Content warning: Animal death, betrayal by a parental figure, and themes of emotional manipulation. Story is told from the innocent, childlike perspective of the victim.

The Human She Called Dad

Me and dad stand at the very top of the hill, the tallest one near the city, and down below everybody is happy.

I can hear the bells from up here. They are the big temple ones that only ring on special days, and they are all going at the same time. Under the bells there are people, so many people, out in the streets and up on the roofs and squished into the square in the middle. A lot of them are singing. The soldiers are the loudest. Every little while a bunch of them does a big cheer together and it comes rolling all the way up the hill to us.

The war is over. We won it. That is why everybody is so happy.

I know I am supposed to be looking at the city, and it does look nice with the sun going down and the little window lights coming on one at a time. But I kept looking at dad instead. I look at dad a lot.

He is standing next to me with his hands behind his back, and the wind keeps messing up his hair. While I look at him I am thinking about how he has always been there. He was there when I came out of my egg. He fed me when I was little because I could not get the food myself yet. He taught me to fly, right here on this hill. He would stand off to the side and yell commands at me until one day I did not fall back down. He even carried me inside his coat when I got tired. And there was the bad winter when all my feathers fell out and I was cold and miserable, and he kept me in my cage all week so nobody would laugh at me. He has always looked out for me like that.

He gave me my name too. He says he whispered it to me before my eyes were even open, so it is the first word I ever knew. He taught me a little whistle that means come here. When I was small I would come from anywhere in the whole palace the second I heard it, running and flapping down the halls so fast I crashed into things. He did not really let me play with the other animals, or go near the other people much, when I was little. He said they would not understand me, that they might hurt me by accident without meaning to, that I was too special to let run around loose. So mostly it was just us, him and me, all the time. I liked it being just us. I still do.

Other people have fancy names for him. They call him the Crown Prince. The soldiers call him commander. The priests bow and say 'Your Highness'. I do not think about him that way. He is just dad. He always says I am his first child and his sword is his second child, and I like that, even though I do not really know what the sword did to earn it.

As I think of the past, it is already time to start walking back down, so dad goes first and I cannot stay still, so I jump off the rock and fly.

I swoop down low over the path in front of him and then come back. I do a circle around him. I drop down and bonk my head on his shoulder and then jump back up before he can grab me. I do a little roll in the air, I wanna see dad laugh. I find a long red feather that came loose off me and I catch it before it hits the ground and bring it back and drop it on his head, and he reaches up and takes it out of his hair and tucks it inside his coat, near his chest, he likes the warmth of my feathers. He once said a single phoenix feather was worth its weight in gold. Then I land on the path in front of him and walk backward so I can watch his face while we go.

I'm doing it all to make him laugh. He laughed a lot when I was a baby. He would laugh and tease me, calling me an ugly duckling.

He doesn't really laugh anymore but something he smiles. Whenever I do something silly the corner of his mouth goes up. His smiles are not like other humans. The soldiers laugh big and loud with their mouths wide open. Dad's are small. They come and go quickly, and you would miss them if you were not watching closely.

We walk the rest of the way down and I feel good the whole time, and then the next days come, and the next days are strange ones.

Dad gets busy. Men in long robes keep coming to get him and taking him. I wait in the hallway and lie down by the door and listen. The voices start out normal and then they get loud. Sometimes very loud. The priests are loud and the advisors are loud, and once or twice dad is loud too, which is not like him, and it makes my feathers puff.

I do not understand most of the words because they are big grown-up words. But I am not dumb, and I listen hard, and after a while I work some of it out. There was a holy thing they were supposed to bring back from the war. They call it a relic. We did not get it. And the people have already been told they will get to see it at the big celebration, so now there is a problem.

I remember that day from war. We almost had it, the relic thing. The enemy commander was running away with it, holding it against his chest and not looking back. Dad and I chased him through the smoke. We were so close. I could have grabbed it. But they were strong, stronger than us, more than we were, and it went bad fast. They got between us. They knocked dad down and they did not stop. I screamed but nobody could hear me over everything. Dad got hurt, hurt worse than I had ever seen, and he stopped moving, and he almost did not get back up that day.

But it was okay, because I could fix it. I landed on him and I gave him a piece of me. That is something only I can do. I burn down to almost nothing and I push all of it into him, my whole warmth, my whole light, and it goes into him and starts his chest moving again. It hurts a lot to burn like that. Dying is the worst feeling there is, worse than the cold winter, worse than anything, and every time I am scared right before it happens even though I know I will come back. But I would rather be the one who hurts than have dad feel it. So I did it. And then I came back the way I always do, shaky in the ash, and dad scooped me up in both hands and held me so tight and said my name over and over. I did it lots of times in the war, every time he got too hurt to get up, and he always woke up after. After a while he stopped letting the other soldiers watch when I did it. He said it was our little secret and not for them to see. It is worth it every time. I would do it a hundred more times if it kept dad here with me.

So I do not like the relic, because the relic getting lost is what is making dad sad now. Every time he comes out of one of those rooms his face is tired and his shoulders are up and the little smile is gone, so I go and sit close to him. I push my whole body against his side. I shove my head under his hand until he feels me there. And after a minute he scratches the soft spot under my feathers at the bottom of my neck, the old way. I hear him breathe out long and his shoulders come down. I have done this for him my whole life, and he does it for me, and we take turns. I wish I could find the lost thing for him. I would fly to the end of the world and drop it in his lap. But I do not know where it is, so I just sit close.

And then one day he comes out of the room and he is not tired anymore. He kneels down in front of me and holds my face in both his hands and tells me not to worry. He says he found something else for the people, something just as good as the lost relic, maybe even better, something powerful enough that nobody will ever know the real one is gone. I want to know what it is so bad. I tilt my head at him and wait. But he just does his small smile and says that everything is going to be okay now. What could be that special? What is powerful enough to stand in for a holy relic and make losing the real one okay? I think about it for days. I really want to see it.

And then the busy days are over, because the night of the banquet comes, and there are more people in the palace than I have ever seen.

There are nobles in fancy clothes and generals with shiny medals all down their chests and priests in their robes and even regular city people let in for the night. There are candles everywhere. There is music in one corner and long tables down the whole hall covered in more food than I could eat in a week.

And almost right away I notice something different, and the different thing is dad. He is letting me do stuff he never lets me do. When I wander off to go look at the music, he does not call me back. He always called me back. When I fly around the hall, nobody stops me and he does not give me the behave-yourself look. When a little girl with ribbons in her hair holds up a honey cake, he lets me take it, and then her brother holds up another one and he lets me have that too. That is the strangest part. He usually lets me have one sweet, maybe two, and then he takes the plate away and says that is enough, you will make yourself sick. But tonight he does not take anything away. He just watches me and lets me eat.

So I eat. I go table to table all evening. People think it is funny when I grab a pastry off their plate, so I do it more. An old general with a big white mustache feeds me candied fruit one piece at a time and laughs every single time like it is brand new. A lady in a green dress holds out her hand for me to land on and tells me I am the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. I sit on her wrist and let everybody look at me, and dad does not call me back from that either. I eat little cakes with cream inside and sugared nuts and a whole plate of something sticky that turns my beak red, and I eat things I do not even know the name of, until my belly is full and round and heavy, and I keep going because nobody is stopping me. Every now and then I look back at dad to check, because part of me keeps waiting for him to say all right, that is enough now. But he never does. He just watches me from across the room with a quiet look and lets it keep going. I decide he must finally be happy, now that the war is over and the loud meetings are done, and he is letting me be free because he feels free too. I love him so much. I'm going to live with dad forever.

And after a while I get tired of the tables and go back to stand by him, full and slow and warm, and he reaches up and pets me. Not just the quick scratch on the neck. He pets me all over, slowly, and then he gathers me up against his chest and holds me there and keeps petting me, for a long, long time. He never does this. He always says royalty have to keep their dignity, that he cannot be seen cuddling a bird in front of the nobility. But tonight he holds me close in front of everybody and does not stop. I can feel his heart going fast under his coat, faster than mine, even though he is the one standing still. And then he says, real quiet, just to me, "Good girl. You've done well." I do not even know what I did well. Maybe I made him laugh when I snatched the old minister's wig. I could do it again if he wanted. He said it in his soft voice with his hand warm on my back, and that is the best feeling there is, so I press into him and make my little happy chirp from when I was a chick, and I feel him go still.

And while we are like that, the ceremony starts, so everybody moves in toward the middle of the hall, where there is a big circle painted on the floor in gold and silver with shapes around it that I do not understand. The priests come stand all around the outside of it. One of them lifts his arms and talks to the whole room in a voice that reaches every corner. He says the holy relic is going to be put inside the circle, and that its power will be tied to the kingdom tonight, and that it will keep us safe forever after this.

I get so excited. What is it? What is the replacement? This is dad's surprise, the thing he found, the one powerful enough to take a holy relic's place and make everything okay. For days I have been trying to guess what it could be. Maybe it is a crown, or a sword like the second-child sword, or a jewel as big as my head. It has to be something amazing, to fill in for a holy thing, to make grown men shout behind doors for days and a whole city to stop and wait. And now I finally get to see it. I really, really want to see it.

The priests start to chant, low and long, and the candle flames lean over to one side, and the whole hall goes quiet. Then a priest calls dad forward to bring out the relic.

Dad stands up, and instead of setting me down he lets me ride up on his shoulder, the way I used to when I was small enough, and he walks us both into the middle of the painted circle with every single person in the hall watching. I sit up tall on his shoulder and look all around, trying to spot it, dad's surprise, the special thing, because it has to be close now. He must have had it hidden the whole time. He must have found something so strong nobody will miss the real relic at all, and I just did not see when he picked it up. I knew he would fix it. I am so proud of him I can barely sit still. I look down at the side of his face so we can find it together.

He is not looking around for it, and he is not looking at the crowd. He is looking down, and he has a strange expression I've never seen. Maybe he's anxious? I nudge my head against his cheek to reassure him. No one will reject the replacement. He has nothing to worry about.

Then he reaches into his coat, and I lean down off his shoulder to see what he is pulling out, because this must be it, this must be dad's surprise, the powerful thing, and out of the dark of his coat comes a dagger.

A dagger? But it is not a normal dagger. It looks like it is made of ice, clear and pale, and I can feel the cold coming off it before it is even all the way out of his coat. I have never seen anything like it. There are little words carved down the side of it that I cannot read. I hate the cold. I am made of fire, so me and the cold have never gotten along, and maybe that is why dad always kept this thing away from me until now. I lean closer to look at the little words. Dad whispers, "stay still". I freeze. Is he worried I'm going to cut myself on the dagger? After going through a whole war? Dad is silly sometimes.

Then he lunges the dagger at my heart.

Dad?