Snippet - for Avi

The birds couldn’t plan their meetings by the time – at least not the time Aurelia had learned from her books, which gonged loudly from the church tower in the valley below. The sun’s position decided their schedule, so she had to adjust her excuses as it moved. For the first weeks it took little effort; their calls would come during court, when no one noticed her or expected her to appear, and when in fact most preferred she were invisible. When the bottom of the sun’s arc just kissed the upper boughs of the great beech tree beyond the courtyard walls, Aurelia would hurry through the corridors and up the winding stair to the turret.

In those first days she met the heavy wooden door with hesitance, certain that she would find nothing on the other side, that she had dreamed them or that they would tire of her and abruptly cease their visits. But each time she turned the latch and shoved it open, she would be greeted by the flickering wind of a hundred wings and the barely stifled chatter of avian voices; and so each day she gained faith in their friendship and confidence in their promises.

Soon the sun began to race the clock, dropping more quickly into place above the beech while the hands of human time remained constant and slow. She feigned stomach aches to excuse herself from tea, hunching slowly out of the kitchen until she was out of sight, then straightening brightly and making her hasty way up the stair. When that became suspicious she misbehaved, chattered incessantly about inane, silly things, repeated herself constantly – all things she knew Marie couldn’t bear for long. This plan worked wonderfully most of the time, for Marie would begin to roll her eyes and slump in her chair until finally she would ask Aurelia if there wasn’t something else she’d rather be doing and send her skipping happily out, triumphant, into the halls.

Those were lovely days – Aurelia would shove sweet rolls into her pockets and bound up the stair to the turret, not even slowing at the top but bursting out the door and breaking into a run, feeling the fluttering of feathers on her wrists and face as she sprinted across the stones and leapt gleefully into the empty air, and when she just began to feel the fall of gravity in her stomach, their claws would close and lift her, bursting with joyful laughter, out over the castle walls and into the open sky beyond.