A Rush of Wings Read online

  PRAISE FOR A Rush of Wings

  Transportive and beautiful. Each page turned in A Rush of Wings is the smell of salt and the spray of seawater. With lyrical prose and a steadfast protagonist fighting against her world and then some, this is a story forged with strength.”

  —CHLOE GONG, New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights

  “A Rush of Wings is a lyrical, moving retelling of one of my favorite fairy tales. Rowenna’s determination to save her family and journey to claiming her own strength will sweep you away.”

  —REBECCA KIM WELLS, author of Shatter the Sky

  “Fierce, lush, and lyrical, A Rush of Wings feels simultaneously like a story passed down through ages and something entirely new. A must-read from historical fantasy’s best.”

  —HANNAH WHITTEN, New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf

  “Outlander meets an old classic in Laura E. Weymouth’s retelling of the wild swans. Chock-full of cold, coastal atmosphere and ancient magic, Rush also features Weymouth’s signature, a fully drawn cast of characters who are by turns prickly, stern, deceptive, cruel, and vulnerable. Another success from a brilliant author.”

  —ANNA BRIGHT, author of The Beholder and The Boundless

  “Atmospheric and lyrical, Weymouth spins magic and whimsy like she was born of it. A Rush of Wings bewitched me body and soul, and I love… I love… I love it!”

  —LAUREN BLACKWOOD, author of Within These Wicked Walls

  “A gorgeously rendered retelling—lovely, raw, and fierce.”

  —JOANNA RUTH MEYER, author of Echo North and Into the Heartless Wood

  “A Rush of Wings is a fierce, dark-hearted fairy tale that yearns toward the light. Readers will love the book’s passionate, loyal characters, beguiling monsters, and subtle, sea-scented magic. With her usual immersive and beautiful writing and a resilient, powerful heroine, Weymouth has crafted another book that feels like a classic but speaks perfectly to this moment in time.”

  —ERICA WATERS, author of Ghost Wood Song and The River Has Teeth

  “Once again, Laura Weymouth’s storytelling is unmatched. Calling to mind childhood fairy tales and teeming with original interpretation, A Rush of Wings is a refreshing blend of nostalgia and unpredictability. Her prose will lift you up on white wings before plunging you from sharp cliffs, and her characters will dazzle against a world framed by history and colored by magic. There are stories to read and stories to live in—and this is a world readers will never want to leave.”

  —ALEKSANDRA ROSS, author of Don’t Call the Wolf

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  For Lauren,

  who wouldn’t let me give up on the girl with the swans.

  The seas of publishing are rough at times, and I couldn’t have anyone better to navigate them with than you.

  Prologue

  “When will you show me how to do that?” Rowenna Winthrop asked her mother. She was newly turned nine, and Mairead had been promising for years to teach her the secret of working craft. They were out on the headland beyond the village of Neadeala, where the cliffs grew steep, dropping from a breakneck height to narrow spits of shingle where waves shattered and foamed. Mairead had a shovel with her and was digging up stones, which she laid in waist-high cairns and infused with protective power.

  “Not yet, love. Not for a while,” Mairead said absently, but a frown drew her golden brows together. Rowenna flushed with shame—she knew what her mother was thinking of. Only that morning Rowenna had let her brother Duncan, the closest to her in age, tease her into a towering passion. She’d thrown herself at him, pummeling her brother with her small fists while he only laughed.

  “If I could, I’d string you up by your toes,” Rowenna had hissed at Duncan. “I’d skin you alive and pull your guts out and feed them to the cliff wyverns. That’d teach you a lesson.”

  Mairead, fair haired and forever composed, had overheard it all from across the single long room of the Winthrops’ cottage. She’d been standing before the tall, warp-weighted loom at which she wove fine woolen broadcloth to sell. Her hand holding the shuttle had stilled at Rowenna’s sharp words, but she’d said nothing—just taken it all in and carried on with her work.

  Rowenna knew, though, that this was why Mairead would not teach her craft—the making of stone cairns into wards and the fashioning of green and growing things into charms or possets. You must have control of yourself in order to work with power, Mairead reminded Rowenna often.

  And Rowenna knew Mairead saw no signs of that control in her yet.

  “Maybe next year?” Rowenna asked hopefully, and Mairead smiled, her cornflower-blue gaze soft with affection.

  “Aye, love. Maybe next year.”

  * * *

  “Do you think I’m ready now?” Rowenna asked, trying vainly to keep impatience from creeping into her words. It was midsummer of her thirteenth year, and two summers back she’d begun to hear the voice of the wind. It made little sense to her, but Mairead had told Rowenna it was a good sign, that she’d work powerful craft when her time came, for a piece of nature itself had chosen to be her ally.

  Yet her time never seemed to come.

  Once again, they were on the cliffs, but today they kept near home. The Winthrops’ stone cottage stood a hundred yards away, smoke spiraling from the chimney. A shaggy cow cropped grass at the end of a picket, and Rowenna’s youngest brother, Finn, who was only two, lay napping on a blanket in the sun.

  Mairead, who’d been burying iron nails at intervals in the rich peat soil, straightened and glanced at Rowenna.

  “What did George Groom say to you on Sunday after church?” she asked. “I know he can be a difficult lad—Duncan’s fought with him a dozen times if he’s done it once.”

  Rowenna looked down at her feet.

  “Enna,” Mairead coaxed. “What did the boy say?”

  “He said you’re a witch,” Rowenna answered reluctantly. “And that I must be a witch too. Not just that, either—he said…”

  She faltered. But Mairead was waiting, her beautiful face mild and expectant.

  “He said I must be the spawn of a union between you and the devil himself, because I look nothing like you or my brothers or like Athair,” Rowenna finished, using the Gàidhlig word for “father,” as was her practice.

  “I’m sorry,” Mairead said. Pity underpinned the words, but with a sickening drop of her stomach, Rowenna guessed what would come next. Her mother was too shrewd and too clever by far.

  “What did you say in reply?” Mairead asked. There was no accusation in the question. It was just an inquiry after fact, but Rowenna felt pinned down, like a gutted herring staked out to dry.

  “I said he was right and that I’d lay a curse on him,” Rowenna replied. “I told George I’d ask the devil, my father, to drag him down to hell for fighting with Duncan and speaking ill of you.”

  Even now she couldn’t keep a note of anger from ringing out with her words. How dare George say such things, when everyone knew how hard the Winthrops worked, and that the Grooms were shiftless and lazy, the whole lot of them?

  “Hm.” Mairead took an iron nail from her apron pocket and set it into the earth. “Go check on Finn, won’t you, love? I think he’s waking.”

  And Rowenna knew she should not ask abou
t craft again for some time.

  * * *

  “I’m fifteen today,” Rowenna said desperately to Mairead as they stood side by side, washing the breakfast dishes. “Athair reminded me this morning before he left.”

  There were English soldiers billeted at a few of the homes in Neadeala, and Rowenna’s father, Cam, was in a rage about it, though no troops had come to the Winthrop cot on its lonely cliff top. Cam had kissed Rowenna upon waking and told her happy birthday and gone straightaway to Laird Sutherland to see what could be done about the redcoats in the village.

  Likely nothing, Rowenna knew. Ever since the English king had sent his youngest half brother to Inverness to be rid of him, small battles and uprisings had sparked intermittently across the Highlands, like so many torches guttering to life only to be snuffed out. The boy in Inverness was ambitious, folk said, and determined to set up a court to rival that of his kin in the south. He’d come with troops of his own, and Rowenna had overheard Cam say time and again that the Highlands were a scapegoat England had used to avoid yet another bloody civil war.

  But they were not used to servitude in this wild and free place. Fealty to a laird was one thing. The tyranny of a distant king’s inconvenient relation and the yoke of bondage that came with him was quite another. In the Highlands, that could not be borne.

  “Fifteen today!” Mairead gasped, her face lighting at the reminder. “So you are. I’m sorry it slipped my mind with all that’s going on. Poor Enna, scrubbing the porridge pot on her birthday. Dry your hands and come sit a moment with me—the dishes will keep.”

  Obediently Rowenna wiped her hands and let herself be drawn over to the hearth, where Mairead settled into a rocking chair and Rowenna sat on the floor, resting her head against her mother’s knees. Mairead ran one hand over Rowenna’s black hair, and the girl shut her eyes, knowing what would come next. It was tradition between them, that every year Mairead would recount the story of Rowenna’s birth.

  “The night you were born, the sea raged at our shores,” Mairead began, and Rowenna smiled. She knew this story by heart but loved to hear it told. “I’d never seen weather to match it—the waves beat so hard at the cliffs that their spray hit against our windows, along with the rain. It was as if the ocean and I had chosen to make war with each other, both of us laboring away as the night dragged on. Finally, near dawn, you slipped into the world. But as you did, the breakers below the cliffs surged so high and the wind gusted so fiercely, one of the storm shutters tore from its hinges. When the midwife held you up to the lantern to look at you, salt spray caught you full in the face. You squalled at the sea and the sea squalled back, and that was your first baptism, by the wind and the ocean, before ever a priest laid hands on you.”

  Mairead’s touch was gentle as she combed through Rowenna’s hair. Opening her eyes, Rowenna stared at the peat embers burning on the hearth and gathered her courage.

  “All I want this year is for you to teach me our craft,” she said, and regretted the words the moment they’d left her. Once she’d spoken her heart’s wish, it could not be unsaid.

  Mairead’s hands stilled, and Rowenna knew at once that the answer would be no again.

  “I saw you,” Mairead told her, and a hint of reproach crept into her mother’s gentle voice. “I saw you in the village, Rowenna, when that redcoat passed you by.”

  Ice lodged itself in the pit of Rowenna’s stomach. Only the day before she’d gone into Neadeala with Mairead, to buy sugar and lamp oil. One of the billeted redcoats had brushed against Rowenna and said something foul as he did.

  The wind had been rustling about her, restless and longing, murmuring over and over to itself in its senseless way.

  Rowenna Rowenna Rowenna, our love, our own, our light.

  And Rowenna, who had not yet received a moment’s instruction in craft, yielded to temptation and tried to curse the redcoat. With one piece of her, she reached out to the wind, and with the other, she focused all her hurt and spite and shame on the retreating soldier. What she wanted to bring about with her unschooled craft, she didn’t know. But she longed to sting, as she had been stung. She’d found herself spineless and powerless, though, and that had cut her deeper than even the redcoat’s words.

  “I can’t teach you yet,” Mairead said decidedly. “But you must keep asking, my saltwater girl.”

  Her hands began to move again, once more running through Rowenna’s hair. “Even rock wears away before salt water in the end. One day, you’ll be ready.”

  Rowenna was relieved to have her mother at her back, so that Mairead could not see the hot tears yet another dismissal brought to her eyes. For the first time, despair washed over the girl. She would never be free of anger. If that was the requirement for learning craft, then she’d have to live all her life in ignorance and cut off this part of herself entirely.

  “Yes, Màthair,” she said dully. “I can wait.”

  But in her heart of hearts, Rowenna knew she would not be able to bring herself to ask for her mother’s help again.

  Chapter One

  THREE YEARS LATER

  Rowenna found her mother on the cliff tops to the northeast of the Winthrop cottage. It was a storm-tossed March night—the sky was a boil of approaching thunderheads, and Mairead Winthrop crouched on her hands and knees, scrabbling for stones in the scant, unyielding earth of the cliffs.

  It hadn’t been hard for Rowenna to find her mother. A nameless something, a pull at her bones, had alerted her to the fact that Mairead was missing and drawn her here. The untapped craft within Rowenna led her places of its own accord with increasing frequency now, but she said nothing of it to anyone and ignored the call when she could. Mairead had made it clear enough that Rowenna was ill-suited for this sort of work and too undisciplined for power. And Rowenna had resolved not to grasp for power if that was so. If she had to wait a lifetime to be taught her craft, then wait she would, even if the wordless pulls and yearnings within her tore her apart.

  “Màthair, come inside,” Rowenna begged. “This is no weather to be out in.”

  Anxious things clawed at the insides of her rib cage at the sight of Mairead. The oncoming storm hadn’t yet swallowed up the last gray light of dusk, and she could see that her mother was filthy. Dark soil stained Mairead’s clothes and clung to her skin, and her nails were broken and bloodied from wrestling with rocks she’d dug up and built into a lopsided cairn. Far below them, the angry sea worried away at the cliffs, its constant muttering having built up to a discontented roar.

  Whatever Mairead was doing, Rowenna did not understand it. All her life she’d sat by, observing her mother’s craft, trying to still the shards of it that lurked beneath her own skin until such a time as she was deemed ready. An all too familiar sense of frustration and confusion washed over Rowenna, bitter enough for her to choke on.

  “Go home, Enna,” Mairead pleaded. “There’s nothing you can do to help.”

  Rowenna stayed as she was, wracked with indecision.

  You’re not ready yet, Mairead had told her so many times, with or without words. Perhaps you never will be.

  But there was hunger in Rowenna Winthrop, no matter how she strove to keep it in check. A hunger to know her inexplicable pieces better. A starveling desire to be whole and understood, even if only by herself.

  “Enna!” Mairead insisted.

  Rather than do as she was bid, Rowenna sank to her knees at her mother’s side. A cold, fitful rain was starting up, and she knew if her father, Cam, had been there, he’d have dealt with this very differently. If he’d been home, he’d have coaxed Mairead in out of this weather, taking her back to the Winthrop cot and warming her by the fire. He’d have soothed her with quiet words and his steadfast presence, the way he’d done for all of the Winthrops at one time or another.

  But Cam was gone and had been for months. The English tyrant in Inverness still kept his upstart and unwanted court, and the disparate sparks of rebellion had been fanned to full flame by his
cruelty. Cam had left to join the Highlands uprising, and in his absence there was only Rowenna to manage Mairead’s fey moods, for her brothers found them entirely unnerving. Well, so did Rowenna, but she did not have the luxury of casting off her mother’s care onto someone else.

  Setting her lantern down, Rowenna pushed up the sleeves of her oilskin and slowly began to dig at Mairead’s side. It seemed simple enough—to pull rocks from the earth. There was no craft in that on its own. No witchwork. Her mother was sobbing with fear, the whites of her eyes gleaming in the lantern’s feeble glow. It was catching, that fear, and however benign the work, soon Rowenna’s belly roiled with nerves. She’d seen Mairead compelled to do things before—to build her cairns on the cliff tops at the solstices and equinoxes, to spin yarn and knit new pullovers for every one of the Winthrop boys well before their old clothes had worn out.

  But none of it had ever been like this.

  This wasn’t just a compulsion. This was raw panic.

  The wind died down for a moment, and Rowenna realized with a chill that the strange, rhythmic sound she’d heard beneath the gale was not the omnipresent sea, breaking against the shore, but Mairead herself. Her lips moved constantly as she muttered the words of the Our Father, over and over again as she worked.

  Our Father, who art in heaven

  hallowed be thy name;

  thy kingdom come,

  thy will be done….

  Deliver us from evil

  Deliver us from evil

  Deliver us from evil

  “Màthair?” Rowenna finally managed to get the word out. She pried a rock free from the iron-hard earth and handed it to Mairead, who took it with a shamefaced look. “What is it you’re afraid of? What are you doing? And how can I help?”

  It was the first time in three years that Rowenna had put a question to her mother about the nature of her work.