The Secret Room by Antonia Michaelis

Author:Antonia Michaelis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2012-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

I felt the wind in my hair and heard the last, furious roar of the lion behind me.

The courtyard’s tiled floor was rushing toward me.

Then a strange thing happened.

I was waving my arms—and suddenly I noticed that I didn’t have arms at all anymore. I was waving white wings with violet speckles.

So that’s how you got the magic back: you just jumped down from somewhere. Of course, I thought, as soon as I touched the earth, I’d be human again. And now that I left it, the opposite had happened.

I began to flap my wings desperately. One of my wings, the one the Nameless One had bitten, would only move with tremendous effort. I must have made a pitiful picture, lurching through the sky like that. But at least I’d stopped falling.

I was flying higher, wobbling upward like an awkwardly large butterfly and finally found myself high enough above the gleaming roofs of the palace to cross over them. The garden danced by underneath me. I could barely keep my balance in the air, I sank, rose again ...

The pain in my shoulder was as sharp as a butcher’s knife and almost took my breath away. But now I had no time for problems with breathing. I didn’t know where I was flying, didn’t know if it made any sense—but I had to keep going as far as I could.

My head felt so light sometimes that I thought it must have floated away. Other times it felt so heavy that I worried it would come loose and fall off.

And then I saw the shadow. It was already directly above me. Before I had time to think a single reasonable thought, he swooped down.

I expected to feel the sharp pain of his claws, to hear the triumphant cry of the giant black eagle with yellow eyes— but everything happened strangely silently.

Something grabbed me, I had been right about that.

It grabbed me gently all by itself.

I hung between its large claws like a wet rag—and later I felt myself being laid onto something soft and made of straw. I wanted to raise my head to see where I was, but I fell asleep immediately.

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