When I woke, the room was empty of people and ravens once more, with only Calvin seated at the end of my bed, his back towards me.

  I considered the shape of him, bowed over, his elbows resting on his knees, head curved to his hands. Watching him, my thoughts drifted in a million directions at once – had he found Sukju? Had I made a sound during the whole ordeal? I had been so out of my mind that I couldn’t remember… Where had Jesse and Peach and Lee Wai Meng gone? How should I talk to Calvin after everything that had happened?

  I had no answers, so I just continued to stare at his broad back, until I noticed it was twitching.

  Or hitching, rather.

  Calvin was crying.

  It didn’t feel right to be observing him without his knowledge. I tugged on the bedclothes, enough for him to abruptly straighten and turn in my direction.

  “You’re awake.” He wiped his eyes roughly. “How… do you feel?”

  I shrugged and picked absently at the bedclothes. Velveteen blanket. No, this was real velvet. Velveteen was a synthetic fibre, and I was supposed to be playing the mistress of the king. Of course it would be real. So then the undersheets must be real silk. They felt nice.

  Apparently at a loss for words, Calvin also remained silent. He watched my fingers pluck repeatedly.

  “Mar- Mik Tsaam?”

  I gestured for him to hold out his hand. When he did, I wrote ‘Where’s Sukju?’

  “Who’s Sukju?”

  ‘You can’t even remember your own child?’

  “You… gave the… baby a name?”

  ‘I have to call it something.’

  “What’s Sukju? It sounds Korean.”

  ‘Just…’

  I went back to fiddling with the bedclothes.

  “Mik Tsaam?”

  I didn’t really feel like replying. Actually, hearing Calvin repeating my name so much, especially when I couldn’t speak, was making me angry. I threw myself back down on the bed and covered my head with the bedsheet.

  After a few moments, I felt Calvin rise from the bed.

  “We… The kid… Sukju has been found.”

  I listened to the door quietly open and shut again. Maybe he had gone to bring Sukju back to me.

  I hoped he wouldn’t. I didn’t want to see it.

  Babies really look weird. What was with that wrinkly red thing?

  It came out of me.

  I shoved the soft, silky fabric of the bedsheets into my mouth.

  Stay quiet.

  How much time had passed? What if I got to the end of what I thought was three and a half years and it turned out I had made a noise? I felt like screaming.

  I probably made a noise.

  There’s no way someone can be silent for so long.

  But what if I have been?

  Stay quiet. Stay quiet.

  Something cried in the room.

  I burst out from under the bedsheets, looking for the crying child.

  There was no one there except me.

  And then a few moments later, a raven on the windowsill.

  I threw my heavy velvet pillow at it.

  The raven dodged with a surprised caw, settling back as the pillow sailed harmlessly away out of the castle. It fluffed its feathers, looked me directly in the eyes, and cawed again.

  I climbed back into the bed and covered my head again. When I lost interest in that, I sat up to find that the raven had landed on the bed, nestled down, and closed its eyes. Impulsively, I reached out and patted it.

  The raven opened its eyes with another surprised caw, but didn’t move. It let me continue patting it, even stretching its neck so I could scratch its cheek. I had always thought birds were a bit alarming, even the little Silver-eared Mesias that my uncle kept; I always worried what would happen if those pretty, multi-coloured birds escaped from their cages. Would they immediately fly at my face? I wouldn’t blame them, stuck in their beautiful but tiny cage that Uncle would uncover and hang outside during the day.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  But what if they were like me, cosy and content to hide in my tiny apartment with the smog of the city holding me in its embrace?

  Then again, I wasn’t a bird.

  A memory suddenly came to me, then, of one of the few times that Calvin and I had been alone together. I had been staying with my uncle during exam season while my mother had to travel for work. My friends had come to visit me, and Calvin had arrived first.

  When Uncle left the room to fetch drinks, Calvin and I stood awkwardly in the little living room. Before I could think of anything to talk about, he suddenly said, “I don’t like them.”

  I followed his gaze and saw he was looking at the three little cages of birds.

  “Mesias?”

  “No… Nothing…”

  I thought again. “Cages?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I don’t really like them either, but Uncle really loves those birds. And all his neighbours have birds in cages like that too. Have you seen the Mong Kok Bird Market?”

  He nodded, briefly. “Por Por and I buy birds on the eighth of every month for life-release.”

  Calvin’s grandmother was a devout Buddhist. It wasn’t a surprise that it had rubbed off on him too.

  At that point, Uncle returned with a jug of cold black tea, the yellow tags of the teabags still dangling from the side, and Rohan and Tommy were at the door, so the conversation didn’t go any further.

  As I stroked the raven, I wondered if I should have let the birds go free.

  Instead I had tried to study and went to the exams and got okay grades and when my mother came back from her trip, she berated me for not doing better after she had arranged for me to stay with Uncle so I would be able to study without interruption.

  Not good enough.

  Stay quiet.

  I wanted to ask the raven if I should have released the birds, but then I remembered that we couldn’t converse with each other, and in any case the raven wasn’t really a raven, it was a person.

  I wonder which one you are.

  And then I wondered what it would be like if Sukju had turned into a raven too. Maybe it would be better for it that way.

  What would I do first when I was able to make noise? Scream? Cry? Laugh? I tapped on the raven to get its attention then tried to write with my finger on the velvet bedspread. The fabric nap held the words.

  ‘How long has it been?’

  The raven considered the words and cawed twice, paused, then cawed ten times. I almost lost count as it did, but I wrote in the fabric, ‘Two years and ten months?’

  The raven responded with a low, short croak, that I assumed meant yes.

  Or I could just have been making up everything in my head, having already lost my sanity. So would it really matter if I screamed right now?

  The raven cawed anxiously and pushed its large beak under my hand. It lay still, head completely covered, like it was dead.

  I’m holding everyone’s lives in my hand.

  Stay quiet.

  I lifted my hand and resumed patting the raven’s back.

  So. Now what.

  I had… Why is this so hard to focus on… eight months to go. What would I do for eight months?

  I could learn to tap dance. Run away from the castle and see what the world looked like. Retreat into the woods like I was Baba Yaga again, and the ravens and I would all live happily in the house with the chicken feet, alone in that eternal winter…

  The raven stretched its wings and hopped to the windowsill. My heart twisted.

  Don’t go. Don’t leave me.

  Stay quiet.

  The raven turned about on the spot, gave me one last look, and leapt outwards.

  Wait, why had it come to see me?

  I sat on the end of the bed, gazing out into the sky as the black bird soared away, long pinion feathers spread like fingers, and I wished I could link my own fingers through them and be pulled up and away out of my own body.

  The raven returned every few days. I was certain it was the same one, although it seemed to have more and more damage each time I saw it, feathers missing or bent, or a wounded foot. It… No, she, left tiny blood drops on the nightdresses I perpetually wore.

  Seven months remaining.

  I rarely saw Calvin. When he did visit, he mostly sat in awkward silence, occasionally updating me on a new happening – the queen mother was under permanent house arrest, the ravens were living in one of the towers and Red had been specifically isolated in a cage…

  ‘Sukju?’

  “Uh… The baby is being looked after by someone.”

  He wouldn’t bring it up unless I asked first, and I rarely asked. I didn’t want to know.

  I carried that thing inside me for what must have been nine months, and I didn’t want to know…

  The worst thing was the waiting.

  Six months remaining.

  Maybe the boredom would kill me. I’d probably welcome it.

  Was Sukju bored?

  Were the ravens bored?

  Five months remaining.

  I fell asleep once and dreamed I was giving birth and I was screaming as a weird little red wrinkly monkey-like thing wriggled out of me that had eyes like a cockroach and little antennae and I clutched it so tightly that it stopped breathing and I –

  I woke –

  I didn’t sleep again –

  Four months remaining.

  The raven sat with me every evening, except when I threw things at her, and slept huddled on the end bedpost.

  Jesse…

  Let me out. Let me out of my own head. Let me out of my own skin.

  Three months remaining.

  I slowly tore my bedsheets into narrow strips and tied them together to see how long of a string I could make. Then I tried to see if I could work out how a slipknot was tied. I stopped being given new pillows because I kept throwing them out through the window.

  A month passed and there were three months remaining.

  There were two thousand and sixteen stones set in the walls of the room. Five hundred and four flagstones in the floor. Ten beams holding up the ceiling. I counted them again to be sure.

  A month passed and there were three months remaining.

  I stopped counting. I couldn’t tell one day from the next anymore, anyway.

  The sound of many running feet echoed dimly at the edge of my hearing, but people were forever running around here, and it had nothing to do with me.

  The door slammed open so hard that it bounced off the wall and swung back to hit Lee Wai Meng in the face. “OW! That hurt!”

  Calvin actually laughed. If the sound he made could be called that.

  “Maria! Mik Tsaam! Mik Tsaam, it’s over!”

  “You did so well!” Peach flung herself on me, sobbing. “You did it!”

  Jesse sat slowly and gently down on the bed beside me, like she was approaching a wild animal. “It’s over, Mik Tsaam. You can speak again.”

  I looked at her.

  Stay quiet.

  It’s over.

  It’s never over.

  Wen Yong and Angry_Birb huddled together at the very back of the group. I couldn’t decipher their expressions. The rest all gathered around me, but they were fading out now, the whole world was fading out into darkness.

  I watched them disappear in utter silence.

  What about Sukju?