To make such a thing happen, though it might seem the work of an incantation and an arcane gesture, is the marriage of effort and will. And will, once wielded in such fashion, is not lightly undone.
But just because the wizard would not lift his curse did not mean that the spell might never be broken.
It just meant it would require a magic stronger than wizardry to break it.
Maeve’s apartment was full of birds. Photographs papered the walls, layered over each other in collage, Escheresque spirals of wings that had never flown together fell in cascading recursive loops of impossible birds.
The statue from Brian was a carnival fantasy among articulated skeletons in shadowboxes, shivered bones set at precise angles of flight.
Her own bones ached as if wings mantled beneath the surface of her skin and longed to burst forth from her back.
The canvas before her was enormous, six feet in height and half again as wide, the largest she had ever painted. On it, a murmuration of starlings arced and turned across a storm-tossed sky.
Among the starlings were other birds. Bird of vengeance, storm-called, and storm-conjuring. The Erinyes.
The Kindly Ones.
More terrible than lightning, they harried the New York skyline.
Cramps spasmed Maeve’s hands around her brushes, and her eyes burned, but still she layered color onto the canvas.
It was a kind of madness, she thought, the way it felt to finish a painting. The muscle-memory knowledge of exactly where the brush strokes went, even though this was nothing she had painted before. The fizzing feeling at the top of her head that told her what she was painting was right, was true. The adrenaline that flooded her until she couldn’t sit, or sleep, or eat until it was finished.
Madness, surely. But a madness of wings, and of glory.
The skies of New York had grown stranger. Sweeney was used to the occasional airborne mystery. It wasn’t as if he had ever thought himself the only sometimes-bird on the wing.
But a flock of firebirds had taken up residence in Central Park, and an exaltation of larks had begun exalting in Mandarin in the bell tower of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
He thought he had seen the phoenix, but perhaps it had only been a particularly gaudy sunset.
Magic all unasked for, and stuck about with feathers.
Though perhaps not magic unconjured.
Sweeney paged through a notebook, not lost on a train but slid from a messenger bag. He had wanted, he supposed, to see how she saw him.
Of course, he was in none of the sketches.
But its pages crawled with magic. It was rife in the shadows and shad ings and lines of the sketches. Sweeney didn’t know if it was wizardry or not, what he was looking at, but there was power in her drawings.
Perhaps enough power to unmake a curse.
“You’re sure I can’t convince you to come to the opening?” Brian asked. “Because I think people are really going to want to talk to you about these paintings, and Maeve, do not say ‘my art speaks for itself.’”
“You have to admit, you pretty much asked me to.”
“Maeve.”
“They’ll sell better if I’m not there.”
“What would make you think that?”
Because if I’m there, I’ll spend the entire evening locked in the bathroom, occasionally vomiting from panic, she thought. “Because if I’m not there, you can spin me as mysterious. Or better yet, perfect. Tell them what they want to hear without the risk that I’ll show up with paint still in my hair.”
“I have never once seen you with paint in your hair. And even if I had, artists are supposed to be absent-minded and eccentric. It’s part of your charm.”
“You told me I wasn’t allowed to be absent-minded and eccentric anymore, remember? Not in this gallery. Not at these prices.”
“I suppose I did. Still, this is your night, Maeve. If you want to be here, even if there is paint in your hair, you should come.”
“I can assure you, Brian, I won’t want to.”
Sweeney could, if he concentrated enough, prevent the shift in form from man to bird from happening. Usually, he didn’t bother—the change came when it would, and after all of these years, he had made peace with his spontaneous wings.
But he wanted to see the paintings. To see, captured in pigment and brushstroke the birds that Maeve had made a space for in New York’s skies.
He wanted to see her, just once, in the guise and costume of a normal man.
More, he wanted to see if the magic that crackled across the pages of her notebook was in the paintings as well, to see if she could paint him free. A request that might allow him to once again be a normal man, instead of what he was: a creature cursed into loneliness and the wrong skin, whose only consolation was the further loneliness of flight.
Sweeney’s difficulty was that while he could, by force of will, hold himself in human form, it let the madness push further into his consciousness. The longer he fought the transformation, the more he struggled to be shaped like a man, they less he thought like one.
Sweeney slid on his jacket. He checked to make sure his buttons matched, his fly was up, and his shoes were from the same pair. He hailed a cab, and hoped for the best.
On the night of the opening, Maeve was not at the gallery. She had been there earlier in the day to double-check the way the paintings had been hung, to see to all the last minute details, and to tell Brian, one more time, that she was absolutely not coming to the opening.
“Fine. Then at least put on a nice dress at home and have some champagne with a friend so I don’t get depressed thinking about you.”
“If that’s what will make you happy, of course I will,” she lied, offering a big smile, and accepting Brian’s hug.
As the show opened, Maeve was wearing a T-shirt with holes in it, and eating soup dumplings. Which she toasted with a glass of the very fine champagne that Brian had sent over. Emilia had texted from the gallery that the “paintings are your best thing ever. So proud of you!” Comfort and celebration and a friend, even if far from what Brian imagined.
Strange to think that this show, which Brian thought could be big enough to change her career, began with seeing a bird turn into a naked man. Which was certainly the one story she could never tell when asked what inspired her work.
She hadn’t seen the bird for a while now. Or, thankfully, the naked man. Some parts of the strangeness of the city were better left unexplained.
Too many answers killed the magic, and Maeve wanted the magic. Its possibilities were what made up for the discomfort and worry of every day life.
The lights were too bright and there were too many people. Sweeney bit the insides of his cheeks and walked through the gallery as if its floor were shattering glass.
The paintings. He thought they were beautiful, probably, or that they would be if he could ever stand still long enough to really look at them, to see them as more than blurs as he circled the gallery. He felt too hot, his skin ill-fitting, his heart racing like a bird’s.
Sweeney clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms, and forced his breath in and out until it steadied.
There.