his nose, the alchemist pocketed the poet's coin and sent him out. Too thankful even to question the gift, the poet raced through the parish and the evening-red forest to the court of the oak, where he wound the locket-watch's cord around his throat and tightened it until the alchemist's magic sent warmth along the veins into his tongue.
"Nightingale," he called, and stammered at the way his call split into notes halfway between human speech and birdcall. "Nightingale, are you there? I'd like to speak with you."
A rustling in the leaves announced the little troubadour's arrival, and the nightingale appeared sitting on a low branch, head cocked inquisitively.
"I have never heard a meat-skin address me before. I don't know what to think," the nightingale said. "What do you want?"
The poet, taken aback by the bird's curtness, forgot his planned words. "I came to ask if you are sad," he said, cringed at his own bluntness, but the bird only laughed with a sound both like a tall man's guffaw and a small bird's trill.
"How could I not be, meat-skin? If you'd seen what my eyes saw, you would be sad too. I have flown over fields where nothing grows but rusted swords, sat on the boughs outside houses built on children's bones. I have seen nations fall and new ones rise only to fall again. I may be gowned in feathers, but I feel deeply for your kind. Maybe that is why my cheerful song has aged to lamentations."
The poet thought of his empty notebook and the ashen face of the boy who'd once been fit and sun-kissed. "If you had to watch someone precious fade, what would you sing?"
"I would sing of the powerlessness of the father, whose strong arms could do nothing to stop his child from slipping away. I would sing of the hopelessness of the mother, whose dream of love and happiness was buried under earth. I would sing for the piece of tomorrow all meat-skins lost when they seal him in a heartwood egg."
The bird's voice was free of emotion, like it chirped a list of what it needed from the market, yet the simple notes lashed against the strings of the poet's heart. "I know who you are, one-feather," it went on. "You try to mimic my song with your curls, but you don't understand it, and so you fail. Do you know why the grass around my seat is open? Because for years your kin have come to my throne and I have sung to them. They have trampled the saplings, salted the earth with their tears, and nothing grows here except my misery when I fly out and draw in more of theirs. They come to me to find release, and I give it to them, and they leave without giving any back or taking some of my sorrow with them. It is a burden so, so heavy for a small bird to carry that at times I wonder how I can fly at all. It weighed down my hatcher, and it weighed my hatcher's hatcher. I think it must weigh all who see through the eyes of the nightingale. Sometimes I wish someone came to my tree who offered to take mine."
"But you sound so happy," the poet said. "Your tune is bright and merry."
"A bird must sing, one-feather. It will spill out, no matter how I try to stop it, and it will be bright because I do not want anyone who hears it to be in the pain I am." It paused for a simulacrum of a sigh. "And the irony is pain is all they hear, and it purifies them."
The poet took in the bird's confession, spun it in his mind like he spun the locket-watch between his fingers, until the cord was so tight he could scarcely breathe. There was a knife in his pocket, but the offer seemed too horrid even to make. Yet, he saw a chance for the two of them to help each other. The poet was finally starting to understand why he was invited to houses of grief, made privy to the darkness in them, and what he could do to help them, too.
"I could take your eyes, if you want," the poet said.
The nightingale went quiet for a long spell of contemplation, which ended with it swooping down to the poet's shoulder, and from there to his open palm. "Do it," the bird said, a waver slipping into its determined tone. The waver grew more pronounced when it added, "I will admit to being afraid, but I am so very tired."
Despite his effort to be careful, the bird perished from fright the moment the knife sank in. A miasma erupted from the socket as the poet removed the first eye, and the nerve kept growing, growing, growing ever longer until it was the length of his arm, fine and thin as a single strand of a maiden's hair. He didn't know much about the anatomy of birds, but surely the ocular nerve couldn't have been this long. It was as though it had permeated the bird's entire body.
He placed it inside his pocket and set to removing the other, but the bird looked peaceful, despite its sudden death, and he decided not to defile it further. He cupped his palm to scoop up a handful of earth and laid the nightingale to rest. Tomorrow, he would go to the alchemist and ask him to place the eye of the nightingale inside the blackness of his own, to let him gain a glimpse of the nightingale's dreary world. Perhaps taking both would have condemned him to be a creature as morose.
The next morning, the alchemist inspected the black bead of an eye and the strand running from it, scratching his bald pate. "I've never seen anything like this. Are you certain you want to implant it?"
"If you can," the poet said. "The bird was wise beyond its stature. I think it'll do me well to share its perspective."
"This will do more than give you perspective," the alchemist said with a frown, lifting the strand and letting it slowly fall, like a swimming medusa's tendril. "If you're not careful, the eye will take you over. You must fight it every day from now on."
"It's only one. My other will remain the same. I will balance the dreariness the bird saw with the beauty I do."
The alchemist gave a long hum of consideration, then set to preparing his tools. "You should have brought the other for me to examine as well," he then said, "because I have an inkling the bird once saw as you think you will."
The alchemist uttered words of magic, so that the poet felt nothing when he cut open the cornea and fitted the bird's eye in the poet's pupil. The poet rested for a day and a half, a patch over his eye, and when the alchemist brought him supper and let him remove the eyepatch, the poet was disappointed. He'd expected the surroundings to have slid into a greyscale hue, but everything looked the same as it had before the surgery.
Nonetheless, the poet paid the alchemist, thanked him for his care, and left.
For the first month, everything was as normal. The poet noticed no changes in his sight, but when autumn shortened the day and darkened his thoughts together with the nights, he sat at his usual place by the fountain and watched people pass by. Amongst them was a butcher who kept and sold him leftovers of meat at prices he could afford, a good man who cared about seeing everyone in his community fed. Today his smile did not touch his eyes when he came to sell his wares, and the poet went to talk with him.
"Good day, wordsmith," the butcher greeted. "I have some ham smoked to perfection and delicious reindeer meat my brother brought from his travels. Come back later if your purse is on the light side again—I'll put some aside for you."
"You're very kind," the poet said, "but I'm happy to only talk today. You seem downcast."
The butcher looked at him with startlement, but quickly hid it by returning to parting meat. "It's nothing."
"It's always something," the poet said. "I don't want to pry, but I will listen if you let me."
The cleaver fell and stayed down as the butcher's mouth moved from side to side, as if willing to open on its own and he would not allow it. "There is a child," he eventually said. "An orphan who comes to me every night for scraps. Like a stray cat, she comes and goes however she wills, and I made her a shelter in my shed for when it's raining or cold at night. The platter of meat I left three nights past sits untouched, feeding only flies. I'm terrified something's happened to her."
The poet stayed by the butcher's stall, listening to him talk about the girl when he did not have customers to serve. He wasn't the only soul the butcher kept fed, as he'd known, but this depth of kindness was new to the poet. "May I ask, why do you give away your goods for free? You could toss them to dogs, as many others would."
The butcher laughed. "I do that as well. Dogs need to eat too." He kept chuckling, then a wistful look overcame him. "When I was small, my father died and my frail mother couldn't do much work. We often starved. I want no one to go hungry if I can help it."
"It would be easy to think since you had nothing, no one else should either."
"Yes, it would," the butcher admitted, "especially because my master did what you suggested even after he learned his apprentice went to a hungry home every night. I think that is not an excuse to carry on passing misfortune, but to become the benefactor I never had, in whatever way I can."
Touched by the butcher's story, the poet declined the piece of meat spared for him, and asked the butcher to give it to someone more in need. With all his heart, he hoped the orphan would find her way back, but as the weeks went on, the arch of the butcher's mouth every morning told him she had not.
Autumn's colours brightened, turned the ground into a mirror of the evening sky, and finally dulled into white. The poet still found himself unable to write and instead spent his days listening to people's stories. He learned that a simple repetition of "How are you?" with a meaningful look and a sympathetic tone after the expected pleasantries were exchanged was enough to get his fellows to open up. The more he spoke to people, the less he could write about the cheerful things he wished to praise. It seemed everyone was hurting somehow, and that was all he could focus on, even when he heard stories of young couples falling in love or an old couple celebrating their first grandchild. Sometimes, when he heard a particularly agonising story—not all reacted to hardship as the butcher did, and some had become so cruel and bitter the poet could not bring himself to pity them—his vision seemed to go blurry for a moment, and when he blinked his eyes in turn, the eye of the nightingale was sharp and clear, while his own was veiled with smoke that took a minute to disperse.
He thought about the bird often those days, and visited it in the quiet opening where even the wind seemed to pass in respectful silence through the swaying branches. A bird must sing, it had said, but the poet's quill was frozen when he sat by his window high up in his attic loft at night, a candle warming the back of his hand while he watched the pale moon rising over the town. There was nothing romantic about it anymore; the poet could not think about the loves it loomed over, the adventures it used to represent. Now it was only cold white light somewhere far away. The girls he'd once made giggle and blush thought him a morose fool, whose tongue locked up when he tried to come up with a cheeky compliment. Worse was his quill did not move for human suffering any more than it did for joy. What a strange crucible the bird's soul must've been, to be able to melt the terror threatening to freeze the poet's heart.
Had the flame not eaten the candle's length, the poet could've believed time stood still while he watched the moon. Eventually the bustle of morning began despite the darkness, as it always did, whether or not the poet understood how people could lift their feet with the weights they carried on their shoulders. He thought about the nightingale again, his heart aching with an unnameable dread, and opened his window when a song in the shape of his thoughts burst out. It wasn't about anything in particular, the words mere Byronic rigmaroles of long-lost nothings and broken somethings he would've laughed at a few months ago. The winter breeze blew out the candle, and maybe time did stop for a moment: Outside, every passerby stilled when they came by his window, until there was only a quiet crowd of people who'd forgotten where they were going before they heard this most beautiful song.
The poet understood the nightingale at last. He did not sing because he wanted to—not because he found beauty, but because he desperately needed it. Otherwise, the darkness he was forced to witness would have choked him in that moment.
When his song was over, it had purged him for a small while, and he went to bed, unknowing of the people wiping frosted tears from their cheeks.
"What a beautiful soul he is," they said. "What a damaged, beautiful soul."
"Are those not the one and the same?" they said. "It is his pain that fuels the beauty. There could not be one without the other."
"Ah," they said. "A poet's gift is his curse. One cannot create without being engaged to misery. I always knew this was his true self, deep down, and that his silly poems of romance and adventure nothing but a passing fancy."
When the poet awoke in the afternoon, he set off to the alchemist's workshop to ask him to cut out the eye of the nightingale. Everyone he passed gave him a nod and a sombre smile, and some stopped him to say, "I heard you singing in the morning. I never knew you were this gifted. You made me feel like someone truly understood me."
The poet smiled and nodded, but his chest constricted more and more every time someone approached him. What a damned fool he was—of course they'd heard him. He should have kept his feelings inside, but what was done was done, and he quickened his step and kept his gaze on the ground to avoid more conversations.
Three knocks on the alchemist's door gained no response. The poet peered into the dark workshop, wondering if the alchemist had stepped out for lunch, but his desk and shelves had been cleared. "We found out he was a warlock, we did," said a neighbour the poet stopped. "Made sure he won't get the chance to trouble folks."
"Where can I find him?" the stricken poet demanded, then, after a leer from the neighbour, forced his tone to calm and added, "So I could make sure he doesn't come back."
"Oh, we made sure of that well and good. He's dancing on the wind down at the old hanging tree."
The poet went to his spot on the edge of the frozen fountain, the ache in his chest spreading into his thoughts. He sat there with his quill and notebook out, thought of what he most deeply wanted to write, read his old verses for inspiration. His ache grew when he looked at them and felt none of the elation captured on days when his heart fell like bursting outward from being too full rather than the implosion that threatened it now. He could not help himself, and began to sing; and so beautiful the song was that everyone at the market stopped to listen, until embarrassment made him cease and run home. The next morning, a letter came to him from the family of the farm boy whose last moments he failed to capture, thanking him for the song they'd heard while out at the market.
As the new year approached and the days reached their darkest, the poet would often sit on his bed, watching the deep, black bead inside his eye reflected on the edge of a knife. When he looked closely, he could see the root loop out of the socket, crawl under the skin of his cheek and down his throat into his chest, where it had made a bruise over the left half of his ribcage as it slowly bled him to death. How he wished for the bravery to dig it out, but he remembered how easily the bird had perished. Though his days were torment, what awaited beyond their end terrified him more. He could not keep himself from singing, and the adoration his hearers gave him had become repulsive altogether. How could they say his odes were trivial? How could they think his old poems were trite? They'd been his words at their most honest, a true image of all the joy with which his heart had swelled. All he gave them now was pornography of pain, and there was nothing beautiful in it.
On new year's eve a travelling jester heard him singing, and a week later a messenger arrived in fineries richer than anything anyone in the town had seen. Despite long travel staining the man's boots, people gossiped amongst themselves the prince had taken interest in the poet; no one else had enough wealth to dress even the two horses the messenger brought in bright colours. Yes, word of the poet's talent had reached the prince, and he now invited the poet to visit. The messenger, a sword on his side to ward bandits, patted its hilt to make understood the invitation came without option to refuse, and so the poet rode long days after him to arrive at the palace.
"My jester told me of your voice," the prince said, inspecting the poet from his raised throne, one leg crossed over the other and chin resting against a propped-up arm. "He spent the past year travelling across my kingdom to bring back tales that would interest and amuse my wife. You, he assured, were the most interesting thing he found. He told me your singing cures people's woes."
The poet, with a deep sigh, admitted, "I don't think I have such power, but it's what people keep telling me."
"My wife is afflicted with a deep melancholy, and I can't fathom why," the prince said. "I have given her everything. She wears dresses worth more than you'll own in your life. She has a legion of handmaids tending to her every whim. If there is something I have not yet given, she'll have it within the hour of remarking on it. She wants for nothing except a smile on her face. I want you to find it."
Knowing there was no arguing with the prince, the poet bowed and let a footman take him to the princess' tower. The walk across the palace made the poet gape with awe he hadn't felt in a long time. It was more a journey to a magical world than merely going through someone's home. Every corridor was wide enough to fit the poet's attic room, and tall enough to do so twice; the walls were perfect white stone, glossy and unmarked, as though the entire structure was carved from a single slab; there was a pleasant scent of incense everywhere, burned to mask the smoke of the many fire pits and hearths to keep the stone floors warm in winter; and the many, many clever instalments of vines, vases, and hanging flowerbeds made the poet feel as though he walked in a garden of the gods. Soon enough his awe gave way for an intrusive note of worry: If all this splendour could not make the princess happy, how could he?
The footman took him outside, across a bridge of the same glossy stone to an island where a tower climbed high into the heavens. The poet slipped along the icy bridge as he gaped at the tower, fretting he'd have to climb all the way, and was relieved to find an elevator in the centre of the spiral staircase. The tower was a palace of its own, the footman explained: Complete with kitchens, libraries, gardens, an aviary, and even a butterfly house, it had been the home of the prince's mother after she abdicated the crown following her husband's death and became a recluse. For a time after her passing it had been empty, but once the prince married and his new wife showed nothing but despondency at his efforts to make her feel loved, he had ordered it restored and banished her there until she treated him with the respect he deserved.
The poet stepped out of the cage lift at the top floor, where doors shaped like arrowheads allowed him into the princess' chamber. It was just as splendid as all the palace, if not more so, for the princess sitting on a bench by her window was the most beautiful creature the poet had seen in his life. A flock of birds flew by outside, and her wistful profile followed them, uncaring of the poet approaching her.
"Good luck," the footman murmured. "See how long you last with that ingrate. It ought to be a crime to have so much and still be unhappy."
The poet frowned at the leaving footman, then went to the princess. He hesitated behind her, hat in hand, thinking of what to say to someone his professional urge was to compare to a mote of the sun veiled with night running down her shoulders, scorching to behold but impossible not to.
After he'd frayed his every nerve stumbling over them, he simply said, "Hello."
The princess acknowledged him at last, looked him up and down, and asked, "Did my husband send you too? You'll end up without a head, just like the others. There is only one thing that would make me happy and it's not something you can give me, only he, and he'll never let me have it."
After taking a moment to reflect on the answer, the poet stuffed his cap in his pocket, took a seat beside the princess, and asked, "How are you?"
The princess' gloom lifted for a spell of surprise. "Fine, thank you," she stammered. "And you?"
"No, your highness," the poet said, and with a meaningful look and a sympathetic tone repeated, "How are you?"
There fell a silence between them, and the princess' expression became unreadable. She studied the poet for a long, quiet while, and finally said, "Who are you?"
"A humble poet, your highness."
"And what is it you see when you look at me, humble poet?"
Given permission, the poet let his praise flow unrestrained. For a moment he felt like his old self, though back in the summer he'd said the same words to every girl willing to listen. Now, the princess' beauty moved him so much he didn't merely wax lyrical, but truly meant what he said.
Despite all the ways and twists of phrase with which he described her features, however, they remained emotionless. The poet's voice wavered and waned when she returned to birdwatching.
"You're verbose, I'll give you that," she said, "but nothing you said meant anything. You've told me how I look, not what I am. A mirror could do much the same."
"Precious, and lovely, and gorgeous, and—"
"Virtues of a gemstone, poet, and therein lies the source of my troubles. You see, when I was small, my kingdom was much, much more modest than this. No one minded if the princess sneaked away on adventures of her own now and again, and oh, what adventures I've had. I have thrown dice with demons and travelled with crusaders, fought off brigands on the merchant roads and, once, sunk a corsair ship—and those are a fraction of my escapades. I am half your age, yet a legend in my kingdom. Here… Well, I suppose your chosen words speak of your skill. I am a gemstone, cold and dead but nice to look at, the most precious the crown has. How could I not be miserable, when once I was truly the heroine of my own story, and now I am an afterthought in my husband's?"
The poet met her gaze, and what he saw stripped him of fanciful words. The darkness inside them, the black strings looping out of both her sockets and crawling under the skin of her cheeks roused in him a kinship, as though she, too, had poisoned herself with the eye of the nightingale.
"All I want is my freedom," she went on, when the poet could not respond. "I envy the birds, free to go where they please. I set loose all those trapped in the aviary, watched them fly to distant lands, and every day since I've thought of flying into the ground as freely as they take to the sky and feel released for one glorious, explosive moment. They come back sometimes, as though to taunt me."
"What happened to you?" the poet asked. "What did the prince do to tame a soul so wild? I wouldn't think he's dragged you here in chains."
The princess scoffed. "My kingdom is small and its army, though brave and well-trained, could not have fended off an assault from a nation this vast. He let me choose between coming with him of my own volition or as a prisoner." She lifted the hem of her dress, showing where manacles had scarred the skin of her ankles. "There's a reason the soldiers don't salute me. By the time I surrendered, we had slain two thousand of his men and lost one of our own—a valiant soul who set off a black powder trap that destroyed their supply lines. Thanks to him, we would have outlasted a siege of my castle, but my now-husband, then-enemy threatened to turn upon my people, who'd survived the war unharmed until then. I could not allow it."
The poet listened to her stories long into the night, feeling smaller and smaller beside the young woman whose life had been vibrant and remarkable, who had lived all the things he'd only imagined. As the saga stretched, something stirred within him—a remainder of his old self that wished to sing her praises, not for her beauty, but for her spirit and selflessness. When her voice turned hoarse from sitting by the open window talking for so long, he offered to sing her to sleep, and a nightingale stopped by to listen to his lullaby.
"Quite the song for a meat-skin," the bird said after the princess fell asleep and the song ended. The poet swung about, startled by the bird's split voice speaking at once in a chirp and with a tall man's tongue. "But there's a note of warmth I hear amidst the lamentations. You be careful, one-feather. If you grow too fond of her and the prince finds out, you'll feed the crows."
The poet stammered a response, but the bird only cocked its head and asked, "What is this garble? Have you gone daft since we last met?"
The poet dug the breast pocket of his vest for the alchemist's locket-watch, kept there as a memento of the day his life had changed. He placed it on his throat, and once more it wrapped tight the instant he sealed the clasp. "How can this be?" the poet asked. "The amulet should have only let me talk to one of your kin, and he is buried beneath an old oak's root."
The nightingale laughed. "Well, maybe I'm a ghost. Or maybe you're mad, or perhaps both… No, one-feather, don't look at me like that. I assure you the first is not true. You'll have to judge the latter. I know this sort of magic very well, and you make a crucial mistake—your amulet is not attuned to one of my kind, but my soul, and mine alone. Did you think a bird this small could harvest the sorrow of lifetimes in only one of its own? No, no, no. I died. Then I came back. It is what we do."
The poet studied the bird perching on the windowsill, coloured blue by the clear night. Not once had the locket made other birds speak clearly, even other nightingales, and he recognised the voice. Yet, when he went to sit on the bench so as to not disturb the princess, the nightingale's feet and weight did feel very real when it hopped onto his finger.
"I've come to regret taking your eye," he said.
"Alas, I've come to regret letting you take it, but perhaps it is a blessing in disguise. I spent some time captive in the tower until the princess set me free. I return every night to sing to her, but without my eye, I cannot ease her pain."
"Then take it back," the poet pleaded. "Go on, peck it out. I'm sure you have your ways to sew it back in."
"Do you really want that? It is rooted deep and you would die, just as I did. I could brave it only because I knew my respite was temporary. Does your desperation run so deep as to seek a permanent end?"
The poet's heart chilled with the formation of a weight. "Please."
"Would you not rather jump? Feel her glorious, explosive moment of freedom?"
The lead ball perforated his heart and fell into his stomach. He peeked out, drew his shadow over the nightingale. "I… No. I want you to do it. Take this pain back."
"One-feather, I'm sure you see I have both my eyes set in place, but I understand your wish well. How could I not, when I once asked the same of you? If you ask me again, I will peck out your eye."
The poet stared down, thought of flying out the same as he'd thought so often atop his loft. From here, there would have been no chance of survival, of failure when he crashed into the thick ice of the lake.
Still, he sighed, withdrew. "Not so long ago, I would have been thrilled to follow someone like her, record her journey, spend my nights around a campfire writing epics about her bravery. Now… Those days feel like a different life and not mere months away. I'm so tired of helping people without easing any of my own pain. All I want is to be rid of the curse you gave me."
The nightingale hopped onto his shoulder. "The eye is not a curse, one-feather, not any more than it is a gift."
"It has changed my voice. When I sing, people salt the earth, like they did in your grove."
"A bird must sing, one-feather, but you're no bird. Your verses have become irresistible because you've learned to listen, and once you listen for too long, it spills out, in one form or another. The eye didn't teach you that. There never was magic in it." The nightingale dropped onto the windowsill. "You can seek release the way I did, but I don't think that's what you want. You are stronger than I was, and if you stay, you might help her be strong as well. Who knows—she might even give you the grand adventure you desire if you do."
The poet gave the bird a dejected nod, searching his feelings. It was right—something bubbled inside him from listening to the princess all day, though he could not find coherence in the nebulous feeling. "If you had the words, what would you tell her?"
"I don't know, one-feather. This one is on you. I have begun collecting more songs, but her pain is too profound for my fresh verses to help. I've done what I can, bringing my other released fellows back to see her and show our gratitude, but there's only so much we can do until she decides to help herself."
With that, the bird flew away. The poet watched it vanish in the darkness between the stars, gave the sleeping princess one more look, and left her room.
No servants waited outside to keep watch on them. As he headed toward his chamber, the poet wondered whether it meant he'd already damned himself by seeming unscrupulous, or whether the prince truly did not care how the poet made her happy, so long as he did. He thought of her predicament, probed his thoughts and emotions, but they were both a jumbled mess, and eventually the frustration for being unable to express himself even in song boiled over. The footman of the tower awoke to banging on his door some minutes later, and despite his grumbling about being roused in the middle of the night, soon left to fetch what the poet asked on the grounds it was for the princess. In the morning the footman received his second rude awakening for the day: The poet had spoiled the walls with murals.
The poet returned to the princess' chamber that noon. The servant leered at him as they passed each other before the many depictions of a black-haired warrior maid swashbuckling down the spiral stairs. "Her highness is in a foul mood," he said. "She's ordered me to scrub the wall. No good deed goes unpunished, as they say. The next time you come to me asking for one, I'll slam the door in your face."
Surprised by the answer, the poet quickened his step. True enough, the princess had fallen from dismalness into fury, and when he entered, her glare was colder than the day outside her window.
"How dare you?" she demanded. "I knew it wasn't wise to confide in someone I'd only just met, knew it even as I spoke, yet I couldn't stop myself. You seemed so kind, as though you were the first person in this kingdom who cared about how I felt. Why would you do this? Why would you throw my memories back at me?"
"Throw back?" the poet said with surprise. "Your highness, for the first time in months, I was inspired. If I'd heard your stories when summer was high, I'd have cast myself at your feet and called you a muse."
"That is a life I lost, you bastard. The girl you painted was put to death when she spoke her wedding vows, and my tiara is the set of strings that makes her carcass dance."
"I don't think that's true at all," the poet said. The way she looked, the poet didn't dare sit beside her lest she reached for a letter knife and put it through his ear. "You offered yourself in trade for the safety of your people. You acted just as you did always before—with great courage and consideration, and got in trouble for it, as you did in every story. Why is your marble tower where servants tend to your every whim the one prison to finally conquer you?"
"Because if I escape, my husband will slaughter everyone in my homeland! Don't you understand? Unless I submit to him, I will condemn everyone I am sworn to protect! It's the only reason why I haven't flung myself out, why I won't do so now."
The poet nodded with consideration. "I apologise," he said, and started away. "I'll spare the servant and scrub the stone myself, then go beg for your husband's mercy. I think it's best I won't trouble you further. I simply find it strange you would consider this the end of your journey, when all I see is another chapter."
The princess said nothing to stop him, and the poet left to fetch a bucket of water. Before he'd had time to erase more than the first corner outside her door, the princess appeared. Uncertainty softened her grimness, though she still regarded him darkly.
"You don't need to do that," she said, after watching the murals for a time. "And you shouldn't go. He has murdered too many because of me already."
"Then, is there any way I can help?" the poet said. "I will do anything."
The princess walked past him to follow the paintings, was quiet all the way to the end. "I think there might be," she said upon returning, an odd glint in her eye. "If you truly mean 'anything.' "
"Anything at all, your highness."
She nodded slowly, drumming her cheek with a thumb. "It'll take some time, but… until then, I have more stories, if you're willing to listen. I think I'm warming up to the paintings, too."
The murals stretched further in the coming days, and as the poet's skill improved with practice, so did the princess' sullenness lift. She began to choose brighter colours to wear, lightened her black hair into hues of purple and blue with a dye of petals, and stopped sighing after everything she said. Her pensiveness resurfaced only when she walked down the stairwell to watch the poet's work, but soon enough, a servant caught her cracking a smile at the bottom of the stairs, where the poet had painted her releasing a flock of birds from her tower.
"You have done well," the prince said to the poet kneeling before his throne, and reached for the smiling princess' hand. "Finally, she is perfect, a wife of whom I can truly be proud. Ask whatever you want in return and it will be yours."
"There's only one thing I want, your highness," the poet said. "And you can't give it to me. No one can. I will be content with a good horse to take me home."
"You underestimate me, poet," the prince said haughtily. "Is it a fragment of the moon? A lock of a siren's hair? If I cannot get it for you, I will find someone who will."
"Some time ago, I fused an eye of the nightingale with my own," the poet said. "I want it removed, but doing so will kill me, and I fear death too much." He sighed deep, looked up at the prince. "So you see, what I want cannot be given to me, because it is both what I most desire and loathe."
"An eye of the nightingale?" the prince asked with curiosity. "Why would you do such a thing?"
"All I wanted to write about were heroic deeds, tales of friendship, romance, and adventure, but no one wanted to hear such stories. I thought I needed the eye of the nightingale to understand the dark side of human emotion, but it was a mistake: All it did was fill me with darkness and torment me. What little I've managed to create was not because of it, but despite it."
"That is not true," the princess said. "The eye marks you as a great artist. It is that darkness that allowed you to dredge through my own and deliver me from it. It made your words more true, your imagery raw and honest. When you sang me to sleep, I had to hide my face with my pillow so you could not see my tears, because no one had ever touched my heart as deeply as you did. Husband," she said, reaching over to clutch his hand with both her own, "you cannot let him leave. I fear he'd do something to himself. You can't allow such a damaged, beautiful soul to leave my world so soon."
The poet stared at the princess, jaw hanging open, unable to believe what he heard.
The prince hesitated, glancing from her to the poet and back. "Yes, my love. Anything for you," he then said, but his voice was droning in the poet's ears. The guards grasping him and dragging him away were unreal. The lock of the tower latching behind him came from some distant corner of space.
With the princess' departure, the old queen's tower was left dark and empty. The poet slumped against the door, blindly pulling at his hair. How could she betray him like this? Of all the people he'd listened to, he'd most keenly felt a connection with her, and now she, who had glimpsed through the eyes of the nightingale and become released of them, revealed herself as just another fool.
Eventually he rose on shaking legs, felt his way to the elevator, let it pull him from blindness into the light breaching in from the many rooms along the way. Bitterness twisted his heart as the warrior maiden travelled backwards with him, and when he reached the top, he bloodied her face and his fist with a punch.
The princess' room was emptied of ornaments, and now only an old dressing table, the bed, and the bench remained. With nothing better to throw, the poet smashed the dressing table's mirror with his amulet, watched his fractured reflection scatter on the floor, and pushed the window open. A bright day awaited outside, cold and yet unmarred with the scents of a spring approaching fast.
He set one foot on the windowsill, but before he found the courage to fly into the ground, the nightingale swooped in. It chirped and hopped around the amulet on the table, nodding fervently at it. The poet watched it in confusion, then went to pick up the locket-watch. As soon as he closed it in his fist, the bird's chirping split into speech.
"—Really matter what I say since you won't understand, but I hope you do understand I'm being urgent, doesn't really matter what I say since you won't understand, but I hope you do understand I'm being urgent, doesn't really—" the bird monotoned, and the poet interrupted it with a raised hand.
"I understand," he said, latching the amulet onto his throat. "What do you want?"
"Rude," the bird said. "I came to make sure you weren't about to do anything stupid."
"No, not stupid. I've come to realise I don't belong in this world. I don't think friendship, bravery, and adventure do either. I'll fly into the ground and take my misery with me."
"You could do that," the nightingale said, "but as soon as you were taken away, the princess ran off somewhere with a look of determination. You'd do well to wait, I think."
The poet gave the bird a bitter scoff as it hopped into flight to his shoulder. "I understand at last why your song—and mine—resonates in people. The one thing every human heart most wants is to be understood. I won't waste any hopes on her. She's no different from the others who only accepted me once I fit their mental mould as the brooding figure I know I am not."
"Wait and see, one-feather. You could yet be surprised."
Despite his deep disheartenment, the poet could not bring himself to fly, and lay down on the bed until he fell asleep. He woke up to someone shaking his shoulder, but could not see who it was in the dark. The day had passed during his rest, and moonlight cast a beam onto the floor behind the figure.
"Are you awake?" the princess asked. The poet responded with a weary grunt and turned from her. "I didn't mean what I said before," she went on. "I had to make sure you couldn't leave. It was vital for my plan."
The poet scrunched his brow. "Plan?"
He couldn't see it, but the excitement sneaking into her tone made him picture her grinning. "You were right. This was just another obstacle, and it took me a little while to hatch a plan to overcome it. I needed to find a way the prince—I will never call him 'my husband' henceforth—would not take revenge upon my people if I fled. You, as it happens, made the perfect scapegoat." She was definitely grinning now. "When the prince finds me missing, he'll also find a letter from you gloating that you fell in love with me over your stay and kidnapped me. He will barge in here and find the evidence of your 'daring escape' I planted for weeks around the tower, careful so the servants wouldn't notice. Don't worry—you can go back to your old life, although you will need to keep your head low for a while. I thought of a way he wouldn't find you, too."
The poet stared at her dark figure as he processed this. "Is that why you were getting better? Not my art?"
"Well, I won't say your pictures weren't nice, but what you really did was inspire me in turn—to help myself. I was paralysed for a long time, and you reminded me of my own strength until I slowly found it anew. I'm ready to write the next chapter. I'm going on another grand adventure, to help people who are lost like I was, all the while avoiding the prince's clutches." She pulled the poet sitting up, held him by the hand. "I'm sorry for using you like this, but you did say you'd do anything to help."
A rush of excitement filled the poet's hollow heart. "I'll forgive you on one condition only. I want to come with you on this adventure."
"Good, because I lied when I said you could go back. I'm sure I would've figured out something, but this makes it easier."
Her silhouette beckoned him to follow, and when she stepped into the shower of moonlight, the poet saw the full change in her: Not only had the royal silks become a travel uniform of tough leathers, but her posture was as stately as a queen's ought to be. The greatest change was in her eyes, where even from afar he could see the defilement of the fire inside gone—or perhaps the spark had fulminated on its own to burn it all away.
Before the poet could stop her, she smirked and dashed up the bench and the windowsill to dive out the window.
He cried out, breaking after her, but when he cast a look down, the princess' beaming face swooped past him to hover at his level.
"I'm sorry! I couldn't resist. I've wanted to do that for so long," she laughed, climbing onto a plank set on a rope swing. A multitude of thick ropes rose into the air like the heads of a charmed hydra, and when he leaned out, the poet saw a flock of birds holding the ends. "They're the ones I set free from the tower," she continued. "I never realised they were this tame. As soon as I finished this contraption, they came to me one by one and took an end each without me having to give any orders."
Amidst the flock, the poet heard a nightingale sing. "Imagine that."
She scooted over, patted the freed space. "Come on. They'll carry the two of us with ease."
The poet climbed beside her and she tugged the ropes, sending the birds toward the high moon. "Where will we go now?" the poet asked.
"We'll head as far north as the birds can fly, then set them free and carry on through the great woods where horsemen can't give us chase."
"And then, your highness?"
"And then you'll never call me 'my highness' again. Let us leave titles for the people who cannot or don't want to see who we are. 'The princess' will be a proud defender of those who can't defend themselves, a noble adventurer and treasure hunter who never flinches from a challenge and always knows the right thing to do. To you, I'll be Jocelyn. You will see me weep for those we fail to defend and curse myself when someone suffers for my choices or we lose out on treasures because they were hidden in a nest of spiders." She gave him an abashed side-eye. "I'm deathly afraid of spiders."
Her words sent a wave of warmth through him. No, she wasn't like the others. She understood him all too well. "I'm Aidan," he said, "and I'm very pleased to meet you, Jocelyn. I think you're just the person I always needed to find. You leave the recording of your future chapters to me."
"Our future chapters," Jocelyn corrected. "This is a new story. I don't want you to be an afterthought in mine."
Aidan chuckled, fished a pot of ink from his pocket and dipped his quill in it. "True enough. There's a word for friends like the three of us coming together, you know."
"The three of us?"
Aidan smiled, hooking his arm around the rope as he took out his notebook. The nightingale swooped down to perch on his wrist. He could still feel the threads of its eye around his heart, but they were looser, and he was certain they would let go and the eye would fall out on its own, given time.
His quill glistened with starlight as he wrote the word "Prologue" on the empty page.