Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer

Author:Nancy Springer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

TEN

FOR ONCE SHADOW FOUND HIMSELF FOLLOWING ALONG, rather than in the lead. Lark was leading, out from under Gypsy Davy’s magenta hat now and back in her adolescent male self. As she strode westward, in a sweat to find Sky, Shadow lagged behind and watched her sweet young ass blissfully. He felt adrift in starry-eyed euphoria, as if he had just been reborn in Gypsy Davy’s arms. He felt every tingling nuance of cool air and warm sun on his skin. Against all logic he felt that this April day was the first day of the universe. He felt himself going breathless with each stride Lark took.

Pygmalion. What a fool, falling in love with his own creation.

Shadow. What a fool, falling in love—

She was not his creation; he knew that, he must always remember that. His had been the hands that shaped, but hers had been the dreams that took form. If he fell in love, it would be with her dreams. Every human over the age of ten seemed to have that dream self, and the real self, and the terrible distance between the two—except him, Shadow. Insight shimmered like a rainbow in him: who he was and who he wanted to be were one and the same.

“Son of a bitch!” Shadow cried happily.

“Huh? What?” Walking beside him, Argent looked over at him with a scowl. Poor old Argent, peevish, jealous, these days reverting to type, perpetually worried about one thing or another. Some people never really changed, no matter what they looked like.

“I just thought of something, that’s all.” Ordinarily, his thought would have made Shadow feel all the more the stranger, the alien in the crowd of humanity, but today it was another aspect of his cloud nine bliss; it took him one step closer to knowing who he was.

He was—a victim dumped along a railroad track, found by a gypsy of kind impulses but dubious morality. He was—a man without memories, therefore without a childhood, without dreams or disappointments. He was—a man without parents and their dictates to love or hate. He was—a man with a beautiful body, but was it his own, or had Gypsy Davy given it to him? The scamp would not tell him. How was he to know anything? For all practical purposes he had been born the day he woke up in Gypsy Davy’s bed with his bones aching and a blank white wall in his head he had never been able to get past.

And never would. He accepted this now the way most people had to accept failing eyesight and midriff flab and the various indignities of age.

He was—a shadow, almost no one.

For some reason, today the realization did not trouble him.

“Almost there,” Lark called back. Shadow’s heart leaped foolishly at the sound of her boyish young voice.

“Wonderful,” Argent grumped. He would rather have been home with a good dinner and a glass of wine. But here he was, hiking to the boonies in his dove gray silver-stitched Tony Lamas, because his daughter insisted.

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