In a Weary World

Chapter XX: The Swan's Wings

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like. -- Lemony Snicket

Solvej was not a great believer in coincidences. If something happened, it had almost certainly happened for a reason. What that reason was, and who or what had made something happen, she had never yet been able to work out. But whatever the answer was, things rarely happened for no reason.

And so her reaction upon seeing the swan was to grumble, "Really?"

She had just been reading a fairy tale in which a swan -- or at least, its wings -- featured prominently. Now a swan had inexplicably flown right into the palace wall and broken its neck. Clearly, whoever or whatever was in charge had a sense of humour, and no sense of subtlety.

She knelt down next to the swan. It was undoubtedly dead, its neck bent at an unnatural angle, its eyes dull and lifeless. Why had it flown into the wall? Had some higher power literally hurled it in her general direction? Had it simply not been looking where it was going?

The ghost tried to pick up the corpse. This was harder than it sounded. A swan was a large bird, and dead creatures were always awkward to handle. Its head hung awkwardly and its wings made it hard to get a grip on its body.

Gritting her teeth, Solvej held the corpse as tightly and as far away from herself as she could as she carried it across the courtyard. She stopped at the door and glanced around. There was no one in sight, but that didn't mean no one was watching. It would be rather hard to explain why she was carrying a dead swan into the palace. It would be even harder to explain why she was cutting its wings off, if someone found her in the process.

She sighed. Supernatural help or not, this would be a right headache.

~~~~

One of the good things about the palace being so ludicrously huge was that there were no shortage of little-used nooks and crannies hidden around it. This extended to its stables. Solvej set the dead swan down on a pile of old sacks in a corner well away from the most-visited areas of the stables.

She leaned back against the wall and frowned down at the corpse. How was she supposed to use its wings to fly anywhere? She could remove its wings, and magically attach them to her back, but how could she make them work? She couldn't make them large enough to carry her, and making them move would require finding some way to attach their muscles to hers...

Or was she approaching this problem from the wrong angle?

The idea of cutting off the swan's wings would never have occurred to her if she hadn't read that story. But there was a way to use a dead animal to disguise oneself: skin it, place a spell on the skin, and wear it as a cape. If the spell had been cast properly, the wearer would then become the animal whose skin they wore. It was not a spell she had ever tried herself, but she was sure she could find some information on it in her spell-books.

Now, how was she to do all this before the Magician appeared?

~~~~

"You want me to what?"

Hjalmar hadn't heard correctly. He was absolutely sure he hadn't heard correctly. There was no way Solvej had seriously just asked him to help her skin a swan.

The ghost sighed. "I need a disguise so I can eavesdrop on the Magician without being seen. There's a spell that can make someone become an animal when they wear its skin. So, I need you to help me skin the swan."

There were so many things Hjalmar wanted to say that he spluttered for a moment, unable to decide which of them to say first.

"I don't know how to skin anything!" he exclaimed at last. "And this whole idea is bizarre!"