The Black Swan

The quiet rain intensified into a raging, weeping storm as the days went by. Torrents of rain fell from the heavens, down on to the castle, the courtyard lake, and the reeds where the black swan and its hatchlings hid. Nathan passed the time by throwing rocks at the cygnets with deadly accuracy, driving them into the lake where they were beaten down by the rain or barely saved from drowning by their protective parent. Whenever he wasn't amusing himself in this manner, he drove himself into a fretful frenzy. He paced back and forth, lamenting out loud about the lack of time, moon light and holy water. Nothing said could comfort him; if spoken to, the lordling would go into a fit of rage. It was said that even his father was wary of him. The night of the full moon came. Thunder and rain continued, masking any moon that might be, and almost drowning out the bell as it struck midnight. Almost, but not quite. Nobody knew how or why Lordling Nathan crept out of the castle that night. No one knew how he felt when he saw, through the flashes of lightning, the ghostly girl near the lake. And there was not a person in Heatherwood who knew what went through his mind as the thunder and rain fell about him, loud and terrible and in time with the mad thrashings of his heart. All that was known for certain was that when dawn broke over the castle of Heatherwood, there was one less person in it than there had been the day before. Nathan was sitting near the lake shore when James found him. He was sitting down, hunched over with his back to the courtyard entrance. Once in a while, he would move his hands, producing a cracking noise. James rushed over to him to tell him the news. "Have you heard, sir?" he gasped. "One of Lady Brock's handmaidens has disappeared!" James peered over Nathan's shoulder in an attempt to see what he was doing. Nathan roughly shouldered him away. James continued. "They say she slipped out of the castle last night . . . said something about making sure the waterbirds were safe . . . but who knows what can happen in a storm like last night's! Bless her soul, she was a gentle, lovely maiden. She'll be missed - " "He was wrong, you know," Nathan suddenly said. He made the cracking sound again, and continued. "I didn't need the neckband of garlic cloves and tea leaves." Crack. "I didn't need the holy water." Crack. "I didn't even need the silken cord." Crack. "All I needed," he whispered, holding up his bloody hands, "were my own bare hands." James shrank from him, as the significance of his words dawned on him. "Did you. . . you didn't . . . .?" he stammered, and gasped as he saw what had been making the cracking noises. Nathan picked up another of the black swan's cygnets, squeezed its beak shut with one hand, and broke its neck with a firm crack. "I have to finish what I started." James stared at him in mute horror for a few moments, before staggering away from the mad lordling into the safety of the castle. Turn the page Back to the Blueberry Fields index page

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Page design, layout, and contents by Clockwork Penguin Productions. Backgrounds and flower plates courtesy of System F. Penguin Kao Ani Smilies courtesy of Miwa's Farm

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