The Weight of Feathers Read Free Page B

their camera flashes. Fathers held video recorders, speaking the year and month and panning across the lake. Children held up plastic binoculars, seesawing the focus bars. Couples soaked up the light off the water and the fever of looking for mermaids.
    The stretch of river Lace’s grandmother had her swimming from ran through deep woods, the edge of where the Corbeaus would set up their show.
    “But you are a good girl,” her grandmother said. “So you will not go into the woods.” A statement and a warning. ¿Sí, mija? ¿Verdad?
    Lace clutched an algae-slick rock and listened for the hollow whistle of her uncles’ zampoñas . To start the show, three of them blew into the long pipes. The arundo reed gave back clean, full sounds. Those thin walls meant louder notes, but only a few of her uncles knew how to hold them without snapping the pipes.
    “ Los turistas are gullible, huh?” they said as they warmed up the zampoñas . “They think we can call mermaids with these things.”
    But it added to the show’s mystery, one man, silent and sun-weathered enough to look wise, standing on a near bank, two others in the trees across the lake, where the audience could spot them. All three played those wooden pipes, fastened with strips of cane and braided bands, the notes long and steady as their breaths.
    Lace kept listening for the deep call of the arundo wood. Tangled river roots gave the air the scent of cool earth. It mixed with the tart fruit of the aguas frescas .
    She took the deep breaths she’d need to stay under. The tail was heavy, and if she didn’t have the air to kick against it, it pulled her down.
    A few low trees shivered. A handful of night birds scattered. Lace crossed herself, like her mother told her, to keep away feathers.
    The silhouettes of branches trembled in the fading light.
    “Hello?” Lace called out, but the wind choked the sound.
    She ducked behind a rock, ready to dive into the current. She’d never been quick on her feet, but she could swim away so fast anyone would think she was a trick of the light, the flicker of a candle in a glass jar. Half her job was disappearing.
    The branches parted, and a pair of enormous wings emerged from the woods. Their shape stood black against the sky. They loomed over the bank. A few more steps, and their shadow would find Lace. If the wearer brought them down, they could crush her. The Corbeaus’ magia negra would harden them into flint.
    The feathers vibrated with all the evil that family carried. These crows had left Lora Paloma nothing. There were reasons a flock of crows was called a murder.
    Lace waited for the figure to click his back teeth like the rattle of a comb call. If she let him, he’d get those teeth into her, his bite sharp as a beak.
    The water grew colder against Lace’s back. She peered around the rock, looking for the frame of a Corbeau man big enough to make the trees shrink away from him.
    Her breasts stung from the chill. The current pulled at her hair. She’d only ever seen pictures of the Corbeaus’ wings, all those feathers fastened to arched wire. They were wide as a hawk’s span, so tall she wondered how the wind didn’t tip them.
    They twitched on the back of their wearer.
    Lace squinted into the dark, making out the body attached to these wings.
    It wasn’t a man, but a woman, smaller than the shortest of Lace’s cousins. How did she stand up against wings that size?
    She stumbled, lost or drunk. Her feet grazed where Lace had hidden her dress in the undergrowth.
    The woman tripped on the underbrush, and her hand bumped her lips. A smudge of red-orange came off on her thumb and forefinger.
    She pinched her fingers, making the imprint of her mouth move. She laughed at her own hand.
    Then she noticed Lace.
    She turned her head and took in the pink of Lace’s tail, the matching cream eye shadow, the plum-red lipstick.
    The woman’s stained fingers froze in the air, a tethered balloon.
    “Ah, ouais ?” she