Flight of the Five Swans

Flight Chapter 14

Cliodne leaned back in her chair, the words of the rhyme reverberating through her head. Her mind was racing as she tried to work out its meaning.

"'All at once'," she repeated slowly, "'or none at all'."

Eurielle threw her hands up in the air. "Whatever in the world that could mean!" she cried, frustration clear in her voice. "You know, I'm really sick of riddles! Why can't they just say what they mean, and mean what they say? Go here, do this, eat a piece of pie! See?!? Easy!"

Petra coughed, and Cliodne could have sworn she was hiding a smile. Callia, on the other hand, was looking at Eurielle as though she had grown two heads.

"But riddles—and rhymes—are classic." She insisted. "They're great strategies for writers to add an element of drama to any story."

Thaleia's voice was dry. "I think our story had quite enough drama before, to be perfectly honest. Adding a riddle we have to solve is just plain mean." And for all her love of puzzles, Cliodne could not help agreeing with her sister. They certainly had enough to be getting on with in planning their escape without adding a vague rhyme to the mix.

"So what could it mean?" Raia asked, and the princesses all turned their attention back to the piece of paper. Cliodne saw Petra's lips moving as she read the rhyme silently to herself. She reached out and tapped a finger on the second line.

"Well, it certainly seems as though this is what we'd need." Petra said, nodding approvingly at Callia. "After all, 'to change a form to man'—or woman—'from bird' is exactly what we want to do."

"And," Cliodne added, "in order to accomplish that, it seems we'd need to knit...something...from nettles."

Raia was already shaking her head, her voice a mixture of confusion and exasperation.

"But you can't knit with nettles. You need yarn to knit. And no one would choose to use nettles, anyway, even if you could knit with them. Nettles hurt. That's why they're called stinging nettle."

Cliodne rubbed the palm of her right hand with her left. She knew from firsthand experience how much nettles stung, having stuck her hand into a patch once when gathering flowers as a young girl. Yet somehow she felt no surprise at the idea of this unpleasant plant being a requirement to break their curse. It seemed almost expected that they would be asked to undergo a little pain to complete the ritual, and she told her sisters as much.

"But that still doesn't answer the question of how we're going to knit with them." Petra argued. Callia tapped her chin with one finger.

"Actually," she began slowly, her eyes out of focus as though she were remembering something from long ago. "I've read about a process used to spin yarn from different kinds of plants. I don't remember nettles being among them, but I think we could adapt the process easily enough to include it all the same."

Eurielle jumped in eagerly, and Cliodne marveled at her enthusiasm for the riddle, following so close on the heels of a complaint. "And the riddle doesn't specify what we need to knit! It just mentions some kind of garment that'll cover us when we're swans! That shouldn't be too hard, right?"

Raia seemed thoughtful.

"You're a little bigger than normal swans," she mused, and Cliodne felt a stab of surprise. She hadn't realized before how her size when transformed compared to the size of the actual birds. Raia continued. "But...I think a large shawl of some sort might be able to cover each of you. And each one would really only take maybe a couple weeks to make."