Paper Pearls

         The sweet but distant lullaby lifted and carried Devnet like water, a river of notes pulling her out of bed. A small part of her fought it, but with each new note her resistance grew weaker. Distantly she felt her bare feet touch the cool wooden floor planks, moving swiftly across them. She floated down the stairs like foam upon the ocean, so fluid she might have been flying.

         She didn’t even notice the chilly air as she stepped into the night, the brisk wind kissing pink onto her pale cheeks.

         “That took longer than expected,” came a soft, smooth voice, his words breaking the flow of Devnet’s musical river. “Come along, then.”

         The music changed as he turned, the sweetly rasping panpipes replaced by a resonating baritone voice. The words of his song were strange to her, but she recognized their meaning perfectly. Follow me. It was a request she had no power – nor any desire – to refuse.

         She dimly noted their entrance into the forest, as the pillowy, dew-drenched grass became dirt and dead leaves beneath her feet. The moonlight wavered and was eventually snuffed out by the towering treetops, which were beginning to thicken with new leaves. The darkness only focused her more intently on the sound of his voice.

         She didn’t even feel teeth pierce her right foot, nor the burning agony the followed, until the voice went silent and its owner became still in front of her.

         “What is it?” he demanded. Was he talking to her?

         The longer he let the silence stretch, the heavier Devnet felt. The river she had been riding began to run dry, and in its absence, she was up to her knee in fiery pain.

         “Ow!” she cried, though she didn’t realize it was for the second time. “Ow, my leg! What – where am I?”

         “Stupid girl, surely you wore shoes?”

         Devnet felt indignant at being called stupid by this stranger, who must surely know that if she had intended to go on a hike that night, she would have certainly remembered shoes. Groggy fear sped the beat of her heart as she realized more and more that something was very wrong here. She stepped backwards, unable to see her own feet, let alone the source of the voice that must be uncomfortably close to her.

         “Who said that?” she whispered into the darkness, wincing as her leg gave a particularly enthusiastic throb of pain.
         He whispered a word she didn’t understand, and a soft globe of light flared between them.

         He was tall, thick, and his dark features immediately gave him away as a Lark. The light glinted off his eyes as she sized him up, and their unusual pale color sent a shiver down her back. The short knife in his hand seemed to make it instantly clear that he meant her harm.

         His eyes, however, were studying her foot. Forgetting the situation for a moment, she followed his eyes. Blood welled from a set of neat punctures near her baby toe. Hot pain enveloped her lower leg, and was creeping steadily up her thigh.

         “Snake must have got you,” observed the stranger grimly. “Quickly, there isn’t much time.”

         Devnet was given no time to reply as she was lifted into the stranger’s arms and carried at full speed into the darkness. Her fear was soothed immediately by the sound of his voice close by her ear, and she was again rocking with the peaceful flow of the river, just before she slipped into blackness.

         She was swimming. Or drowning. It was sometimes hard to tell, but she was sure of one thing: she was soaking wet. She kicked and writhed against the current, occasionally caught and dragged down to the rocky bottom by the fingers of riverweed that reached for her. Water snakes slithered against her skin, hovering just out of sight around her ankles, ignoring her efforts to kick them. Hands belonging to people she couldn’t see reached out for her, but she pushed them away. Why wouldn’t they let her float in peace? She was tired of being tossed an grabbed.

         Just ahead, she could see that the river made an impossible dead-end into a vast meadow of wildflowers. She felt relieved; it was nearly done.

         But someone was blocking her view of the horizon. The Lark from the forest stood on the shore, the wind whipping his dark curls about his face as he sang sweetly to her. It was a message she recongized: follow me.

         Before she could reach the shore, the current changed in the direction of the wind, carrying her back upriver. When she looked back, there was a boat. A hand reached down for her, and this time, she took it.

         Devnet’s eyes were weak when she opened them. The river had left her wet and trembling with the cold. But as awareness returned to her, the image of the river began to dissolve and she realized she was not covered in water, but in perspiration.
         She blinked, searching for the source of the dim, flickering light and finding a small oil lamp on the nighttable beside her. Beyond the lamp she was surprised to find the Lark boy sitting in a rocking chair across the room from her, playing with a small, red rubber ball. She watched him for a moment, her eyes following his moments. He threw the ball to the ground and watched it bounce up, against the wall, and then back into his hands. The repititious noise was soothing. Bunkthumpock. Bunkthumpock.

         “You’re awake,” he observed casually, catching the ball and pocketing it. “That’s a relief.”

         “Why?” asked Devnet, suddenly wondering what exactly had happened to her, and how long she had been asleep.

         “Let’s just say that if things had gone another way, you wouldn’t have been the only one facing the afterlife earlier than expected.”

         Now that sounded odd. “They would have killed you?”

         He shrugged, leaning back against the wall opposite her and taking the little red ball out of his pocket. “Someone would have to look after your everlasting soul,” he answered simply, passing the ball back and forth between his nimble hands.

         Devnet asked the most obvious question. “Why?”

         The young man opened his mouth to respond when a middle-aged woman poked her head into the room.

         “Thought I heard voices. She’s awake then, I see. I’ll tell them to call off the execution, then.”

         The Lark boy smirked as the woman left. “My mother,” he explained, nodding in the direction of the door. “Being funny again.”

         It took several moments for Devnet to finally come to grips with the fact that she shouldn’t be here. In fact, the last thing she remembered doing was falling asleep in her own bed.

         “You – you kidnapped me,” she accused, wiping her damp face with the woolen blanket that covered her.

         Another shrug. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose. But I have a feeling you will come to realize you’re meant to be here.”

         Devnet made a sour face. “I’m afraid you are sadly mistaken, sir. In any case, I will be found long before I come to any such realization.”

         “You will not be found,” he insisted with frightening confidence.

         “How are you so certain?”

         He smirked. “Because no one is going to look for you.”

         Devnet scowled. “I’m fairly certain that my parents will not neglect to notice that their firstborn has vanished into thin air.”

         “Ah, but that is exactly what will happen,” he affirmed. “They forget they ever had a daughter at all. That is the way it must be. You were never truly theirs to begin with, after all.”

         Instead of retorting angrily, Devnet bit her lip as her mind fluttered with troubling thoughts. Could all of Nanny’s changeling nonsense be real? It was unthinkable, unfathomable.

         “Do not mistake my meaning, you are their flesh and blood,” he continued. “But you were created for us.”

         “You are raving mad,” Devnet replied, her trembling voice betraying her uncertainty.

         He ignored her. “There was a foretelling of the events that would lead to my people’s reclamation of our island.  It was written that a blue-eyed boy – that would be me – will be born with the sole purpose to find, capture, and protect the Lion god’s mortal daughter – that would be you – who will be marked by golden eyes and hair. Under her – that is, you – the tribes will unite and conquer the pale thieves that stole this island out from under us.”

         “And you believe that,” scoffed Devnet, wishing to antagonize him.

         “Do I believe you were fathered by a god? Perhaps not. But the reality of it does not matter, you see. It does not matter that I have blue eyes because my grandsire was a white man. It does not matter that I chose you simply because you were the first girl I found with golden eyes. What matters is that it is what my people believe, and because of it we will finally be able to unite and defeat the invaders. The ancients that made the foretelling knew this, and that is why I believe.”

         “And you expect me to just go along with it?” Devnet pressed, her mind racing.

         “I make it a rule not to expect anything from anyone.”

         “So you simply work witchcraft on my family, enchant me out of my bed, and then turn around and ask me to help you betray my own people.”

         He gave a small smirk. “Sorry, did I give the impression we were asking?”