The Weight of Feathers

The performers climbed with their wings folded down, leads tethered to their wrists so that when they reached the top, they could pull the wings open to their full span. Those cords gave them a way to bring the weight of their wings forward. But if they didn’t hold themselves upright, a sudden gust could still make them fall. If one of the women stepped wrong, she could catch her dress, tearing the fabric and slipping on the organza.

The men moved with as much calm as if it was their own muscle and not the trees holding them up. They pulled themselves onto higher branches as though the wings helped them instead of getting in the way, but Lace could guess how heavy they were.

The women’s flower crowns never came undone, the larkspur and paintbrush clinging to their heads like a swarm of butterflies. They danced like the branches were broad as a field. They arched their arms so softly they looked as though the wind moved them. One in a champagne-colored dress stood so far up on her toes and lifted a leg so high and close to her body she looked like a clock striking noon. A tall one wearing mauve did an arabesque and tilted her body so her pointed foot showed between her wings. Another in dusk blue spun along a bough in a row of turns, spotting with nothing but stars.

Now she knew why Justin said so little about the show. He didn’t want to admit how beautiful their enemies looked as they danced. When one of the men lifted one of the women, the wind turned her skirt to water. When he set her down, she landed so softly the branches didn’t bend.

The women leaped like they knew the branches would hold them, like the boughs whispered their reassurances as they flew. The men’s jumps from higher branches to lower ones made the audience gasp, and then applaud. The wind streamed through those feathers, and they looked like they were flying.

Even with the weight of those wings, Lace never caught them stumbling or flailing their hands to keep from falling. Each of them had balance as constant and rooted as these trees. If they extended their arms, it was part of the dance.

These winged creatures, las hadas, kept rhythm with each other, with no music but the sound of chimes hung in the trees. No metal or wood, just pieces of polished glass, the same pastels as their dresses. If the wind died down, the performers touched them, and the glass gave off shimmers of sound. They made one chime answer another, then a few more answer that one, like the staggered song of nightbirds.

When one hada stepped into the light, another faded into a bough’s shadow. It looked random, an unplanned dance, charged with a romance that made the audience forget these people were relatives.

Lace could sense the choreography under their movements. The show had the same patterned feel as the mermaids’ dance. The trick was making it look like no two nights were ever the same, so each performance brimmed with fleeting magic.

Sometimes a Corbeau woman opened her hand, releasing a shower of wildflowers, and girls who watched from the ground held up their palms to catch the cream petals. Lace could never spot the women filling their hands. They must have hidden the flowers, one hada gathering a handful when the audience was watching another.

Tourists stared up, their necks taut with the worry of watching tightrope walkers. Locals didn’t gasp, used to these shows year after year, but they still watched, smiled. Children lifted their hands and pointed whenever they spotted another fairy in the trees. After the show, the women offered children fairy stones, cheap glass pebbles full of glitter, and their small faces flooded with wonder.

Watching sowed a strange jealousy in Lace. It burrowed into her as she fell asleep on the floor of the yellow trailer. Her exile and her wounds kept her from the shutter click of families taking pictures for vacation scrapbooks. They kept her from daughters in bright dresses reaching out to touch her tail fin, wondering if it was real.

Did the women on those branches know how lucky they were to be beautiful? Lace had never been their kind of beautiful, but she’d faked it. The less stunning of the Corbeau women faked it too, now with Lace’s help.