Please enjoy the below opening scene of the new version of my debut novel FEATHERFOOT. Feedback welcome.
She was my ally at The Turning: Ria, a little flame of a girl with apricot hair and orange play-wings, skipping twirling surrounded by pale blue birds as though Sky himself reached down for her.
Birds swished and swept round her, brushed her arms, snagged her hair, shied from her reach…
Never in all its days had the island shaken with such windweaver’s power as that day turned its boy-children to moonbirds. Never since the ancient volcano made an orphan of their island and left only its crown, had a blast rewritten them – but never so deft and sure, nor brief.
Other people in the cobbled plaza screamed the screams of murder and fell to their knees but Ria and me danced:
she so light of foot and lofty of mind that the birds felt drawn to kin;
me, the wind Sophia… and finally finally the children could answer my calls to play.
And how wondrously deliciously unforeseen – so rare, almost impossible, for me and the windweavers to not have felt it coming; for me who makes myself known by gathering up and sprinkling round the scents of the hour, to not have smelt such a thing heating in the air or lurking in the cool minty shadows of the alleys.
Yet here were the moonbirds with no smell at all – too new and sudden to yet waft of feathers or fish guts or sea, but their boy smells had vanished – only Ria in the middle wafting of hot sweet wonder and sticky treats on her fingers and a little bit of wee from shock.
Ria, I’ve always known best because she wears her heart on the outside where I can fly through it. Her brother’s eager energy disappeared to me the moment he became a moonbird, so too their friend Thane who was always there, but one or the other came to land on Ria’s waiting palms.
We stilled to watch the obsidian eye like a jewel in a silver ring, watching back, remembering, memorising…
It fluffed itself into a blur of blue, took its weight from her and launched.
Ria’s mother screeched and the whole flock made to flee from the sound but Ria helped push the bird upward and so did I because what a scrumptious gift to go on adventure with boys that are birds and birds that are boys!
We flew west,
then north…
From the plaza the bird boys shrank to dots and dissolved into distance – for I am the wind and can be there and here at once, leaving and staying, but little Ria hurt herself trying the same as her heart stretched too thin holding onto the boys as the distance lengthened
and snapped.
Slowly from her eyes seeped the stinging salty words that would leave her ever thirsty:
“Come back”.
Feel welcome to compare this new scene with the original draft here. Again, comments welcome. Which do you prefer?
