“What toad would want this swan’s flesh?” her papa muttered. “I want to look upon the face of my daughter.”
In her head, she spoke a phrase of rara linguathat shed the albumen granting her form. The transformation left her weak and famished; while she had seen her papa as a pother owl devour a hare in one swallow, Odile as a swan could not stomach moat grass and cloying water roots. No longer the tips of great wings, her fingers dug at the moss between flagstones.
“There’s my plain girl.” Smiling, he gently lifted her by the arms. “So plain, so sweet.” He stroked her cheek with a thumb.
She could hear the love in his voice, but his familiar cooing over her rough-as-vinegar face and gangly limbs still hurt. A tear escaped along the edge of her nose.
“Why you persist in playing amongst the bevy. ” He stroked her cheek with a thumb. “Come inside.” He guided her toward the door. “There won’t only be lessons today. I’ll bring a Vorspiel of songbirds to the window to make you smile.”
Odile nodded and walked with him back into the tower. But she would rather Papa teach her more of rara lingua. Ever since her sixteenth birthday, he had grown reluctant to share invocations. At first, Odile thought she had done something wrong and was being punished, but she now suspected that Papa felt magic, like color, belonged to males. The books he let her read dealt with nesting rather than sorcery.
From his stories, Odile knew he had been only a few years older than sixteen when he left his village, adopted a more impressive name, and traveled the world. He had stepped where the ancient augers had read entrails. He had spoken with a cartouche of ibises along the Nile and fended off the copper claws of the gagana on a lost island in the Caspian Sea.
But he never would reveal the true mark of a great sorcerer: how he captured the wappentier. His secrets both annoyed Odile and made her proud.
As the sole surviving offspring of the fabled ziz of the Hebrews, the wappentier is the rarest of raptors. Having never known another of its ilk, the wappentier cannot speak out of loneliness and rarely preens its dark feathers. Some say the beast’s wings can stretch from one horizon to the other, but then it could not find room in the sky to fly. Instead, this lusus naturae perches atop desolate crags and ruins.
The Rashi claimed that the wappentier possesses the attributes of both the male and female. It has the desire to nest and yet the urge to kill. As soon as gore is taken to its gullet, the wappentier lays an egg that will never hatch. Instead, these rudiments are prized by theurgists for their arcane properties. Once cracked, the egg, its gilded shell inscribed with the Tetragrammaton, reveals not a yolk but a quintessence of mutable form, reflected in the disparate nature of the beast. A man may change his physique. A woman may change her fate. But buried, the eggs become foul and blacken like abandoned iron.
When Elster was nine, her grandmother brought her to the fairgrounds. The little girl clutched a ten-pfennig piece tight in her palm. A gift from her papa, a sour-smelling man who brewed gose beer all day long. “To buy candy. Or a flower,” said her grandmother.
The mayhem called to Elster, who tugged at her grandmother’s grip, wanting to fly free. She broke loose and ran into the midst of the first crowd she came upon. Pushing her way to the center, she found there a gaunt man dressed in shades of red. He moved tarnished thimbles about a table covered in a faded swatch of silk.
The man’s hands, with thick yellowed warts at every bend and crease, moved with a nimble grace. He lifted up one thimble to reveal a florin. A flip and a swirl and the thimble at his right offered a corroded haller. The coins were presented long enough to draw sighs and gasps from the crowd before disappearing under tin shells.
“I can taste that ten-bit you’re palming,” said the gaunt man. Thick lips hid his teeth. How Elster heard him over the shouts of the crowd—“Die linke Hand”—she could not guess. “Wager for a new life? Iron to gold?” His right hand tipped over a thimble to show a shining mark, a bit of minted sunlight stamped with a young woman’s face. Little Elster stood on her toes, nearly tipping over the table, to see the coin’s features. Not her mother or her grandmother. Not anyone she knew yet. But the coin itself was the most beautiful of sights; the gold glittered and promised her anything. Everything. Her mouth watered, and she wanted the odd man’s coin so badly that spittle leaked past her lips.
When she let go of the table, the iron ten-pfennig piece rolled from her sweaty fingers. The gaunt man captured it with a dropped thimble.
“Now which one, magpie? You want the shiny one, true? Left or right or middle or none at all?”
Elster watched his hands. She could not be sure and so closed her eyes and reached out. She clamped her hand over the gaunt man’s grip. His skin felt slick and hard like polished horn. “This one,” she said. When she looked, his palm held an empty thimble.
“Maybe later you’ll find the prize.” When he smiled she saw that his front teeth were metaclass="underline" the left a dull iron, the right gleamed gold.
A strong arm pulled her away from the table. “Stupid child.” Her grandmother cuffed her face. “From now on, a thimble will be your keep.”
Down in the cellar, the stones seeped with moisture. Odile sneezed from the stink of mold. She could see how her papa trembled at the chill.
The floor was fresh-turned earth. Crates filled niches in the walls. In the tower’s other cage, a weeping man sat on a stool. The king’s livery, stained, bunched about his shoulders.
“The prince’s latest messenger.” Papa gestured at a bejeweled necklace glittering at the man’s feet. “Bearing a bribe to end the engagement.”
Papa followed this with a grunt as he stooped down and began digging in the dirt with his fingers. Odile helped him brush away what covered a dull, gray egg. “Papa, he’s innocent.”
He gently pulled the egg loose of the earth. “Dear, there’s a tradition of blame. Sophocles wrote that ‘No man loves the messenger of ill.’ ”
He took a pin from his cloak and punched a hole into the ends of the egg while intoning rara lingua. Then he approached the captive man, who collapsed, shaking, to his knees. Papa blew into one hole, and a vapor reeking of sulfur drifted out to surround the messenger. Screams turned into the frantic call of a songbird.
“We’ll send him back to the prince in a gilded cage with a message. ‘We delightedly accept your offer of an engagement ball.’ Perhaps I should have turned him into a parrot, and he could have spoken that.”
“Papa,” Odile chided.
“I’ll return his form after the wedding. I promise.” He carried the egg to one shelf and pulled out the crate of curse eggs nestled in soil. “What king more wisely cares for his subjects?”
The prince would rather muck out every filthy stall in every stable of the kingdom than announce his engagement to the sorcerer’s daughter at the ball. His father must have schemed his downfall; why else condemn him to marry a harpy?
“Father, be reasonable. Why not the Duke of Bremen’s daughter?” The prince glanced up at the fake sky the guilds-men were painting on the ballroom’s ceiling. A cloud appeared with a brushstroke.
“The one so lovely that her parents keep her in a cloister?” asked the king. “Boy, your wife should be faithful only to you. Should she look higher to God, she’ll never pay you any respect.”