The Weight of Feathers

Cluck turned around.

His mother kept picking out lavender. “Your brother would like to talk to you.”

Cluck slid his hands into his pockets, hiding his wrecked fingers in the lining.

This wasn’t an order to go find his brother.

Dax would find him.



Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.

Raise crows and they will peck your eyes out.

Lace held an eye shadow brush under the bathroom tap, flooding out the color she couldn’t get with rubbing alcohol the night before. Lilac-tinted water swirled down the drain.

One of the Corbeau women pushed on the half-open door. Lace couldn’t remember her name. Only that the dress she wore for the show was yellow as a pear.

“Excuse-moi.” She reached past Lace for a bottle of perfume all the Corbeau girls shared.

Lace nodded to the woman’s reflection. At first she’d kept the door closed, but cleaning the brushes took so long that every few minutes a Corbeau woman knocked, wanting the mirror so she could fix her lipstick on her way out to the Blackberry Festival. After the second time, Lace gave up and just left the bathroom door open.

She’d wondered what about those booths and fruit stands thrilled them so much until Eugenie sighed and said, “So many farmers’ sons,” as she combed her hair.

The woman sprayed on a little perfume, and the room filled up with a warm, sweet smell like cardamom. All wrong for the weather, but if the Corbeau girls wanted to stand out among all the powdery flower perfumes, that was how to do it.

The woman rubbed one wrist against the other, eyeing the brushes. “How’d you get stuck with that job?”

“Someone has to.” Lace pressed water out of the rinsed bristles. “And I don’t mind.”

“Better you than me.” The woman set the bottle back on the counter. “Next time use the sink upstairs,” she said on her way out. “Horrible little mirror. No one will bother you.”

Forget it. Lace would rather do all this at two in the morning than go upstairs. Being in this house was bad enough.

Lace laid out the brushes to dry, the chatter of a few Corbeau girls rounding the side of the house and then moving too far away to hear.

A door slammed at the other end of the hall, and Lace jumped. So many Corbeaus had left the house in the last few hours—off on errands or enjoying the free hours before tonight’s show—that she’d thought the whole downstairs was empty.

Even from the bathroom doorway, Lace could hear the muffled yelling. She patted her hands dry on her skirt and took slow steps to the other end of the hall, trying to keep the old wood quiet.

She stopped at the closed door, making out two voices she was just starting to learn, and the clipped sound of skin hitting skin.

“Who is this girl?” one voice asked. Dax, the man who’d stood over Lace and the blond woman.

“She’s from around here,” the second answered. Cluck.

Dax chuckled. “She’s from around here. Well, that fixes everything, doesn’t it?” Then came the thud of a body hitting a dresser or a wall. “We don’t know enough about her. She could be a thief.”

Lace pressed herself into the door, listening against the wood.

“That’s what everyone thinks we are,” Cluck said, his voice strained with trying to get his air back. “So I take that as a recommendation.”

“You don’t get to make that kind of decision on your own.”

Guilt pinched at the back of Lace’s neck. It crackled down her body, spreading through her escamas.

“Do you want me to fire her?” Cluck asked. “She’s good. You saw her work.”

“Les mecs,” a voice behind Lace whispered, close enough to warm her shoulder.

Lace startled, tripping on the hallway carpet.

Nicole Corbeau passed by, shaking her head. “Il faut que jeunesse se passe, n’est-ce pas?” She rolled her eyes at Lace, ready for her to agree.