Chapter 3: Talking Animals

"Is she dead?"

"Don't be rude. She's breathing."

"She was breathing yesterday too, look how that ended."

"I think she’s waking up."

I opened my eyes slowly, and found myself looking at a ceiling I did not recognize, and then at a very small round and fluffy puppy.

The puppy was sitting on my chest. It was golden and white, no bigger than a loaf of bread, with enormous, serious brown eyes. It looked at me, tilted its head, and said, in a voice like a tiny, anxious aunt, "You look terrible."

I screamed.

The puppy yelped and tumbled backward off my chest. Something behind it squawked. Something else hissed. I sat bolt upright in a narrow wooden bed, my heart hammering, and the whole room came into focus at once.

It was a small room with a slanted ceiling, painted a pale, chalky blue. There was a washstand, a wooden wardrobe, a round window that let in a stripe of morning light. And on every flat surface, there were animals.

There was a grey kitten on the windowsill. A fat green lizard on the washstand. A small, pale, owl-like bird perched on the top of the wardrobe, glaring at me. A ginger squirrel, with a very fine but silly moustache, was eating a nut on the end of the bed.

They were all looking at me.

"I think she's broken," said the squirrel, with his mouth full.

"She screamed at Pudding," said the kitten.

"Pudding is a very frightening puppy," said the lizard.

"I am not frightening," said the puppy, with great dignity, from the floor.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, counted to ten before opening them again.

They were still there.

"Okay," I whispered. "Okay. I have been hit by a car. I'm in a hospital. This is a drug thing. I am hallucinating a squirrel. That is a thing that happens."

"I am not a hallucination," said the squirrel, offended. "I am a Spirit Beast of the Second Rank, thank you."

I stared at him.

Spirit Beast… Second Rank? What the…

The squirrel flicked his tail and returned to his nut.

I looked at my hands. They were small, clean, and unscarred, and they were not mine. I turned them over. My fingers were slim. My nails were short. There was a tiny scar on the left wrist, thin and white, where something had nicked it a long time ago.

My heart began to thud again, slower and heavier.

I looked down at the dress I was wearing. White. Plain. Ceremonial. A strand of long hair slid over my shoulder, and I caught it in my fingers and held it up to the light.

It was golden.

I had given my heroine golden hair.

"No!" I said aloud. "No! No!”

I scrambled out of the bed. My legs shook. The floor was cool under my bare feet. In the corner of the room, there was a tall, tarnished mirror in a carved wooden frame, and I crossed to it in four stumbling steps, and stopped.

A girl stared back at me.

She was eighteen, perhaps… slight and pale, with a thin, soft face and long, wavy golden hair, and grey-blue eyes that were wide with shock. She looked like the kind of person who apologized when someone else stepped on her foot. Like the kind of person who had never once been chosen.

I knew her face. I had described it so many times.

"Nora Wells," I whispered.

The girl in the mirror whispered it with me.

The door banged open.

"Nora! Nora, there you are!"

A girl came rushing in. She was round-faced and freckled, in a patched coat, with a small orange fox riding on her shoulder like a scarf. She was out of breath. She grabbed my hands before I could say anything.

"You have to come right now! Lord Gordon and Lady Helen are furious, and the examiners said anyone who isn't in the Temple by the second bell will lose their turn, and you don't want to lose your turn, Nora, not today, not of all days. Hurry!"

"Today," I said faintly. "What is today?"

"Selection Day!" She stared at me. "Did you hit your head? It's Selection Day. We're choosing our beasts!"

The fox on her shoulder narrowed his eyes. "She looks like she hit her head."

"Biscuit, don't."

Biscuit.

Molly Hart.

I had written her for exactly two scenes. She was the freckled herb girl who would save Nora's life in chapter forty with a handful of frost-moss. I had liked her so much that I had never found a way to give her more.

"What's your name?" I heard myself ask.

Molly blinked. "Molly. Molly Hart. Nora, you're scaring me."

"Where am I?"

"You're in the Wells house." She said it slowly, as though to a child. "In the Kingdom of Eastland. We are going to Skyfang Academy's Selection Day at the Temple of the Hundred Cradles, remember? You've been talking about it for a month."

Eastland.

Skyfang.

The Temple of the Hundred Cradles.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. My knees had stopped working.

Did I just transmigrate into my own novel?

It was ridiculous. It was an idea I had mocked in other people's books. A girl dies, and wakes up in a story, and everything is fine because she knows the plot. I had written four reviews, privately, about how lazy that was.

And now I was a golden-haired girl in a blue room with a talking squirrel, on the very first day of my own story. Chapter one. Ninety days before the great Flood.

Then something happened.

It started as a pressure at the back of my skull, as though someone had pressed two thumbs against it. Then the pressure broke, and a flood came through.

A tall stone house with windows that had never once been lit for me. A woman in green silk saying, Poor Nora. A father who looked past me at dinner. A pale blue cloak, and a girl's voice saying, Nobody wants a blank, sister. The long, cold silence of a house where nobody ever said my name.

I gasped as I clutched the edge of the bed. Molly said something sharp and worried, and I could not hear her.

Those were Nora's memories. The ones I had written. The quiet, cold years of a girl who was never chosen.

But there were others, too.

They came in a wave, under the first ones, dark and cold and heavy. A black sea. A dragon's hand on my wrist. A silver thread, snapping. The water closing over my face.

And something small, in the dark, against my arm.

A bird. A skeleton of a bird, soaked and shivering, with a twisted wing. It was clawing at my sleeve. It was beating its broken wing against the water as it tried to lift me.

It weighed less than a loaf of bread, and it was trying to carry me to the surface.

I came back to myself on my knees on the wooden floor, gasping, with tears running down my face.

"Nora!" Molly was crouched in front of me, white with fear. "Nora, say something!"

"I'm fine," I managed. "I'm fine. I just had a, a dream."

"You're crying."

"I know."

I wiped my face with my sleeve. My hands were shaking.

I had never written the bird.

I had written Nora's drowning. I had written it in the clearest, coldest detail. The Ark, the bridge of light, the dragon's smile. But I had never, in any draft, given her a bird. There had been no peacock. There had been no one trying to carry her.

Whose memory was this?

The puppy, Pudding, had crept close and was pressing his warm, round head against my knee. "It's all right," he said, in his tiny aunt's voice. "Things get better. They usually do."

I laughed… It came out cracked and wet. Then I got to my feet, looked at the mirror, at the pale, golden-haired stranger who was now, apparently, me. I thought about the Selection. I thought about what I knew.

In the novel, today was the day Nora walked into the Temple and picked up a small, injured black snake because she felt sorry for it. She carried it home, fed it and loved it with her whole heart, then in ninety days, it would take her stepsister's hand and let her drown.

I knew who the snake was. I knew exactly what he would do.

And I knew something else, too, from a deleted note at the bottom of an old outline, something I had cut because it would have made the story too easy.

Nine-Colored Divine Peacock. Last of an ancient bloodline. Cursed into the shape of a dying chick. Awakens only for a tamer with White Blood and a compassionate heart.

I had cut that part, but the memory in my head had a bird in it. A starving peacock, trying with everything it had to lift me.

I looked at Molly.

"Which bell is it?" I said.

"The second bell's about to ring. Nora, hurry!"

"I'm coming."

I stepped out of the room. The corridor was long, cold and dark, lined with portraits I knew by heart. At the end of it, a tall door stood open in the morning, and a carriage waited. A whole world I had made with my own hands was waiting to find out what I would do.

I thought of DragonMom77’s comment. I thought of forty thousand readers who had begged me to give Nora a chance.

You want a comeback, I thought. Fine then.

I lifted my chin. "Let's go choose a beast," I said.