Maggie didn’t know when exactly she had fallen asleep. The combination of the gentle rocking motion of her bizarre mode of transit and the exhaustion of pushing her body and mind to their limits having been too strong to resist for long. She’d never struggled with sleeping as a bird like Ink-Talon apparently had, the particular misalignment of mind and body she’d been afflicted with precluded that reflex in much the same way as her breathing defaulted to “human,” at least as long as she was conscious. A tiny blessing in an otherwise horrific scenario. Emphasis on “tiny.”

  More than once, Sunny-Plume had described the sight of her just slumped over on her side to sleep as “concerning,” and she could only hope that the Physicians’ assessment of the behavior as “probably not harmful” held true. Not being able to do things “correctly” didn't mean that she couldn’t muddle through by doing it “good enough.” What it did mean, however, was that when Maggie woke up in an environment entirely different than anywhere she had ever been before with no knowledge of how she got there, some messy mixture of the human expectation of human limbs being attached to a human body and the avian expectation of being aware of one’s position from one moment to the next hardwired into her half-conscious bird-brain caused her to default to blind panic.

  “Velvet! Unwrap it before it hurts itself!” An alarmed bellow from a large creature nearby barely registered as the myna continued to thrash about, her wings awkwardly pinned to her sides just tight enough that her sudden attempt to pull them out only managed to painfully wedge the limbs against her bindings.

  “Oh! Calm down, please! You are safe!” A second cry, sounding closer to a honking goose than something large enough to shake the ground running over to her like this creature did. The absurd image of a giant water fowl running to her rescue was just silly enough to chip away at the wall of icy panic that had gripped her mind, getting her to stop thrashing and focus on trying to fix her breathing again. Panicked human breaths in a bird body turned what was already a recipe for light-headedness and nausea into sickly-sounding gasps more akin to a drowning victim than someone fearful.

  “I’m… Okay…” Maggie wheezed, opening her eyes to find herself staring at a wall, bundled up in a woolen blanket. “I’m okay. Thank–” Her words were cut off by the blanket getting tugged out from under her, unwrapping her by way of rolling her across the floor at a speed that absolutely would have had her emptying the contents of her stomach as a human.

  “Sorry!” the honking beast blurted out as Maggie tumbled. “You are… smaller than I am used to.”

  “Just… warn me… next…” The myna trailed off as the world stopped spinning, finding herself staring up at a ceiling covered in murals. Broad impressionistic swirls of color unevenly painted on white plaster that seemed random at first glance, but their intent to be viewed through less keen eyes than a bird’s was immediately Understood. Deliberately unfocusing her vision revealed an impression of a blazing sunrise overtaking a star-studded night sky as the disparate blobs of color blended together. The shadows of many antlered heads filled the peripheries, mixing with the actual moving shadow of the room’s occupant to make a scene that, if only for a moment, seemed truly alive. “Wow.”

  “Incredible, is it not?” A much calmer, less squeaky grunt from her seeming rescuer preceded the animal laying down nearby with a muffled whump and a few stray pieces of straw blown overhead. “Every time we return to Darksoil, Branching-Tree always surprises us with something new. The children love it.”

  “Yeah, I bet kids–” Maggie's train of thought screeched to a halt as she remembered what exactly she was doing before she woke up here, the onset of a second round of panic obliterating the last of the sleep from her brain in one fell swoop. “Black-Leap! Is Black-Leap here?” She didn’t get an immediate answer, flipping herself back onto her talons fast enough to send her stumbling off to the right for a second before she could right herself. “She’s a squirrel kit, black fur. I need to–”

  “Yes.” Something cold and firm pressed down on top of Maggie’s head, delivering the answer in the most direct way possible, while finally getting Maggie to actually look at who she was talking to. It was a reindeer, absolutely massive even by human standards, gently touching a cloven hoof to her head as it lowered its own to look her in the eye. “Black-Leap is here, under the watch of our Caretaker. Safe.” The deer softly snorted the expression, flaring nostrils shifting the look on its graying muzzle from calm to one of utmost concern. “The child explained little that made sense in its panic, as expected from one so young. But you seem to be an adult, so your version of events should be… More comprehensive. Can you tell me what happened?”

  Right. ‘Seems’ like I’m an adult. Sure hasn’t felt like that in a long while. Or maybe ever. That just had to be the one thing being a bird failed to change, somehow.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no. It’s just… A lot to explain.” Maggie’s mind raced, trying to figure out what she could say that wouldn’t just confuse them even more. Starting with immediate events seemed like the better idea. “My friend, Black-Leap’s mother, was kidnapped today. The poor kit was so determined to rush out and find him that I only barely managed to stop her. I’m… not good at flying, which is why you found us in the state you did.”

  “Is that because you have been Taken?”

  “...Taken?” The idea felt familiar, but it wasn’t something Maggie had ever heard expressed directly before.

  “Taken away from your world and put into ours.”

  “Oh.” Maggie relaxed for only a moment before she stepped back, narrowing her eyes at the reindeer. “Who told you that?” Quiet-Dream had mentioned that word was beginning to spread about their otherworldly origins, and that there had been some worrying spiritual significance attributed to them as a result. The last thing she needed was to be in the clutches of people who considered her sacred. They could possibly be even less inclined to let her leave than the Guardians had been.

  “Nobody told me,” the deer lifted its head and grunted, somehow deeply amused by Maggie’s reaction. “But the way you move, the way you emote, and the way you ask questions… It is just like the other Taken in our herd.”

  “Other…” The myna’s entire train of thought screeched to a halt at the revelation, threatening to derail entirely. “Other humans? With you? How?” Her words came out choppy and harsh, skipping the same way her brain was.

  “They… replaced two members of the herd half a season or so ago,” the deer whined, its tone turning somber.

  “Right, but…” Maggie picked her words carefully, not wanting to make light of their loss as she attempted to clarify. “How are they still with you? Haven’t the Guardians attempted to detain them?”

  “Why would they?” The deer stiffened, growing anxious as it realized something. “Was that why you came from the College? Were you being held there?”

  “Yeah? Have you been living under a rock? Our situation has been rather important news. They held a Consensus about it and everything.”

  “Not under a rock. On the road.” It shook its head, turning to look over its shoulder as if it expected a Guardian to barge into the room at any moment. “Dawn-Herd is migratory. We shelter in Darksoil to wait out Heavy Storms each year, and we arrived only five days ago. If members of our herd are in danger…” The reindeer surged to its hooves with an urgency that sent Maggie scrambling backwards for fear of being stepped on. “Granite! Make sure our guest is comfortable, and answer its questions as best you can. I will be back soon.” Its voice once more took on the squeaky, near-honking tone it had previously.

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  Something very large shifted in the corner of the small room, a brown mass that Maggie had assumed to be a pile of spare cloth rising up to reveal the bulky form of a bison, the same species Maggie recalled Steady-Step taking pains to avoid on the trip here from Deep’s End. A “feral-born,” assuming she had her facts straight.

  “Of course, Velvet. This one will be fine. Do what must be done.” Granite’s grunts identified it as the first voice Maggie heard upon waking up. As Velvet trotted through the curtain on the far wall, the bison slowly ambled over to take its place, somehow managing to lie back down without making much noise. Despite its bulk, It was clearly far gentler and more precise in its movements than Velvet was. “Guardian Granite Dawn-Herd, here to serve.”

  “Oh, uh, Maggie.” The myna fruitlessly extended her wing towards Granite’s face, too taken aback by the name to realize it had no way of returning the gesture while on the ground with her. Dawn-Herd is the herd itself, if I Understood Velvet correctly. Does that mean that members of the herd effectively adopt it as a surname? Or is there some deeper significance at play here? The two I’ve met do seem to prefer simpler “first” names than most other natives around here. For once, “Pearl” would fit right in. Of course, there was also that first part of Granite’s name that loomed over her like a lurking threat. “Nice to meet you, G-Guardian.”

  “Dawn-Herd’s Guardians are protectors, not law-keepers,” Granite snorted, picking up on the reason for her hesitant stutter and contributing no small amount of disdain for Darksoil’s system of enforcement itself. “You have nothing to fear from me, Pearl.” The bison’s eyes glinted in the lamplight as it appraised her, just barely visible under its well-groomed but clearly overgrown woolly fur.

  “Maybe not, but… I just have a lot to fear in general.” Maggie held her ground as she spoke, not wanting to let on that Granite intimidated the hell out of her, same as any other large creature she interacted with. It was a person, same as any other. She shouldn’t be afraid, but she was. For its part, the bison simply nodded and continued looking at her, the smallest of movements being exaggerated enough by the size difference to become obvious.

  “You express yourself in sound alone, and rather slowly, at that,” Granite eventually grunted, breaking the silence with a pointed observation. “Is something wrong? Have you been injured?”

  “I’m not hurt, but something is certainly wrong.” Maggie looked down at her own talons for a moment, tapping them in sequence to ground herself in this reality. The flexing of alien muscles and the pinpoint pressure on individual toes reinforced the way things were, keeping her thoughts from lingering on the way things used to be. “I don’t think I can explain it to you, though.”

  “You are unused to being Understood, and miss the directness of when you were not.”

  Maggie’s beak fell open as she gawked at Granite, the bison somehow having managed to identify the heart of the issue in a single sentence.

  “If what my Taken herd-mates explained is correct, your mind is feral-born, regardless of the origins of your body. I may not know what it is like to inhabit a different body than the one I was born with, but finding myself in a different world, with different rules and different ways of communicating? That is all too familiar.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Maggie murmured, her gaze falling once more.

  “How could you have?” Granite sighed and closed its eyes, breathing deep as if bracing itself for something painful. “There is a stereotype, believed by many, that feral-born Gifted are slow-thinking, dim-witted, and possess irrational tempers. Some even believe that whatever happenstance raised us above our kin is 'incomplete,' and that we are only 'partially' Gifted. There was even a time that I believed it, too.”

  “Why!?” Maggie shouted back, her mimicry threatening to break into a screeching cry as she flared her wings for emphasis. A month’s worth of repressed anger and confusion was bubbling to the surface all at once. “Why are we being treated like we’re stupid, or dangerous, or untrustworthy? How can they Understand us and still be so…” A multitude of words finished the sentence in her mind. Patronizing, prejudiced, ignorant, closed-minded, paranoid…

  The sudden motion of Granite standing up sent Maggie leaping backwards with a startled chirp before she could settle on a pejorative.

  “You are a far more complicated issue than I was, but I believe I can explain at least part of it.” Granite backed up to the far wall, allowing Maggie to get a better view of it without needing to crane her neck. “I spent the first five years of my life living with the feral herd I was born into. Among bison, actions and vocalizations conveyed singular, simple concepts. Taking this stance”—it lowered its head, stamped the ground with a forehoof, and grunted—”is a threat, nothing more. And yet, I just expressed orders of magnitude more to you with those motions than any feral animal could. When I was discovered and… ‘adopted’ by Gifted society,” Granite growled with clear resentment, “ideas, emotions, and instructions were expressed to me in a volume I had never experienced before, and when I gave my overwhelmed replies, I did so in the manner I was used to. Large, exaggerated posturing and loud sounds, all to express the simplest of concepts. Because my herd could neither express nor Understand anything more.”

  “Which only reinforced their assumptions about feral-born,” Maggie concluded, attempting to reflect on her own behavior. “But I haven’t been expressing myself in simple terms at all! People just… struggle with my speech for some reason.” She could see Granite closing its eyes as she spoke, focusing on her voice as much as possible.

  “By my count, you created over twenty individual sounds to express that objection,” it grunted, returning to lay down next to her again. “You could have done so in three or four.” Granite said no more, waiting for her to work through the implications on her own.

  Maggie muttered the pair of sentences to herself three more times, counting sounds and roughly tapping out seconds on the floor. She wasn’t the bat, so this was far from a precise science, but the results she came to spoke for themselves all the same.

  Two sentences. Twenty words. Twenty-eight syllables. Approximately eight seconds of continuous speech. All to express something simple enough to cover in three chirps and a head-tilt. To the average Gifted creature, her speech could be coming off as agonizingly slow and protracted, or perhaps filled with garbage noise as only a select few syllables end up carrying the bulk of the meaning. Add that to the way Sunny described nicknames and contractions being Understood, and suddenly the fact that she was described as “exhausting” made so much more sense.

  It wasn’t her “abrasiveness” or “defiance” that made her frustrating to listen to, as it had back on Earth, nor was it as simple as a “double translation” being slower as Ink-Talon had theorized ages ago. Her speech was literally straining people’s minds as they heard it, as if her voice had been slowed down and listeners had to patiently wait and concentrate to pick out each word one at a time. And she’d been too stubborn, too spiteful, to even consider the possibility.

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie chirped, deliberately making the smallest, most concise noises she could. “I thought that when people found me ‘frustrating’ or ‘exhausting,’ to listen to, it was because my voice was simply strange and unfamiliar and that they needed to just get over it. Because of that, I… redoubled my efforts.” Unable to recall the turn of phrase that would have come naturally, the myna sighed as she settled for an equivalent. “If Sunny-Plume hadn’t been so enamored with the habit, I would have ended up…”

  “Alone and frustrated?” Once more, Granite struck at the heart of the problem, clearly familiar with the experience.

  “Well, more alone and frustrated than I already am.”

  “There is a directness to feral communication that most Gifted do not appreciate. Understanding, for all of its wonders, is inconsistent in subtle ways. If I express something to two creatures at once, each will have Understood their own version of my intent, shaped by their personal context. But when I called out a warning to my feral herd, each and every one of them heard the same voice, the same message. The calves without knowledge of danger were not left confused by hearing of [Monsters on the Horizon] as I had been at their age. They would hear an alarm and look to their herd-mates for guidance, no interpretation required.”

  “It’s not quite the same for me, there’s plenty of room for personal interpretation in my native language, but that directness? Knowing that people heard exactly what you said, as you said it? I miss it so much.” After a few moments of somber silence, Maggie cracked one of her fake avian smiles. “You’re really good at this, you know that?”

  “I have had practice. The Taken in Dawn-Herd faced similar struggles, and it was some time before I realized our shared experience.”

  “Right!” Maggie perked up as she realized what she could do. What she should be doing rather than sitting here and feeling sorry for herself. “Granite, can you take me to see whoever Velvet has run off to warn? I don’t know what’s going on, but it feels like something bad is going to happen. We need all the help we can get.”

  “I will see what I can do.” Granite snorted, tilting its head to the side to offer a horn as a ramp to climb on.

  “Thanks.” Maggie carefully shuffled up onto the bison’s head, its thick wool making for fantastic footing as she gathered her thoughts. Connections forged by common ground, shared experiences, points of relation. This is what our captivity has kept from us.

  This is how we break free.

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