The Black Swan Read Free Page A

would be—I was wrong. I thought I had accomplished something important, but it must be that I have only done what I should have . The approval she craved more than food or drink would clearly not be forthcoming. Once again, she had failed to exceed her father’s expections—and he had made it abundantly clear that merely fulfilling them was not worthy of praise.
    â€œSee that you are certain in the spell and its removal,” he said gruffly, an odd glint in his eyes for a moment, a glint she did not understand, and was not entirely certain she really saw. “Magic is useless if it cannot be reversed or removed.”
    With that, he put down the cage and waited. Stifling a gulp of disappointment, blinking eyes that stung for just a moment, she removed the magic, taking the sparkling motes of power back into herself as they drained from the mouse, until it was no more than an ordinary, if severely confused, house pest.
    Von Rothbart turned, his feather cape rustling softly, and left the room without another word.
    Odile watched her father’s back, swallowing involuntary bitter tears of disappointment and rejection, feeling her head droop a little as her heart sank with dejection.
    Still, her fingers were steady as she reached for the cage to release the captive. She unlocked the catch, pulled on the door—and frowned. The door was stuck—but it had moved freely enough before.
    She moved the cage into the light, and examined it carefully; to her astonishment, the cage was now mildly deformed, making the door stick rather than moving freely on its hinges. There was only one way, one time, that could have happened—when her father had picked up the cage to examine its contents and then held it as the sparrow became the mouse. His powerful hands had, for some reason, contracted around the top and base of the cage, subtly deforming it.

    The sky lightened from black to gray as dawn neared. All over the gardens, birds shook themselves awake, and a few tentative songs replaced the chorus of frogs and crickets. Von Rothbart was in his suite with the great door shut; if he was not already asleep, he soon would be.
    Odile, however, had one more duty to perform before she retired to her bed, and it was one she did not begrudge spending the time on.
    This morning the moon would set and the sun rise at nearly the same moment, and the setting of the moon marked the moment when the maidens would undergo their own transformation. As Odile paced down the steps of the manor, the maids cast wary glances at her, then abandoned their tasks, taking her appearance to mean that their evening was at an end. They rose from their seats, dropped the flowers they had been gathering, deserted their dances in mid-step, and drifted to the water’s edge, gathering there on the soft grass in a rough group. Jeanette awakened the new one and, rising, took her by the hand to draw her to her feet and lead her to join the rest. Even Odette left her seat in the shadows of the marble pavilion and came to the water’s edge on the island. Odile followed, but did not actually join the group, keeping a delicately calculated distance between herself and her father’s captives.
    They all waited, in silence, as the moon touched the horizon, then descended.
    When the last sliver of pale disk slipped below the horizon, the maidens stiffened, then dropped to the ground in awkward curtsies, as if faint, their silken gowns puddling around them.
    A peculiar, opalescent mist rose about them, a mist that separated into pockets surrounding each girl, then closed in on them. Odile watched closely, eyes narrowed and forehead furrowed, drinking in each subtle nuance of her father’s magic, searching for the refinements she had clearly not mastered.
    The mist shivered, the girls trembled, then the mist settled over them, obscuring their forms completely in shimmering whiteness for just a moment.
    Then the first rays of the sun touched