The Bird and the Sword (The Bird and the Sword Chronicles, #1)

by Amy Harmon

Corvyn was weak, but he wasn’t evil, though I wondered if weakness wasn’t just as dangerous. The weak allowed evil to flourish.

“Swallow Daughter, pull them in, those words that sit upon your lips. Lock them deep inside your soul, hide them ‘til they’ve time to grow. Close your mouth upon the power, curse not, cure not, ‘til the hour. You won’t speak and you won’t tell, you won’t call on heav’n or hell. You will learn and you will thrive. Silence, daughter. Stay alive.”

But the voices of fear and discontent are always loudest, and one by one, the Tellers, the Healers, the Changers, and the Spinners were destroyed.

My mother made words. She was a Teller, and her words were magic. She spoke and the words became life. Reality. Truth. My father knew it, and he was afraid. Words can be terrible when the truth is unwelcome.

The palace court would talk about me for a while, then they would forget about me all together. I had that effect on people. Silence was a close cousin to invisibility.

He laughed out loud this time, and the action made his black eyes crinkle at the edges and his lips turn up in a way that was terribly attractive and impossibly infuriating.

I was only limited by my ignorance, by my fear, and by my own sense of right and wrong.

“Kjell is right. You are a dangerous little bird. But I think I will keep you.”

“I knew I would have to save myself. I took the man’s sword—he’d completely underestimated me—and I remember the way it felt to plunge the blade into his belly. There was very little resistance in his flesh . . . or maybe my fear gave me power.” He paused. “But I saw the life leave his eyes, and it was absolutely terrifying. I wished I had let him kill me instead.” Why? “Because in that moment, as I watched him die, I felt something leave me too. Like he’d taken part of my soul. The best part. I’ve never gotten it back. And I miss it.”

His kiss was warm and persuasive, and completely different from the first time he’d kissed me. He still took—demanded even—but laced with his power was something sweeter. Something I needed from him. Something I longed for. Yearning. There it was again. Suddenly yearning had a flavor. It tasted like a king, a beautiful, frightening, infuriating man who flew into my life and began to free my words.

“Can you call to him? The way you did to the Volgar?” I was stunned that he knew and wondered how many of Tiras’s warriors had heard me beckon the enemy in Kilmorda. He is more man than an animal. The Volgar are simple. Tiras is not. “He is not simple. But he is a bird as often as he is a man. Maybe more often,” he murmured, and my heart grew heavier in my chest. I walked to the open doors and raised my face to the sky. Then I closed my eyes and thought of the white-capped bird with the sooty black feathers. I saw the span of his wings with the fiery red tips, unlike any bird I’d ever seen, and I asked those wings to bring him to me.

Wait for him. The words invoked an ache deep in my belly, an ache that felt like pleasure but lingered like pain. I wanted to wait for Tiras. I wanted to see if he would come to me again, if he would come without my beckoning, on two legs instead of red-tipped wings.

“Your skin is like ice,” he observed. I don’t feel cold, I responded. My inner voice was calm. Level. I wanted to punch the air in triumph at my control. He would not know how much I wanted him, how much I longed for him. I would give him anything else. But not that. He shook his head, arguing, and his hair swept his shoulders. “No, it isn’t cold like ice. It is translucent. You are silver from head to toe.” He ran his flattened palm from my shoulders to my hips. I definitely wasn’t cold. I was liquid heat. I was terror and curiosity and denial disguised as indifference. “You glow, Lark.” His hand climbed back up again and swept over my unbound hair. I swallowed, suddenly close to tears. Then why does no one see me? “I see you,” he said.

The pain had made the pleasure all the greater, searing the moment into being, imprinting Tiras into my heart and onto my body. I had felt his desire to claim, even as he kissed me softly and swallowed my hurt, soothing it with gentle hands and tender words. The words had risen from his skin even when he wasn’t speaking, and I had called them to me, collecting them like falling leaves, pressing them between the heavy pages of my memory so I could keep them.

I thought you couldn’t change. So I decided to wait . . . until you could. “Stubborn woman,” he murmured, but the tightness in his features had eased, and his eyes were warm on my face. I didn’t know what else to do. The lords were angry. The people . . . mocked me, and I wished to be invisible, the way I usually am. Tiras lifted his hand from the water and touched my jaw with the tips of his fingers. “You are easy to overlook. Slim and pale and so quiet. But now that I’ve studied your soft grey eyes and traced the fine bones of your face, now that I’ve kissed your pale pink mouth, I don’t want to look anywhere else. My gaze is continually drawn back to you.” Without hesitation I gave him another truth. You . . . are . . . impossible . . . to overlook. His breath caught, and for the first time, I was the one who leaned in, the one who pressed my lips to his, the one who cradled his face in my hands.

You chose me because I am of use. But I chose you because I wanted you. All I ever wanted was for you to love me in return. He froze, and when he pulled away and peered down at me, it was all I could do not to open a hole in the earth and climb into it. His eyes gleamed in the gathering twilight, and he began to shake his head, rejecting my words.

You said I chose you because you are of use to me. And I did. But know this, Lark.” Tiras’s voice broke on my name, but he didn’t pause. “I have loved you every moment of every day, and I will love you until I cease to be. Bird, man, or king, I love you, and I will always love you.”