* * *
TINY LEGS DANGLED from a rock along a stream. May splashed her face clean. Holding her hands as a cup, she drank deeply. She missed her thimble. Her lack of thimble would have made her think of Daniel, if her mind hadn’t been full to the brim.
Swig paced back and forth as he rambled. “If there’s a king, then there must be a palace. If you’re the child that was stolen, then you are a princess. I knew there was something more to your—”
“But my name is May. All the pirates called me that, even the captain. It’s the only name I remember.”
“I saw what was written on your head when I found you. M-A-Y.” Swig frowned. “Oh.”
“There was an O?”
“No, but now that I think more about it, there was a smudge after the Y, as if somebody had wiped it away. I had no way of knowing that your name was Ma—”
“Nooo! Don’t say it!” She smothered his beak with her hands. “You heard what the nurse and the crone said. If you say my name and I really am a princess, then the king—my father—will die. He has to be the first to say it, to call me by my true name—to break the enchantment.” She unclasped his beak from her grip. “There could be witnesses in the trees. We can’t let those rotten women get their way.”
“And then, you’ll no longer be…May. You’ll have your family, a whole new life. You won’t need me anymore.”
“Of course, I will,” she soothed, squeezing him so tightly that his feathers molted. “I’ll always need you, and we’ll stay together. Forever.”
A crystal drop leaked from Swig’s eye. “Let’s find that palace and turn you back into a princess.”