Page 27 of Ruby
“Will find. Force touch you.”
There is a hitch in her breathing and I know that my song has worked. A large part of me feels bad for scaring her this way but it had to be done if we are to make any progress at this point.
I watch her start to crawl toward me and I help her open the cage so that the broken shards does not hurt her.
She lets out a wordless melody and I am taken aback by the pure, unbridled malice her voice is capable of holding.
“Get me down,” she says in a resonance that makes my feathers clamp tight to my body.
This one was clearly already familiar with unhappiness even before this situation.
However, there is no time to check manners and I reach out my two bottom hands to grab her. There is a flash of fear in her face when she looks at me and I hope that she does not move too much as I climb down. I am not a climber and doing it with all four hands on the way up was hard enough.
With two hands holding onto the small female and just two left for climbing, I am very unstable and she does not hesitate letting me know her thoughts.
“Terrible climber,” her song tells me after I bump her into a branch.
Embarrassment washes over me.
I want to apologize but one of my hands begins to slip from the tree and I realize that I need all of my focus to get us both down from the tree in one piece. I decide to ignore her and continue climbing my way down until we reach the bottom of the tree.
She doesn’t even let me properly place her on the ground before she eagerly detaches herself from me and takes a few steps to create some space between us. As I dust off leaves and tree particles that have stuck themselves to me, I can feel her gaze on me, heavy and questioning.
“What now?” she asks me, her hands folded across her body in a stance that seems defensive.
Her eyes seem to scan me from top to bottom, no doubt reassessing me and noticing my injured body and I cannot help but feel judged.
I do not look anywhere near my best right now; my feathers are matted and muddied, shot through here and there with bits of leaves and sticks, and my skin is bruised and scarred. I carefully keep my mangled wing stumps tucked into my feathers, thankful now she didn’t seem to see them earlier as I tried to convince her.
I cannot help but survey her as well.
Her arms and legs are proportioned opposite of what they should be. Legs long where they should be short. Her one set of arms delicate and short. Although she is taller than Ree, she is still very small. Looking at her makes me feel relieved that I have fulfilled one of my promises to Ree. I can only hope she makes it a little easier to fulfill the second goal of getting her to safety.
“Better walker than climber?” she sings, her tone holding a taunting resonance.
I want to tell her that I am not built for the ground, that I am a creature of the skies forced to suffer these current circumstances. But then I remember I will never fly again.
“We go,” I sing back.
It is obvious that she did not expect a response from me and she makes a small sound of annoyance. She starts to sing a reply but stops before I can understand the melody. She does this a few more times and lets out another grunt of frustration.
I know that she is embarrassed at how little she understands the language, so I offer advice.“Sing slowly. No need rush.”
Her red eyes look up at me and she scoffs. “Too long. Few words. Stupid language.”
There is embarrassment in the melody of her song and although I feel insulted on behalf of my lost brothers and the entire flock, I understand that it is not native to her and will have to take some getting used to.
If I was covered in as many red feathers as Tch’tek I might have a cutting reply, but instead sympathy rises within me. Then another emotion.
Instead of being annoyed, I am slightly amused by her fledgling-like behavior. What would Nnaiv say if he saw me now having to guide someone so clueless through the intricacies of our complicated language?
“Sing slowly,” I intone to her.
“No. I sing how want,” she resonates, staccato anger and defiance mixed in with the same taunting reverberations.
She still mocks me. I feel disappointment begin to settle in my stomach.
I am disappointed in myself because this should not have been so hard.
