Dax took the needle and held Cluck’s ring finger. He bent it back, the pressure building at the joint. Cluck felt himself getting smaller, the edges of him pulling in, until he was half his age again. Folding his tongue, pressing it against the roof of his mouth, clenching his back teeth to keep from crying, because if he started crying, Dax would think he had him, and he’d break every one of his fingers until he gave him what he wanted.
A tear found the cut on Cluck’s lower lip, the salt stinging. It wasn’t the pain coming. It was all the lies after. I closed my hand in a door. I fell. I got my fingers caught in the wire. Trying them on like his grandfather’s old clothes, seeing which one fit. Coming up with one good enough that even Pépère would believe it. And the fear of what his mother would do to him if she knew he’d stolen something from Dax.
It was Pépère arguing with his mother about why she hadn’t taken Cluck to a doctor. His mother screaming that—Nom de Dieu!—she hadn’t known anything was wrong with the boy’s hand. Pépère yelling that it was her fault for not watching her sons, that now he’d watch Cluck since clearly she didn’t, that now the doctors couldn’t do anything unless they had the money to get his fingers broken again and reset. The knowledge that Cluck had done it wrong, curling his fingers under to protect them when he should have set them straight.
That one tear soaked into the cracks on his lips. Then there was just the taste of salt. The memory of nine years ago, of Dax bending back the fingers on his left hand. Where’d you put the net? But Cluck wouldn’t tell. Dax snapped his pinkie to show he wasn’t kidding, but Cluck wouldn’t tell. Surprise shot across Dax’s face. Then he broke Cluck’s ring finger. Tell me what you did with the net. Cluck still wouldn’t say. An almost-fear had flared in Dax’s eyes, the clean, new knowledge that even though Cluck was small, and ugly, and stupid, he would not talk when hit.
Dax had broken Cluck’s third finger anyway.
This time Dax had his right hand, his right ring finger. This time shutting up wasn’t a way to get half his hand broken.
It was how to survive this.
But a question had gotten into Cluck. It’d been burrowing in since he walked away from Lace. And he wasn’t as good at keeping quiet as he was nine years ago.
He looked up at Dax. “Did you let them put another net in the water?”
Dax held Cluck’s hand still, the pressure steady for that one second, not easing up, not pushing harder.
“Did you?” Cluck asked. Pain got around the words, strangling the sound out of them.
Dax wrenched Cluck’s finger, and the bone cracked like ice in hot water. Cluck clenched his teeth to keep himself quiet. They cut his tongue, and blood spread through his mouth.
The pain tore through his arm up to his shoulder. This was Dax’s flight call to Cluck, the stab of a new bone break, something that hurt enough to make him remember.
It would remind him to stay with the flock.
Dax dropped his hand.
They shared a breath out.
Dax left, slamming the trailer door. The vibration splintered through Cluck’s finger. He gritted his teeth against the pain. That feeling of cracking ice, bound around his finger like a ring, pulled every other feeling from his body. The memory of his mouth on Lace’s. The warmth of her under his hands. The grain of cottonwood bark on his palms and the soles of his feet.
Dax must not have checked the yellow trailer. He hadn’t seen Lace had already left. Her things were already gone.
Qui ne risque rien n’a rien.
He who risks nothing has nothing.
“Where are you going?” Eugenie asked.
Cluck kept his hand at his side so she wouldn’t notice his finger, bent out of place.
“We need milk,” he said. They always needed something. Bread. A crate of peaches or strawberries. Eggs, bought a flat at a time. The least le bâtard could do was make himself useful.
He taped his ring finger to his middle one, three bands to hold them together. If he’d known to do this when he was nine, if he’d had enough unbroken fingers to pair them up, maybe he’d still be Luc. Not cygnon. Not Cluck.
The bones in his finger wouldn’t settle. He’d lost the feeling of his veins and muscle holding him together. He’d burnt out into pieces, like firewood gone dark. The wind breathed on the few live embers left, keeping them lit. The little knives stabbing into his ring finger every time he moved his right hand. The cut on his tongue. The wet salt of blood, drying on his lower lip. Where Lace had set the glow of her mouth, a burn’s left-behind heat. The rest of him was as broken as wood crumbling into ash.
He scratched at his lower lip. The cut opened again, and he tasted the salt in his blood.
He wasn’t going after her. If she was there, he didn’t want to see her. He just wanted to know how much of a liar she was, if she believed that conte de bonne femme. Some story about the scar she’d gotten when one of his feathers stuck to her arm.
Keeping his head down worked. The woman at the lakeside took his money, told him to enjoy the show.
The audience gathered on a low cliffside, just high enough to see down into the water. His grandfather told him that before the lake took those trees, there’d been a wide beach between the drop and the waterline.
Cluck stood behind everybody else who spread blankets on the rough grass and rocky ground. The sun had gotten low enough to make the lake glow. The blue-green was translucent as a dragonfly’s wings. He could see straight down to those sunken trees, bare of leaves, an always-winter. Those reaching branches made him shudder, the stark look of dead things.
An old man stood on the bank, holding a pan flute as long as his torso. His fingers, dark and wrinkled as a shelled chestnut, gripped the woven band. He blew a first note, wide and empty as the sky. The first mermaid, a purple one, took her cue and swam in. A few more bars, and another came, bright yellow like a nectarine. Another couple of minutes, and they’d all gathered. Turquoise and indigo. The mint green of tarnished copper.
They moved like kelp, the shapes of their bodies rippling like a current. They didn’t fight their costumes. Instead they looked like they’d gone their whole lives with their legs sealed in the shimmer of beads and sequins. They bent backward and touched their own fins. They joined hands, and the sheer fabric trailing from their tails became the points of enormous stars. Pairs of mermaids touched their fins and arched their backs to form hearts.
They gathered and then dispersed like damselflies. They swam together and then staggered. Like his family’s show, it had the magic of seeming unplanned. The truth was probably that it took weeks of rehearsal. Every time they set up in a new place, they would’ve had to relearn the current of rivers, the depths of lakes, how fast to move, how far down to go.
He never saw them come up for air. They must have swum to the edges of the lake, taking their breaths behind rocks. He never saw them scramble either. They moved quickly, easily. They didn’t startle or scatter when the sky flashed, dry lightning that bleached the deepening blue.
The shells and pearls dotting their hair made them look crowned with their own small coral reefs. Light blinked off their bodies like fish scales speckled their skin. Some illusion faked with sequins or paint. The Palomas’ scales didn’t shine like that, not like the sheen of plastic. He knew that now.
The mermaids wove in and out of the sunken trees. They’d turned the drowned branches into their kelp forest. He couldn’t understand it, how the Paloma mermaids swam where two people had drowned. Even if they hated his family, the water had taken a man from theirs too. Their show was no different than if Cluck’s cousins had danced in the trees above a cemetery.