He wanted the pulse and the press of people he had never quite felt home among. They would be his home, if Maeve succeeded. Perhaps then he would feel as if he belonged.
He should have, perhaps, spent his night on the wing, the flight a fragment to shore against the ruin of his days once he could no longer fly. He would miss, every day of his life he would miss the sensation of the air as his feathers cut through it. But he would have a life.
Sweeney bought truly execrable coffee in an “I Love NY” cup, because at that moment, with every fiber of his being, Sweeney did.
“Can I ask,” Maeve hesitated.
“How this happened,” Sweeney said.
She looked up from her sketchbook. “Well, yes. I don’t want to be rude, or ask you to talk about something that’s hurtful, but maybe I’ll know better how to paint you out of being a bird if I know how you became one in the first place.”
“It was a curse.”
“I thought that was the kind of thing that only happened in fairytales.”
Sweeney shrugged, then apologized.
“That’s fine. I don’t need you to hold the pose … And I’ll stop interrupting.” Maeve bent back to her sketchbook.
“It is like something from a fairy tale. I was angry. I spoke and acted without thought, and, in the way of these things, it was a wizard I insulted. He cursed me for what I had done.
“For over a thousand years since, this has been my life.”
“I’m sorry. Even if it was your fault, over a thousand years of vengeance seems cruel.”
Tension rippled over Sweeney’s skin. He shrank in on himself, fingers curling to claws.
“What is it?”
Sweeney extended his arm. Feathers downed its underside. “I had hoped this wouldn’t happen.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only in my pride. Which was the point of the thing, after all.” He schooled his breathing, and Maeve watched him relax, muscle by muscle. Except for a patch near his wrist, the feathers fell from Sweeney’s skin.
“May I?” Maeve asked.
Sweeney nodded.
Maeve stroked her hand over the feathers, feeling the softness, and the heat of Sweeney’s skin beneath. Heart racing like a bird’s she stepped closer and kissed him.
A beat passed, and then another.
Sweeney’s hand fisted in her hair, and he shuddered a breath into her mouth. She struggled out of her clothes, not wanting to break the kiss, or the contact.
Feathers alternated with skin under Maeve’s hands, and Sweeney traced the outlines of her shoulder blades as if she, too, had wings.
As they moved together, Sweeney was neither feathered nor mad. Maeve did not feel the panic of a body too close, only the joy of a body exactly close enough.
White feathers blanketed the floor beneath them.
Maeve looked at Sweeney. “I don’t think the painting is going to work.”
“Why?” He tucked her hair behind her ear.
“I mean, I think it will be a good painting. But I don’t think it will be magic.”
“I’m no worse than I am now if it isn’t. All I ask is for a good painting, Maeve. Anything beyond that would be,” he smiled, “magic.”
The parcel arrived in Wednesday’s post. Inside, the sketchbook Maeve had lost. In the front cover, a scrawled note: “Forgive me my temporary theft. It’s long past time that I returned this. —S.” There was also a white feather.
She flipped through the pages and wondered what Sweeney had seen that convinced him her art was magic, the kind of magic that could help him. Whatever that thing had been, she couldn’t see it.
Maeve kept the feather, but she slid the notebook into a fresh envelope to return it to Sweeney. Even if she couldn’t give him freedom, she could give him this.
That done, Maeve took down all of the reference photos of mystical, fantastic birds that she had printed out and hung on her walls while painting the show for the gallery. She closed the covers of the bestiaries, and slid feathers into glassine envelopes, making bright kaleidoscopes of fallen flight.
She packed away the shadow boxes, the skeletons, the figurines, reshelved the fairy tales.
The return of the sketchbook had reminded her of one thing. If there were any magic she could claim, it was hers, pencil on a page, pigment on canvas. It came from her, not from anywhere else.
The only things Maeve left in sight were a white feather, a photo she had downloaded from her phone of a naked man perched in a tree, and the sketches she had made of Sweeney. Finally, she hung the recent sketches from the cathedral. She would have to go back there, she thought, before this was finished, but not yet. Not until the end.
At first, Sweeney thought it was the madness come upon him again. His skin itched as if there were feathers beneath it, but they were feathers he could neither see nor coax out of his crawling skin.
His bones ground against each other, too light, the wrong shape, shivering, untrustworthy. Not quite a man, not wholly a bird and uncertain what he was supposed to be.
The soar of flight tipped over the edge into vertigo, and he landed with an abrading slap of his hands against sidewalk.
And then he knew.
Maeve was painting. Painting his own, and perhaps ultimate, transformation.
Dizzy, he ran to where he had first seen her, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Maeve hated painting in public. Hated it. People stood too close, asked grating questions, offered opinions that were neither solicited nor useful, and offered them in voices that were altogether too loud.
The quiet space in her head that painting normally gave here became the pressure of voices, the pinprick texture of other people’s eyes on her skin.
She hated it, but this was the place she had to paint, to finish Sweeney’s commission here at the cathedral. The end was the beginning.
On the canvas: the shadow of Sweeney rising to meet him, a man-shape grayed and subtle behind a bird. Sweeney, feathers raining around him as he burst from bird to man. A white bird, spiraling in flight, haunting the broken tower of the cathedral, a quiet and stormy ruin.
The skies behind Maeve filled with all manner of impossible birds. On the cathedral lawn, women played chess, and when one put the other in check, a man in a far away place stood up from a nearly negotiated peace.
Behind Maeve, Sweeney gasped, stumbled, fell. And still, she painted.
This time, it felt like magic.
The pain was immense. Sweeney could not speak, could not think, could barely breathe as he was unmade. Maeve was not breaking his curse, she was painting a reality apart from it.
Feathers exploded from beneath his skin, roiling over his body in waves, and disappearing again.
He looked up at the canvas, watched Maeve paint, watched the trails of magic in her brush strokes. In the trees were three birds with the faces and torsos of women, sirens to sing a man to his fate.
The church bells rang out, a sacred clarion, a calling of time, and Sweeney knew how this would end.
It was not what he had anticipated, but magic so rarely was.
Maeve set her brush down, and shook the circulation back into her hands. A white bird streaked low across her vision, and perched in front of one of the clerestory windows.